Sunday, January 31st--Port-au-Prince

Today we went to Port-au-Prince. Fortunately, there has been a lot of clean-up of the streets.  Bodies no longer block the roads. There are tent cities everywhere.

  As we entered the city, we could gradually see more and more signs of earthquake damage.  The effect was staggering.  Along the way, we saw a seven story building that had been totally reduced to a pile of rubble.  One of our translators told us that 130 people were still inside, their bodies unrecovered. As we drove in, there was more and more rubble, every block had collapsed buildings, sometimes an entire side of the street. 

It's one thing to see it on television, but to drive past block after block, unending, the scope of the situation really starts to weigh on you. 

The energy released in that 35 seconds is incalcuable in human terms, probably on the order of 30 nuclear bombs exploding under the crust of the Earth.  The devastation on the human scale is likewise hard to comprehend. 

All week long, we had been hearing individual stories of terror, heartache and loss,  now, at Ground Zero, it is almost too much to take. 

We see the Presidential Palace and the Catholic Cathedral in ruins.

Tent cities were everywhere. Fifty thousand people at each city. The conditions have been getting more and more deperate as the waste piles up.  Broken people lay in the tents.  Children have gone days without food or water.  At the same time, there are signs of the city coming back to life.  People are on the street conrners hawking their goods again, or selling fried plantains, even souvenirs like wood sculptures and paintings are again on display.  After looking most of the morning for a place to help out, we finally happen on a primary school that collapsed in the quake.  The main school building is just a facade in front of a pile of rubble.  We are told that class was in session, and about 25 children were in the building when the earthquake hit.  Their bodies lie there still, under the tons of rubble.

 Around the school building is a courtyard ringed with low buildings that were the dormatories.  These buildings are now housing around 100 people displaced by the quake.

This is where we set up shop.  We work quickly, the team is in maximum efficiency mode.  In 2 1/2 hours, we see about 250 patients. 

The people with immediately life threatening injuries from the earthquake have now either been treated or have died.  What we are seeing is either long term illness that had been neglected or new infections--communicable disease that has started to spread due to dispacement, crowding, poor water, and lack of food.  From my work station, the school building is constantly visible, and I keep thinking about how it would be if it were my son or one of my daughters under all of that brick, concrete and stone.  Then I think of all the collapsed buildings that I've seen today--thousands, and all the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers now entombed in them.  This morning, as we were riding the bus towards Port-au-Prince, we had church of sorts, and one of the doctors with us told us of a patient he has been treating at our hospital at Fond-Parisien.  She and her twin girls were home when the Earthquake happened.  Their house collapsed around them, and she was trapped in the rubble for 2 days.  Her twin girls died in her arms.  Dean asked her if she was angry at God for what had happened to her.  She said she was not angry.  She was grateful to God to be alive and knew that she was spared bacause she has a purpose, a task in life that she hasn't done yet, and she will always have two angels with her as she goes through life.
The Port-au-Prince that I knew is gone, and this new Port-au-Prince has changed me.  We walk through life confident, even arrogant that we can pretty much handle anything, but seeing this reminds me that life is fragile and fleeting.