Haiti thoughts from abroad

We drove out from Port-au-Prince and up to Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic. Darkness was falling and the border shuts at night. We had to step on the gas a bit. But in our haste did not fail to note how little traffic there was on the road.

Indeed in the entire six hour run to Santa Domingo, we never saw a single “aid convoy”. I can’t explain this. I have asked the UN, I have asked the Americans and they say the aid flow is normal and active.

Even the airport itself in Santa Domingo did not look unduly busy. I guess in the end the sheer difficulty of moving stuff across the earthquake ruins means that there is some restriction on how much aid you can cope with on the ground.

It’s one of many unresolved questions about the quake and its aftermath.

I spoke to an earthquake expert who told me candidly that Port-au-Prince had been on a watch list, as “about to blow”, for several years. There are ten spots on the list.

In the meantime, the mind wrestles with what it encountered. The dead do not linger – devoid of soul and personality, they become objects, removed from the persons they were.

But the living are a different matter. I think about them all the time. I think about the camps I wandered through. As I see the afternoon light catch the backs of the sheep in the field beyond my window, I think how blessed I am. I have escaped, they cannot.

If globalisation is to mean anything we must not forget them. In three weeks Haiti will have faded from the news. We must go back. I fully intend to return. And certainly again in a year’s time to find the people I spoke to in the days after the Haiti earthquake.

What happened to the pastor? What happened to the older woman with the head wound? What happened to Mariana Ulcena who’s first baby is due on 26 January? That’s tomorrow.

The midwife is dead, the hospital wrecked. Where will she have had it, who will have delivered it?  The father Jean Rodrigue told me he didn’t know how to. In short, will that child be alive even in a year’s time?

I say the dead do not hang about my mind. But a decomposing arm, sticking out of the cathedral ruins in the capital of Haiti does haunt me. Its hues of mauve and brown, skinless, sinewy, shiny. Its index finger had a beckoning profile. It visits me repeatedly, “come back”, it seems to be saying.

I want to return, I want us all to know about Haiti. I want to ensure that the unparalleled generosity of our people really does make a difference on the ground.

Make no mistake, the tragedy of Haiti is one of the greatest challenges our globalised world has yet encountered. We know more about the suffering and the scale of it than perhaps we have ever have known.

We have responded with our cash and our support for humanitarian intervention on a massive scale. We must see to it that engagement in this hour of need is rewarded on the ground – a people fed, watered, housed, employed and loved.