Haiti: the toughest, most harrowing assignment ever

I am writing this sitting cross-legged on a sleeping mat at the bottom of the runway in Port-au-Prince.

That there is a runway is itself remarkable in that, from the first steps beyond the airfield, the earthquake destruction is everywhere.

And because there is a runway, nine days on, there is a credible relief effort here in Haiti.

This has been the toughest and most harrowing assignment I have ever known. Even for those who did not live there, the living conditions are desperate.

Food from prepared rations made many years ago and stored in a garage. Bottled water – but you worry when it will run out.

Petrol is more valuable by far than dollars, and you lose track of time. Days, and a life beyond the death and carnage that surrounds you. Who knew that concrete was such a mass murderer?

My only real experience of an earthquake disaster was the Pakistan earthquake of 2005. Sure, I’ve been in quakes in Mexico and El Salvador, felt the room in my American chain hotel shudder and bump.

But there was an aftershock here, at this time yesterday. The airfield rumbled and it felt as if it was being subjected to a seismic wave beneath. We swayed but we did not fall.

But in those 30 or 40 seconds your mind does curious things and wonders if a great fissure will open up and swallow you.

In Pakistan there was infrastructure. The capital was secure. There was an army, and aid agencies were not themselves decapitated as they have been here.

I have begun to see signs of humanity trying to pull itself together here in Haiti – of people on the pavements, cooking and presumably selling dishes of one sort or another. I’ve begun to see the bilious colour of fruit in the dusty grey: oranges, bananas.

Haitians are somehow struggling to the surface. Yet the tens and tens of thousands who are out in the open – no, they are hundreds of thousands with all they have left – present such a massive challenge. How will they ever be housed?

I have seen a solitary man with a hammer and a chisel, setting to work on a 100ft-long wall. Six foot high, it had collapsed on his garage business, crushing 10 cars. Each brick takes him many minutes to break and move.

The wall could take two months to clear this way, But then, what else has he got left to do?

The challenges are beyond any imagination. Seasoned aid and rescue people tell me they have never ever encountered anything like it. The Red Cross says it is their biggest humanitarian deployment ever.

Seen from my cross-legged perspective from the bottom of the runway, the world has responded with extraordinary generosity. Obama has sent a sizable segment of his war machine to deliver hope.

Corporations, charities, individuals, are doing all they can. But there is something in this for us all. We are a world, interdependent, luck and unlucky. Haiti is so desperately unlucky.

DFID is sending a huge ship of supplies. It won’t get here for a month. When it comes, it will be most needed. That’s when we shall have begun to forget, and when whose who do not die between now and then – and there will be many who will – will need us most.

Haiti must join the so many other causes etched upon our hearts: our children, the people we love, our own individual histories and understandings.

Boy, this has been something it will take me long to shake out of my system. It is in my pores. I smell of it. I cannot share my sleeping space with my boots or my socks. There is not enough water to wash anything.

Today I will wear the shirt I wore last Sunday. It is the least ripe of what I have left. And that’s me – free to leave. What of them?