I know that my audience here is my friends and family, so I'll share my experience with you since I'm guessing that's why most of you are reading. But please continue to keep the people of Jérémie, Les Angles, Tiburon, Jacmel, Port Salud, Les Cayes, and the many other small towns and rural communities of southwestern Haiti in your thoughts or prayers, and do not assume that my experience says anything about theirs.
I first heard about Matthew sometime in the week before it hit, I think Wednesday. I remember because we were out to dinner with some of the other ex-pats in Les Cayes who work for NGOs. We were sitting around a picnic table, drinking Prestige (the go-to Haitian beer), and my boss, Caitlin, asked if anyone was interested in going to Île-à-Vache that weekend. Île-à-Vache being an island, one of the women mentioned that she couldn't commit to the plans because of the coming storm. We discussed the likelihood of it actually coming our way. I don't recall if we knew its name yet. Maybe it was still just a tropical storm at that point. Regardless, we were more curious than concerned.
As the week went on, we remained hopeful that the storm would dissipate or avoid Haiti and our plans could go unchanged. By Friday we were a little more realistic; we switched Île-à-Vache for Port Salud, a coastal town that is only an hour's drive away. On Saturday, everyone was a little tired from going out the night before and settled for the pool. I actually stayed home because I've developed a weird allergy to one of the thousands of new environmental factors in my life, but that's a whole different story. The point is, Saturday was actually a nice day, but at that point we knew there was a Category 4 or 5 hurricane called Matthew heading towards Haiti.
Sunday was rainy, but nothing to cause alarm. By then we were all checking weather forecasts pretty regularly, but we weren't sure exactly how serious we should be taking things. No one in Les Cayes seemed that concerned. We couldn't be sure how close Matthew would really come to us, or how safe we would be in our apartment. Caitlin and I went back and forth on whether to relocate that night or to wait until the next day. Eventually we decided to stay the night and relocate on Monday. Caitlin wanted to open the apartment up to people from La Savane, since their homes are yards away from the ocean and while most are made of concrete, they usually have tin roofs.
We went to the store to stock up on water, dry food, and canned goods. We did what we could to prepare the apartment for the storm that night; we moved furniture and closed our windows as best as possible, although we did not board them up. To be honest, we never even discussed it. No one else was boarding up their windows. One day after the storm Caitlin pointed out to me that there isn't really anywhere to get wood like that if people had wanted it. And again, it was hard to know how worried we should be.
On Monday we woke up in the dark. It stayed that way throughout the day. We had power but the rain interferes with the wifi here, so we still didn't have reliable access to weather reports. The first kids from La Savane arrived in the afternoon. They were teenage boys who like to hang out at our house anyway, so they didn't need any convincing to come over. The same was not true for most of the families in La Savane. Caitlin left not long after the boys arrived. I can't really communicate with them beyond the basics, so I set them up with a movie on my computer while I tried to prepare some food for the coming families. Most of my movies are in English, so I tried to find a movie that would be visually interesting for them. Sadly I don't own any Van Damme movies, because apparently he's their favorite. But that's how seven Haitian teenager boys ended up watching The Wizard of Oz on my couch during a hurricane. I skipped Kansas (including the tornado) and went straight to Oz. I'm guessing the end of the movie was very confusing for them.
Over the next several hours, Caitlin arrived with carload after carload of kids. When The Wizard of Oz was over, I put on Where the Wild Things Are, then The Muppets (Les Muppets in French), then The Little Princess. (I wish I could say I brought these movies to Haiti with this kind of thing in mind, but really I just love kids' movies.) It was pretty amazing to see fifteen kids of all different ages sitting perfectly still around one tiny laptop to watch a movie in a language they do not speak.
Caitlin checked in after dropping each round of kids off. She was having trouble getting parents to come to our house, though they were willing to send their kids. Their fears were the same as those who are always hesitant to evacuate - they did not want to leave their homes and belongings to be destroyed or stolen. Their reassurances were the same as well - it was in God's hands.
In the end, 46 kids and 4 adults (all women) stayed in our 4 bedroom apartment that night. For whatever reason we have lots of extra mattresses and sheets, so we were able to make things somewhat comfortable for them. Caitlin and I opted to spend the night at her friend Jessica's house along with four other people. Jessica lives in an area just outside of town that is significantly less populated. During certain times of day, it seems almost deserted besides the few cows and pigs sprinkled in the fields or people on porches of all the big houses, many of them unfinished. (In Haiti, you build your house layer by layer in accordance with how much money you have on hand. When you run out of money, the construction is put on hold.) The MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, present in the country since the 2004 ousting of President Aristide) base is just around the corner.
Caitlin and I decided to stay there because Jessica's building is further from the sea and has a generator. We weren't sure if our apartment would flood, though we knew it was much safer than the homes in La Savane. It was obviously an uncomfortable decision to make - leaving 50 people in our apartment and heading for higher ground. It felt like a horrific microcosmic harbinger of global society in the face of climate change. I know this is definitely reductive and probably condescending, but its the thought that went through my mind all that night and the next several days, and its a reflection of the cognitive dissidence that is a part of having money and access to resources when you work with people who do not.
Our actual experience of the hurricane was frightening, but we were never in serious danger. The eight of us crowded into the guest room in Jessica's apartment around 2:00 a.m. (it was the only room without windows). At that point we had all been in the apartment for hours, separating into groups to either discuss the storm or try to ignore it by watching movies or getting lost in our phones. There was some concern over Jessica's patio door; she had already complained to the landlord that it was unsound in general, and definitely not up to hurricane winds. We tried to tape it into the frame, but didn't see what more could be done.
Around 6:00 a.m., all 8 of us woke up to a banging a noise; the wind had ripped the door open and was slamming it open and shut. We eventually got it closed by tying a rope around the handle. The one man among us held the rope for at least an hour while we tried to manage the inch or so of water that had come in through the door and windows. Jessica's boss, who lives directly below her, came upstairs looking for the tape he'd lent us, and to tell us that the water from our apartment was leaking down into his. He ran out when he saw what had happened to the door, and returned with a hammer and nails to temporarily fix the door in place. All of this was communicated by shouting over the wind outside and the door shaking in its frame. Eventually the building employees carried an extra door up to the apartment and nailed it on top of the old door. I don't know how it worked, but it did. Haitians find a way.
Meanwhile, we had carried all of our belongings down into Jessica's boss's apartment, thinking we would have to weather the rest of the storm there. We were trying to push the water out of his apartment and to set up buckets to catch the water dripping down from Jessica's apartment. We were incredibly lucky to have power through all this since it remained dark despite the sun being up. Somehow I also had cell service throughout the storm, and was getting text updates on the storm's course from my family, who I imagine were glued to the weather channel that morning.
By 9:00 am it was mostly past us. It was never directly on top of Les Cayes, though it's difficult to imagine the wind or rain being any more intense. Once the hurricane began retreating from our area and settled back into a severe storm, someone had the idea to make breakfast. Jessica and her boss raided their fridges and turned up a hodge podge of foods that shaped up to be a pretty respectable meal. There weren't enough chairs, plates, or utensils, so many of us ate standing up with messy fingers, free hands cupped under chins to avoid leaving crumbs on our host's floor. Coffee was brewed in small batches on the stove, everyone eagerly waiting their turn for a cup. After that, it was determined that Jessica's new door would survive the remnants of the storm, so we made our way back upstairs to nap. I can't remember now how we spent the rest of the day, but we stayed at Jessica's the whole time. We could see pretty plainly out of the third floor window that the roads were impassable, either flooded or blocked by fallen trees. We spent another night there, this time spread out through the small apartment.
In the morning, we were able to drive around town. The destruction was shocking. So many trees had fallen that entire streets and neighborhoods looked completely different. Buildings that you never noticed before jumped out at you. Most roads were at least partially blocked by debris, but people had gotten to work quickly to try to make passable lanes. It was a cloudy day, but clothes and other belongings had started to be laid out to dry. Women were sweeping water out of their houses and into the canals, many of which were still overflowing. People were everywhere, trying to assess the damage and fix what they could.
In the car, conversation turned to the long term affects of the storm. Homes can be repaired, but what about the crops and fruit bearing trees that were destroyed? What about public health - what diseases might be carried in the floodwater that so many people were wading through? What about the ruined investments people had made in their families' futures - inventories and supplies for small/microbusinesses, school books and uniforms for their children? We asked these questions while simutaneously expressing relief that the death toll seemed mercifully low. Only a handful of deaths had been reported in Haiti by that point.
Now we are weeks out from Matthew. Radio and electricity are mostly back in Les Cayes. People, mainly private citizens by my estimation, have cleared the streets by hacking the trees apart with machetes and burning the piles of trash and debris at night. The small garbage fires that were omnipresent before grew into massive bonfires whose smoke drifted across roofs, down streets, and into windows and homes at night. I was often alarmed by their size, but those who set them seem to have a keen understanding of how to control them.
Every couple of days it rains. On October 21st I woke up at 6:00 am in the middle of a downpour. I was half asleep with the loudest thunder I had ever heard still ringing in my ears when another crack, even louder, seemed to fill the whole house. It continued like this for about 10 minutes, with flickering purple lightning intermittently illuminating our rooms. I'm not sure if the storm was huge or just slow. Eventually the thunder lessened and moved on, but the rain continued and by the time I went outside at 8:00 the streets were flooded again. It poured for most of the day, stopping some time after dark. Anyone whose roofs were still in disrepair (which was most in La Savane and I'm sure thousands more across the region) had all their hard work of the last few weeks basically undone.
In the end, the death toll that we thought had been so low turned out to be anything but. Over 1,000 people that we know of were killed, though very few of these were in Les Cayes. In fact, of all the southern towns and cities, Les Cayes was one of the luckiest. Over the past two weeks we have heard a stream of stories about coastal and rural towns and communities that were all but wiped out, who continue to struggle with access to food and clean water, and where already dozens of cases of cholera (endemic to the country after being introduced by UN soldiers) have been reported.
I read a really excellent essay written by Junot Diaz in response to the 2010 earthquake, and I think that much of what he says there can be applied to this "social disaster" as well. There is little I can say that he doesn't say much better in the essay, and I cannot recommend it enough. Here are some of my favorite parts:
"This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die."
"Because we must change, we also must refuse the temptation to look away when confronted with disasters. We must refuse the old stories that tell us to interpret social disasters as natural disasters. We must refuse the familiar scripts of victims and rescuers that focus our energies solely on charity instead of systemic change. We must refuse the recovery measures that seek always to further polarize the people and the places they claim to mend. And we must, in all circumstances and with all our strength, resist the attempts of those who helped bring the disaster to use the chaos to their advantage—to tighten their hold on our futures.
We must stare into the ruins—bravely, resolutely—and we must see.
And then we must act."
If you are inclined to donate, consider supporting these local organizations:- Tous Ensemble Rehabilitation Center is the only rehabilitation center in Southern Haiti. People come from all over the south to get services here. They provide therapy as well as community outreach and education programs.
- St. Boniface Hospital has a long-established presence on the ground in southern Haiti. In the wake of Hurricane Matthew, St. Boniface is uniquely positioned to provide medical care and aid to the people most affected by the storm.
- The Lambi Fund of Haiti is a unique grassroots organization whose mission is to assist the popular, democratic movement in Haiti. Its goal is to help strengthen civil society in Haiti as a necessary foundation for democracy and development.
- Fondation Aquin Solidarite (FAS) is a non-profit organization, founded in 2005, to provide educational, cultural, sports and economic support and mentoring to the city and the people of Aquin, located 117kms southwest of Port-au-Prince. Hurricane Matthew literally destroyed all major infrastructure work and buildings in the city and surrounding districts, leaving more than 70% of the 70,000+ population of the Commune of Aquin in dire straits.
- Friends of Paradis des Indiens goal is to create an empowered, self-sufficient community by raising funds to support education, jobs, and modernization of the existing resources of the region. Hurricane Matthew destroyed decades of work and has created an urgent need for reconstruction and reforestation to put the community of Abricots back on track.
- Fonkoze is Haiti's largest micro-finance institution.
Some larger non-local NGOs with good reputations include Partners in Health (who usually operate in Haiti's Central Plateau, but have been involved in the hurricane response) and Doctors Without Borders.
Thanks for reading. Sorry this was such a long one!
