Home thoughts on the way to Haiti

How will we ever find the UN translator, Jean Rodriguez who led us to his ruined community – his then pregnant wife… did her baby live?

I’m on a plane from Washington DC via Miami to Porto Prince, Haiti. At least this time we shall be able to fly straight into the airport. That last time in the aftermath of the earthquake we drove from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. We slept in tents on the airport runway.

What this time? We are riding the edge of a tropical storm upgrading to a potential hurricane. We’ll just get in before the the tropical rains decend upon 1.3 million souls living in UN provided tents. Tropical rains and canvas… it doesn’t bear thinking. And for the rest, what will we find?

This is the moment in flight when my spirits sag and I wonder whether I will be able to report what I find as I want to, or will the words run away from me, dispatched on the wind by the shear enormity of the human misery that will confront me. I reach for my iPod. On goes the St John Passion – stirring brass and strings-opening pursued by a choral section.

I think of what I have left behind, of home, and then of America and deflated, defeated Obama and the punishment of power. That news conference – the academic, low key confessional about what had gone wrong in the elections.

I think too of how he waited no instant to mobilise the Southern fleet to go to the rescue of Haiti’s largely African American community in their earthquake hour of need.

With guilt I think ahead to our hire car waiting by the terminal building; a hotel booking too. And then again of the 1.3 million. How privileged I am to be dispatched on others’ behalves to come and find out their plight and what more we could do.

Bed in the terminal hotel in Miami airport. I have stayed here fifty times en route to El Salvador, Guatemala, or Nicaragua in times past. Used Bach for mental buoyancy here too. These hotel rooms must have the highest density of throughput in the world. Don’t start thinking who else has slept in this bed, bathed in this bath. So I don’t. I sleep the sleep of the dead. Four hours is up and Haiti beckons. Now where’s that upgraded potential hurricane got to?