Time to skip town

By Nico — February 16, 2010 | 7 comments

Warning: graphic imagery

It feels like many months have passed since we last crossed the border into Haiti, and a lifetime worth of emotions is beginning to hit my brain.

Our crew met for the last time at the Red Cross camp:

And packed up our gear for the trip across the border:

As our crew of four silently stares outside the minivan windows, we can see the landscape change from the Port au Prince region’s dry, treeless horizons to the green and lush paradise of the Dominican Republic.

We never had much time to think while running these long days of work over the past month in Port-au-Prince (P.O.P). We all feel like it is too early to leave our friends behind in the dusty chaos of Haiti’s capital.

Don’t worry Haitian friends, we have enough images in our psychological luggage to knead our brains for weeks to come; we won’t forget your plight as we settle back into our comfortable Toronto lifestyles.

The aid agencies have much work ahead of them, and there are still many more stories that need to be told by the media before Haiti can slip out of international attention.

Our crew will be back in Haiti within six months to document the progress of the country’s reconstruction. Knowing we’ll return helps me with the guilt of “jumping ship” so soon.

As we drive through a barren valley not 20km from P.O.P, Stefan breaks the silence in the van: “Why couldn’t the quake have happened just a few kilometers east? Why did it have to happen right near the most populated city, in the poorest country of the region?” It’s true, when you think about it, what are the odds?

The explanation is easy for religious extremists: “God wanted to punish the sinners of Haiti”. But after spending weeks amongst this country’s “sinners”, I can tell you that the Devil himself would blush in shame for having anything to do with destruction on such a scale.

In a way, we all need an explanation. We want someone, something to blame it on. But unlike wars, there is no one to blame. No corporation, government or organization sold any weapons responsible for this. No one financed revolutionaries to do the killing on their behalf.

From watching the rescue teams competing for the limelight, military public relations officers courting the press into reporting every good deed, I can understand why the international community and politicians are so drawn to natural disasters. They are a great opportunity to do good in the public eye, an a-political PR opportunity for those in power.

A natural disaster is a ‘clean’ calamity. It allows us to forget about the shady trade agreements and economic stands by the international financial institutions that contributed to the poverty of Haiti before the 12th. (I love to read Le Monde Diplomatique for an alternative view on world events).

To me, a natural disaster can be attributed to fate, but not the impoverishment of a population prior to it.

As we drive closer to Santo Domingo and leave Haiti behind, I’m stunned by the difference in wealth and landscapes between these two countries, made up of the same people, living on the same island. What happened to the strong and independent Haiti?

One thing that really struck me from the beginning was the near absence of anger amongst the victims of the earthquake. I talked to Haitians who were angry at the aid coming in too slowly, angry for being forgotten in their camps, and frustrated from hunger and thirst.

But overall, it was as if many of them had accepted the fatality of the earthquake. I would hear phrases like, “This is how it is, this is life”, or “there is nothing to do about it, we must move on”.

Will it be possible to build a better Haiti, with the country now starting from scratch? I believe the Haitians have what it takes. But will the international community really give them a chance once the show is over? Will they cancel the debt?

Toronto: what was that dream I just awoke from? Can you repeat the question?

PTV Productions gave me a very broad mandate as “Web Producer” for the Inside Disaster website. My role was to create portraits of the daily lives of earthquake survivors, rather than focusing on the news stories of the hour.

My goal was to give a voice to the common people of Haiti, to get the public to know them as human beings. I tried to do this with the utmost respect and love, to find dignity when the food lines and desperation would mask it.

Veteran journalists told me the first week after the earthquake was more difficult than anything they had experienced in twenty years on the job. Others talked about photographing “Holocaust images” of the kind the world hasn’t seen for sixty years.

Yet despite the hardships of the situation, one thing in particular was very different from my previous experiences abroad. The media had unlimited access to virtually everything in post-earthquake Haiti. The aid organizations, the citizens and the military understood the importance of getting the stories out to the world in order to bring in as much help as possible. Last year, working in the Amazon forest, I would have guns drawn on me just for taking out my camera, but in P.O.P., no one would ask me any questions as I wandered into any hospital, or into any situation.

In the streets and the camps, people wanted to tell their stories to the world. I spent a good part of my days simply listening to people. The challenge wasn’t to find a story, but rather to stick to only one and not get sidetracked — especially since I had to meet my deadline of uploading a story every night.

Upon my return to Toronto, I’ve been asked in interviews and conversations what it was like for me personally, what marked me, what was the hardest part, and so on.

While I was there, I wished I was a doctor so I could save lives. I wished I was a pilot flying in food to feed people in the camps. I wished I was a Red Cross logistics manager so I could give people tents, or a chemist capable of purifying water.

But I was only a media guy with a camera. I had to play my role by telling stories rather than saving lives. And that was difficult when I was visiting places that hadn’t seen any help yet, and I had no help to offer them.

I hope my work helped to put a human face on survivors, to share the urgency for help. Journalists probably convinced many potential donors with their stories. I took as many pictures as I could and told as many relevant stories as I could.

But as you try to focus on one thing, as you try not to spread yourself too thin, you end up ignoring other stories, ignoring people you could have helped. These memories haunt me now that I have time to replay all the events in my head.

It was Friday the 15th, just a few days after the earthquake. The city was still in shock and the street looked like a scene from the Second World War. Buildings in rubble, people were walking aimlessly in the streets, looking for loved ones within the destruction.

I was in front of the Hopital General, where people had been carrying in the wounded for days. The place was very quiet, and the hospital wasn’t fully operational yet. The only noise covering the silent agony came from the engines of trucks dumping bodies in front of the morgue, right beside the hospital.

On the sidewalk in front of me, less than twenty meters away from the growing pile of corpses rotting in the sun, were a handful of hospital beds holding the wounded. Many more of the injured and dying lay right on the ground around the beds, waiting for care one hoped may come.

I was just getting my first glimpse of the size of the catastrophe. I had barely slept in the last three nights, and like a robot, all I could do was take pictures of this unreal sight. I remember the deafening silence weighing on my shoulders, the sun beating down on my head so hard that my right ear would buzz as I tried to breathe through my mask. This was a completely hypnotizing nightmare, something humans were not built to see. Like a machine, I would trigger my camera, not really looking at what I was capturing.

My lens led me to two wounded girls lying alive right there in the thick of the smell of death.

Someone had dropped them on a blowup mattress right there on the sidewalk. They were waiting for a doctor, without a blanket or clothes to cover them. While submerged in the darkest surroundings I have ever known, it’s the young girl’s naked breast that stood out, that caught my eye.

Surrounded by death, despair and destruction, in this moment, there was nothing more beautiful and precious than the sight of this flowering young woman, nothing more fragile, nothing more innocent, she was hope itself, she was future motherhood.

The image of this girl shook me out my stupor, and woke me from the nightmare around me. (to find beauty everywhere would be key to enduring the next weeks in P.O.P).

My friend and colleague Stanley was standing in the middle of it, all completely traumatized. His own family was missing since the earthquake, and being surrounded by the dead and dying outside the hospital had overwhelmed him: he told me he wanted to go to Carrefour to find them now, immediately. And so we ran…

Days later, I saw the snapshot of the girls on my hard drive. I could have helped these girls, talked to them, gotten to know them. I could have slipped a 50 dollar bill in a guards pocket to make sure they would be taken care of. I could have moved them to a better spot, jut have given them water.

Now, I’ll never know if they made it. There were among the hundreds of thousands of people that needed help that day. But these two had somehow called out for me, and I had run away.

It was a great privilege to be able to tell the stories of the Haitian people, and also a great responsibility. The beauty and strength of my fellow humans never stopped to amaze me throughout my travels, something I surely expected to see much of in a disaster zone.

How can I explain that the horrors I have witnessed would soon be replaced by triumphant humanity? What I carry on my way back to Canada is a rather refreshing feeling of humility, a growing love and faith in what we are capable of as a human society.

I was not alone this past month. I want to thank Emmanuel Midi and Johnny Pierrot for relentlessly and courageously supporting and accompanying me to all the crazy places we went to visit. Back in Toronto, Katie McKenna, Yshia Wallace and the PTV team were working endless days editing, posting, and promoting the blogs.

Nadine, thank you for taking me along on this life changing experience and for allowing me to be part of this project.

Stefan, Simon, Paul, Tony, I feel fortunate to have witnessed first-hand what the cream of Canadian documentary filmmaking is capable of.

And dear readers, thank you for all of your pertinent and encouraging comments that gave me energy and inspiration throughout these challenging weeks.

I can’t wait to go back to Haiti.

Tags: Bodies Emmanuel and Johnny Emmanuel Midi Featured Humanitarian aid Johnny Pierrot Katie McKenna Natural Disasters Nicolas Jolliet Red Cross Water