On our way into Port-au-Prince from the Dominican Republic, the driver, who is Haitian, but lives in the DR, said that he was really touched and impressed by the response of the Dominican people to the tragedy in Haiti. Relations between the two countries have historically been troubled. But this Haitian driver described a Dominican telethon that raised a very large sum of money to help the Haitian people. And he told us how Dominicans without a lot were giving generously, like maids giving $50 from their savings.
We know that a lot of money has been pledged from around the world to Haiti. But we still hear stories and meet people who are not receiving help. Today, we visited the town of Petit-Goave, which was close to the original earthquake’s epicenter. And it was the very epicenter of the second quake, the 6.0, that hit on Wednesday.
Great damage has been done to the once pleasant seaside town. Some houses still stand. Some appear unharmed. Others are completely flattened. Residents claim they are not getting food aid, not getting water, and they are desperate. They say they need people to come in and tell them if the houses that still stand are safe enough to enter, even if just to grab a few personal items. There are no professional teams clearing sites. It seems the capital remains the priority so that things don’t descend into chaos there.
Petit-Goave is just 40 miles from Port-au-Prince, and yet it took us two and a half hours to get there. Much of that has to do with the congestion in the capital’s roads but also some of the road leading to Petit-Goave are badly torn up in places. Residents say they did not see outside help until a week after the earthquake. And we did not see evidence of people distributing aid in Petit-Goave.
Still, despite all that, life is slowly getting back to normal, on some level. There were people out vending goods.
Yet, we came across a local who used to live in Boston. He had moved back to Petit-Goave. His house had survived but he was worried to go back in. We spoke about the immediate needs of the area. I asked him what the town was famous for. He looked dazed, and couldn’t come up with an answer. He just said it was too hard to think about those things. That the horror of what had happened to his country and to his town, trumped everything else. He repeated, it was very hard to think about anything else but the painful present.