Channel 4 News producer Hannah Storm on her visit to Petit-Goave.
Within seconds of arriving in the airport, I was asked to head out with another team.
After days of Channel 4 News stories from Port-au-Prince, we wanted to give a sense of what was happening in other parts of Haiti. So after grabbing sunscreen, hat, the all important wetwipes and a satellite phone, I jumped into the car alongside Jonathan Rugman, cameraman Stuart Webb, our security guard Lee and our Haitian translator Peterson.
We headed west through some of the most damaged parts of the capital, once glorious colonial edifices now just broken shells, UN buildings and the offices of aid agencies left unworkable and homes crushed.
I felt fortunate to be looking in the opposite direction as we drove past a pile of bodies on the side of the road. Heading slowly out of the capital, weaving our way through dusty, uneven streets, we passed Haitians getting on with their daily life: school buses driving children to lessons, the brightly painted buses known as tap- taps hurtling dangerously down the road, people on their roofs and dangling precariously out of doors.
We skirted the Caribbean, heading along Haiti’s western peninsula that stretches like a lobster’s claw into the sea. In the ruins of a church, a congregation was singing. Dressed in their best clothes they had defied the rugged, upset ground and boulders, the lack of power and running water, their own collapsed homes, to worship together and weep together.
Further down the road, after experiencing the first of several aftershocks of the day and picking our way past giant boulders and landslides, we found the town of Leogane, where the crushed cemetery is a poignant remember that in disasters like this not even the dead are sacred.
After two hours we reached Petit-Goave, a place which was shortly to carve its name forever in my head.
The smell of death is almost impossible to describe until it has invaded your nostrils. Now it has.
In the ruins of Le Relais hotel, in the 90 degree heat, desperate Haitians sawed at metal supports and clung to trainers dug out of the ruins to sell. Their slim chance at making something now they have nothing.
And then I smelt it: the acidic, stomach-churning smell of death.
Petit-Goave was one of the towns closest to the epicentre of Tuesday’s earthquake. Once a beautiful coastal enclave, now a pile of rubble. Helping shift that rubble was Arron Rooks, from Florida, who’s been living here for several months working for a mining company. He’s been working with a digger from dawn to night since the earthquake. He couldn’t remember how many days had passed since the quake.
Exhaustedly he explained how he had excavated 25 bodies and buried them. But there are many more dead. In the town’s cemetery, a crowd gathered around us – their faces hauntingly silhouetted on the baked earth of the newly dug graves. Like Arron, they looked dusty and shell shocked. Like him too they said there had been no sign of foreign assistance.
More than a thousand people in this town have already died. Many more are grieving. One man, Lanaud, showed us his house, overlooking the shimmering blue sea. A boat sailed past in the distance. In front of us, a microwave lay on its side, a car was trapped in between the collapsed walls beneath. Lanaud’s two year old daughter was also down there. She died along with two older siblings while watching television.
Lanaud took us up the hillside to the makeshift camp to which dozens of people have retreated, fearful of aftershocks, their homes useless or dangerous shells. In a country whose very name means land of tall mountains, this is where they feel safest. But nothing can mend the broken heart of a mother.
Lanaud’s wife wears a T-shirt from one of her dead children around her waist. That in turn holds a pouch of pictures tight to her stomach. Her eight year old granddaughter has lost her mother. The little girl injured her leg in the earthquake.
But the hurt is so much deeper and as she summons a smile, her distant pleading eyes have more of an affect on me than anything I’ve seen so far. The helplessness of Haiti’s children is never far away in a country as poor as this, but that desperation reaches a new level as we arrive at the hospital of Petit-Goave, where a tiny girl lies under a parasol, in the courtyard, both her legs in full plastercasts, a drip in her arm.
Alina Sires, a Cuban medic in charge here, tells us the hospital was destroyed in the earthquake and in the days that followed she and her team treated and evacuated hundreds of patients to Port au Prince. Parents brought their children in their arms. “There was panic. There were aftershocks. We treated them here on the ground,” she tells us. “But 31 children died. Nothing could have prepared us.” Nothing could have prepared anybody, I think, as we wish her luck and say goodbye.