Shaken but not stirred – confessions of a Haiti reporter

I’ve been back from Haiti for over a week now, and I am still troubled by the experience. I have not been visited by nightmares, and I have not been sucked into an emotional maelstrom because of what I have witnessed. In fact, precisely the opposite. I am troubled because I feel a sense of emotional detachment from it all.

Not all reporters feel this way. The BBC’s admirable Matthew Price spoke powerfully on Radio 4’s The Media Show about what he called a “deeply distressing week”.

“The guilt started setting in early on”, he said. The guilt, that is, of being a journalist and not a doctor and therefore not being of much practical use to the injured and dying. “You can’t be emotionally detached”, Price concluded.

I’ve been trying to work out why I felt, and still feel, differently.

It may be because I got there a few days later than Mr Price did and therefore the full horror of an earthquake which killed tens of thousands of people had perhaps begun to abate. Yet this doesn’t seem an adequate explanation.

I saw for myself the desperation of Haitian children lying on stretchers in the streets, still coated in dust and in dire need of medical attention. Medecins Sans Frontieres doctors purchased a saw in a local market to perform amputations. I met an estate agent from San Diego in California who found himself involved in amputations because there was nobody else to do the job.

Across the road from Port-au-Prince airport, we filmed doctors from the Dominican Republic treating patients pulled from the rubble. There were not enough dressings or antibiotics and five to 10 people were dying out there in the open every day, even though we could all see the aid flights landing on the runway just across the road.

You could smell the dead still entombed in crushed buildings across the city and one Saturday afternoon we drove out of Port-au-Prince into the hills of Titanyn, where we found dumper trucks emptying bodies into what have euphemistically been called “mass graves”, but were in reality mounting piles of bloated, rotting corpses.

My local vicar, a good friend, was concerned. The day after I got home to England he cycled round with a tin of home-made flapjacks, a touching act of kindness for a reporter emerging from a catastrophe. But I’m fine. Of course I am. I have left Haiti, while the vast majority of Haitians cannot.

Journalists can be caught unawares, their professionalism quite possibly enhanced by explosions of sheer empathy. Jon Snow cried after one interview in Haiti. I cried last year after making a film about the sexual abuse of children in Kenya, so clearly this hack can crack in some circumstances and without empathy, how are you going to make your viewers care, which they must if they are to donate money, which of course makes our jobs that much more worthwhile? And without empathy, how are you going to rise to the verbal challenge of matching the harrowing pictures your terrific cameraman has shot?

I think I remain sanguine about the Haiti experience, partly because of the extraordinary way the many Haitians I met handled themselves. Often they were too grief-stricken to be angry at the scandalous absence of food and water. You would never wish an earthquake on anyone, but bizarrely it is because Haitians were so poor in the first place that they have handled this disaster with remarkable stoicism.

Many were stunned at the miracle of their own survival, when so many thousands were lost. The anger at the grindingly slow delivery of aid came from the aid agencies and from the journalists, but not, it seemed to me, from many Haitians themselves. This may be borne out by the simple fact that this disaster has not prompted the widespread rioting which some feared. And there was a real risk of transferring one’s own anger, as an eyewitness, to victims so lost in a daze of incomprehension that they were still working out how they felt.

Although rival news organisations could not see each other’s pictures in the field, and were therefore working in a void, there was an unpalatable sense in the air that journalists were competing for the worst tales of woe. “I get the feeling that everyone wants a cut of the action and are competing for the best and most tragic story” as somebody put it to me in a text message from the UK. “If it helps raise money that is good”, I replied.

“Found a body in a building” I matter-of-factly texted my producer on my phone. You do your job and you move on, and you do it quickly because you have a deadline to meet.

Besides, many journalists were fighting their own mini-battles in the Haitian capital. “Your mind is occupied with the logistics”, as the BBC’s Matthew Price put it. Or to be more direct, we were so busy working out how we were going to feed our pictures to London, and wondering where we were going to sleep that night, and worrying about how the five-hour time difference gave us so little time to shoot pictures and edit, that emotional paralysis at the suffering of the Haitians all around us was akin to a luxury we could not afford.

In the case of Channel 4 News, I grabbed two of my children’s pop-up tents on the way out of my front door, and along with two fold-up deck chairs, they formed the centre of my existence. After a six hour drive from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, we set up the tents in a compound near Port-au-Prince airport, the arrival of thundering cargo planes a few hundred metres away barely denting my sleep. Jon Snow preferred sleeping out in the open air.

We eventually found a hotel with intermittent electricity and no running water, but the rooms were so stiflingly hot and at risk from aftershocks that we camped out in the courtyard. Then we went back to camping more safely and conveniently near the airport as guests of British firefighters involved in search and rescue . They had dug latrines and rigged a shower and were far more organised than we were.

Our cameraman travels with a stock of boil-in-the-bag food rations from the US army, and a petrol-fuelled generator purchased on the way in from Miami allowed us to charge our phones and camera batteries and edit the TV pictures on a laptop computer set up in the boot of the car.

By this point, Jon Snow had moved into my seven-year-old daughter’s tent. I thought my wife would be amused. “No laundry, no hot water, no gas stove and Snow in my seven-year-old’s tent!” I texted her.

The firefighters had warned us about the nests of tarantula spiders in the grass, and after I saw one near the car, my tent was zipped shut at all times.

The British Ambassador’s residence was a bright red tent, just a few tents away from mine, with a picture of a Union Jack posted up near his tent flap. “We can even issue passports here”, the Ambassador told me proudly. He was wearing a crisp khaki jacket and looked as if he should have been on a verandah sipping gin and tonic rather than helping out in an earthquake.

It may seem inappropriate to laugh, but of course you have to sometimes when all around you is gloom and despair, and the Ambassador’s task, like everybody else’s in Haiti, was a grim one; discovering the fate of Britons who were among the missing and the dead.