Life in Haiti has been pretty intense the last week.
This week in Haiti has been work from 6am (or more like 5.30am when the generator wakes me up in my tent) until 10pm.
This week in Haiti has been a lot of meetings, a lot of trying to find a space to sit and a plug to use in our overcrowded half of an office that is still standing (yes that is the country director sitting on the floor in the corner).
It’s been seeing my Haitian friends and colleagues one after the other and the relief finding that most of them and their families had miraculously escaped intact, though many lost their houses and their possessions.
It’s also been confronting the facts, the places and the mutual friends of friends of mine who died, and trying to be sensitive to the trauma and loss that everyone here has been through.
It’s been dealing with the waiting for the bathroom that sharing a four bedroom house with up to 44 other people involves:
(sleeping arrangements for the dozen or so colleagues outside without tents)
It’s been being woken up various times by various people vomiting noisily, and ferrying sick colleagues to find doctors late at night. 15 or so of us have been sick – stress, overwork, the living and the sleeping conditions, the lack of water, the fact that many just arrived and had to cope with a totally different climate and diet on top of it all. Not a good combination.
It’s been getting out of the office just one time to visit one site where people are living after their houses were destroyed, the old Petionville Golf Course (and Wednesday night salsa haunt for those who used to be here):
(happy to see that you can still charge your mobile phone even in the camp).
It’s been coming to work in the shadow of our destroyed former office, and trying to work out what we can salvage from it without putting people at risk:
It’s been realising it’s ok to laugh and smile with my old colleagues and friends who have been through so much.
It’s also been remembering that there comes a point in every emergency where you have to find a quiet corner to cry.
It’s been dealing with the inevitable insect incident, this time meeting a nice big hairy spider in my sleeping bag the other day.
It’s been being slightly depressed at one point or another every day by the pronouncements of yet another expert who knows nothing about the country as to how to fix Haiti.
It’s been guilt passing small groups of people we can’t really help right now, it’s been shock, it’s been confusion and shouting, it’s been coffee, it’s been regularly riding in a car with 14 other people, and above all it’s been an awful lot of skype.
Finally, it’s been a lot of wishing that I could stay longer and do something useful, while knowing I have to leave in just 5 weeks.
