Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Sun rising over Leogane as we left for the airport

Day 9 -- Saturday, August 14, 2010

I woke up Saturday morning at 3 AM and absolutely could not fall back to sleep.  I finally got my iPod and played some games for a while and then dozed off.  My alarm woke me at 5.  Hillary and I were both leaving that morning, so we had arranged to share a ride to the Port-Au-Prince airport.  Fearing "Haitian Time," we told the driver that my flight was an hour earlier than it was, and then left extra time on top of that.  We were supposed to leave at 5:30.  One of the women who works at the camp came into the guest house shortly after I got up to make sure we were awake, and we quickly finished our packing and got ready to leave.

Those of you following this whole series may recall that when I came to Haiti I had donations of clothes for the kids and lots of workbooks in my luggage.  On the way back, the main compartment of my suitcase was filled with dirty laundry, and both my carry on and checked luggage were much lighter.  It also helped that anything I did not have a definitive purpose for was left with the kids.  I packed up my mosquito net and left it and my repellent for Christopher.  The two boxes of snack bars I had brought with me were long gone, given to kids who told me they hadn't had anything to eat on a given day.  My fan, flashlight and batteries were given to Daniel's family.  I had my clothes, my journal, my iPod and not much else.  We left the property at 5:30, with no opportunity for a morning goodbye to anyone other than Amelia. 

Driving back through Leogane and into Port-Au-Prince was again surreal.  The relative tranquility of the camp was replaced with more visions of rubble, collapsed buildings and tent cities. 

We had been warned not to let anyone "help" us with our luggage at the airport.  However, a porter had grabbed my suitcase long before I even got out of the car, so I let him bring me to Spirit for check-in.  I got out a dollar to tip him, and he said, "For fast check-in, price is $5."  I knew I was being had, but it wasn't a lot of money, so I dug out a $5 bill, whereupon he said, "For fast check-in, price is $20."  I told him no, and took my luggage and placed it on the first security scanner belt.  In Port-Au-Prince, you actually have to go through security to get into the airport, on top of the screenings to get on a plane.

After waiting in line for an extremely long time, I checked my bag and went upstairs to where the shops and cafeteria/bar is.  I wandered around and bought gifts for my kids.  My son collects vehicles of all sorts, so I bought him a model of a tap-tap.  My daughter collects keychains, so I got her a keychain with a tap-tap on it.  Finally, I bought a bottle of rum for the friend who was meeting me at the airport in Detroit, and went out to the counter to get something to eat.  A snack and a coke later, and it was time to go through security.  After a few minutes they called my plane, and I started down the hall to the entrance.

Before we could get on the plane, a handful of security personnel rescreened our luggage by hand.  I then picked up the rum (which of course couldn't go through security so it had been dropped at the plane door for me) and got on the plane, settling in next to a Haitian man.  He buckled himself into his seat, clutching a manila envelope for dear life.  I looked at it, and realized it was an immigrant visa to the United States.  I offered him words of welcome.  The plane took off, and I started to cry, the first of many times that day.

Customs and immigration in Fort Lauderdale were relatively speedy, and I got my bag and headed over to Delta.  I had truly not known how I was going to be feeling when I returned, and so I had made some plans before I left on this trip to deal with the real possibility that I would be a wreck -- physically, emotionally or both -- coming back.  I had cashed in some frequent flyer miles to upgrade this last leg of the trip to first class, which turned out to be wonderful.  I just needed to feel pampered, which a bottle of water (which I really needed since I had probably been mildly dehydrated all week) followed by a beer, unlimited snacks and wide seats were just what the doctor ordered.  Before I knew it, we were in Detroit.

My husband had left for the weekend to pick up my daughter at camp, but I knew that I might not feel much like driving myself home from the airport.  We had therefore arranged for a dear friend to watch my son for a few hours and pick me up.  I highly recommend being met at baggage claim by a 5-year-old who loves you and hasn't seen you in a long time for anyone whose ego needs a little boost.  As I came down the escalator, a little voice screamed "Mommy!!!" and my son came tearing down the terminal towards me.  I felt like a rock star.

My bag was the first one off the plane, and my friend, son and I headed out to her car.  We headed up the highway, chatting, and I described some of what I had seen.  As we drove along, we came to a place where an overpass had been demolished and a new one built.  The remains of the original bridge were in a pile by the side of the road.  As we drove past, I caught myself about to point out the pile as an example of the kind of destruction the earthquake caused before I realized that, of course, that wasn't earthquake damage.  I realized then that the reentry to my life at home was going to be even bumpier than expected. 

After a nice dinner, we headed home.  I enjoyed my first hot shower in more than a week, although of course I hadn't wanted hot showers in the heat of Haiti.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed being able to control the temperature.  I got out in my centrally air conditioned house, tucked myself into my nice soft bed, and went to sleep.  As I drifted off, I thought about Daniel, sleeping in his tent almost 1800 miles away, and I cried again, not sure if the tears were for him or for me.


Tomorrow -- Reentry and Reflection

The kids with perfect attendance get their crowns.

Day 7 -- Friday, August 13, 2010

While the property where we were staying in Leogane was not really a farm, there were a smattering of farm animals hanging around.  Cows and goats were on the field to one side, and most of them belonged to people from the area who brought their animals to graze.  There were two or three roosters and a family of ducks that roamed free throughout the property, and the occasional dog, cat or pig happened by.  Each morning as the sun came up, I was awakened by one of the roosters crowing.  It bothered me the first night, but after that I got used to it and went back to sleep each day.

On Thursday night, however, something was different outside.  Some dogs appeared to be getting into a fight of some kind directly outside the bedroom window.  They were barking and growling for what seemed like hours, and I had a terrible time going to sleep.  No sooner had they stopped, it seemed, when a rooster and one of the dogs appeared to get into a heated argument.  The rooster would crow, the dog would bark, the rooster would crow again, the dog would bark louder, the rooster would crow louder, and on it went.  Once in a while a cow would chime in from the field, making for a scene that would have been downright funny had it not been the middle of the night and had I not been trying to sleep.  I finally gave up around 5 AM, and so I was quite tired and downright cranky as I entered my last full day in Haiti.

The plan was to grab the three kids we were most worried about before the assembly started that morning, but there was general chaos and disorganization, and we weren't able to do it.  The entire morning was devoted to the last day assembly, during which the various groups of children reported on their activities, performed music, dancing and skits, and generally had a good time.  Hillary had some Burger King crowns she had gotten donated for a craft project, and the kids with perfect attendance got crowns.  Soon, everyone, even the adults, was wearing a Burger King crown.  This might not have gone over very well in the United States, but in a place where Burger King does not exist, the difference between a BK crown and some other kind of crown is nonexistent, and the kid were very happy.

Sometime around 11:30, I hit the wall.  I could not keep my eyes open any more, so I snuck back into the guest house and laid down.  While the music from the assembly was substantially louder than the livestock from the previous night, I was able to put some white noise on my iPod next to my head and go to sleep for about 45 minutes.  When I woke up, the festivities were still underway but almost over.

Amelia got hold of the head counselor for the older children and made it clear that we needed to talk to some of the kids before they left.  Her first thought was to get all 16 kids who had scored high on the assessment, but in the time we had I felt it was most important to reach the children who were suicidal.  Two of the three of them were there that day, and we took them aside together. 

I explained that we wanted to talk to them because they were two of the children who said they had thought about killing themselves, and we were very worried about them.  I gave them the choice to talk to us together or apart, and they both wanted to be apart.  One of them, Olivia, waited off to the side while we spoke to the other, Nicole.  As it turned out, while Nicole was clearly upset and depressed, she was not currently suicidal.  She was 18 and had lost both of her parents in the earthquake.  She was one of the few kids who had a house, but she had no family and no way of supporting herself.  We spent some time problem solving with her, trying to come up with ways she could make sure she had food and was able to go to school, and ways she could find adults to talk to and confide in.  I was not at all sure we had really helped her much when we moved on to Olivia.

Unlike Nicole, Olivia was clearly suicidal.  I went down the usual assessment questions with her:  How often do you think about killing yourself?  What do you think about doing?  Would that be hard or easy to do?  What do you think are the chances you will actually do it?  This girl was straight out of a textbook on suicide, and she was at tremendous risk.  While we were talking to her, her mother came along and she gave us permission to bring her mom into the conversation.  

A Doctors Without Borders clinic in Port-Au-Prince

Had this been a student at my school or a person I was working with in the community at home, I would have referred her to the psych emergency room and made sure she went.  I was in no position to do that, in part because there is no hospital in Leogane right now.  I did the best thing I could think of, which was to impart to her mother how very serious and dangerous this was, and ask her to take her daughter to Doctors Without Borders right away.  I tried to give her language to use with them that would convey the seriousness of the situation.  I said to tell them that a mental health volunteer had assessed her daughter and felt she was in serious danger of hurting herself, and that the volunteer insisted she needed medical attention right away. 

I have no idea whether the mother took her daughter there, or whether Doctors Without Borders had any way of helping Olivia.  It was the best we could do to make the referral and to tell Olivia she was important, that we understood how much pain she was in, and that there was help for her if she could just hold on.  She seemed to believe us.  As I went back into the house for lunch, I said to Amelia and Hillary, "That is the work I came here to do."  While I was worried for Olivia, I also knew that this, unlike any other problem I had worked on all week, was a situation where I had specialized knowledge that could make a difference.  I just hope it did.

After lunch, Daniel attached himself surgically to my hip.  He knew that this was my last day in Haiti, and he clearly wanted to be around me.  The feeling was mutual.  We sat on the porch for the entire afternoon and into the evening, sometimes just us and sometimes with Christopher, playing cards, drawing in my journal and playing Doodle Jump on my iPod. 

My confidence in my ability to communicate with Daniel in French had improved over the week, even though my French itself probably had not.  Still, I ventured into some heavier topics with him.  We talked about my family, his family, and our respective religions, and about stereotypes of Haiti and of black people that are common in the United States.  We talked about his school, and I told him about how important it was for him to do well in school.  We even discussed the possibility of him going to college on scholarship some day.  He asked if it was difficult to come to the United States, and if he could come visit me someday.  I gave him my contact information and email address, and he and Christopher gave me the email address of Christopher's uncle, who also lives on the property, to use to contact them.

As the night drew to a close, I gave Daniel my battery-operated fan, my flashlight, my extra batteries for both and an extra bottle of bug repellent.  I gave Christopher my cards, which he was constantly playing with, and promised him I would leave my other bottle of repellent for him when I left in the morning.  Daniel admitted he was sad that I was leaving, and I certainly was as well.  He asked me if I would return to Haiti, and I told him the truth -- I didn't know.  I told him that if I did, I hoped he had a house when I returned.  He said he wanted one too, but that he really wanted a telephone and a DVD player.  He is, after all, thirteen.  In my lousy French, I summed up the trip, and our newfound friendship, before I headed off to bed:

Before I came here, I didn't know that I loved Haiti.  Now I know that I love Haiti and I have people I love in Haiti, so maybe I will come back.

Tomorrow -- The Journey Home

The Quarterback, Amelia and Hillary at the beach

Day 7 -- Thursday, August 12, 2010

Thursday was beach day, and we were told we would be leaving at 9:30.  It soon became evident that this meant 9:30 "Haitian Time," since the assembly didn't start until around 9:30.  In addition to the usual prayers, the head counselor lead the children in prayer for their safety on the trip.  I don't want to read too much into this, because I suspect the prayer was exactly the same one she would have offered any other summer.  However, Eloise had told us that many parents were still quite skittish about sending their children to the beach.  There was a small tsunami with the earthquake, not like the big one in southeast Asia a few years back but just big enough that if you happened to be standing on the beach or in the water when the earthquake happened you probably would have drowned.

At around 10:30, a school bus painted blue and white drove onto the field next to the gazebo, and the children began to pile on.  There were about 125 kids and about 10 adults going on the trip, and any teacher will tell you that far exceeds the safe capacity of a school bus.  The kids and regular counselors got on, and the volunteers were told we would take another bus.

After the kids had been on the bus for several minutes, I heard voices yelling my name.  Christopher and Daniel were leaning out the window, and when they saw they had my attention, they motioned to me to come to the bus.  I jogged over, and they asked me why I wasn't going to the beach.  I explained that I was going separately with the other volunteers, and they seemed very happy.

Our tap-tap

The "other bus" we were taking was not what would pass for a bus in the U.S.  Haiti has an informal system of vans and converted pick-up trucks called "tap-taps" which function as somewhere between buses and taxis.  They are brightly painted, and people stand on the side of the road and hail them, or you can call them if you and they both have a phone.  People ride in, on and on top of these vehicles to get around.  One had been called for us.

It was about now that we noticed that the school bus wasn't leaving.  The kids had been on it for a good half hour, and we imagined the heat was horrible.  The driver was now standing in front of the bus with the hood open.  It had broken down.  At about 11:10, we piled into the tap-tap, the bus driver got the bus going, and we headed towards the beach.

Having spent five days inside the grounds of the camp, it had been easy to forget that we were actually at ground zero for the earthquake.  While the living conditions of survivors were in evidence daily, the destruction caused by the quake was not.  As soon as we ventured out of the gates, however, it was back to reality.  Rubble, empty foundations and collapsed buildings were everywhere.  Where there weren't building remains, there were tent cities.  Very few buildings were standing and undamaged.  We continued through what, I suppose, had once been the center of town and out onto a dirt road which wound its way to the shore.  At 11:30, we got out of the tap-tap and waited for the kids to arrive.

The remains of a building near the beach

What was perhaps most striking about the beach was that it could easily have been on any island in the Carribbean.  With all the poverty and misery in Haiti, it's easy to forget that it is, in fact, a beautiful tropical island.  The beach had a lot of garbage and debris on it where the tap-tap let us off.  There had been heavy rains for several nights in a row, and it probably wasn't that clean to begin with.  Once the kids arrived, we headed down the beach to a much cleaner and nicer stretch, and to a house owned by Eloise which also had withstood the quake. 

As soon as we arrived, the kids started taking off their clothes and putting on whatever they were going to swim in.  A majority had bathing suits, although the two-piece suits didn't necessarily match.  The smallest kids were mostly in underwear.  Some kids wore shorts and t-shirts, or suits that obviously were too small or too big.  No one cared.  As soon as the counselors gave permission, everyone headed into the water.  I took my time getting ready, and by the time I walked towards the beach, a little girl decided I was late and needed to be pulled into the water.

The scene in the water was unlike any that would be permitted at any camp or school trip in the U.S.  Adults stood around the perimeter of a relatively small area of water.  125 children all squeezed into this area and jumped all over each other in what, in my experience, is "no horseplay or you're out of the pool" behavior at American venues.  I asked one of the counselors how many of the kids knew how to swim.  He had no idea.  The motion of the children kicked up sand from the ocean floor, meaning that when children went under water they couldn't be seen.  I spent most of my time praying I wasn't going to have to rescue or, God forbid, not rescue any children.

Once I had been yanked into the water, four or five kids at a time clung to me for dear life.  While I understood the impetus, I was truly afraid they were going to send me under the water and I wasn't sure I'd be able to get back up with them on top of me.  Add to this that Christopher and Daniel very much wanted to be around me, and showed their enthusiasm by leaping on top of the pile of kids who were already holding on to me.

After a swim it was time for lunch.  Some men who appeared to be camping on the property brought out freshly picked coconuts and, while the kids played, the adult paid them 25 gourdes (about 60 cents) each to hack off the top of the coconuts with a machete so we could drink from them.  It was fabulous.

The plan had been for Amelia and me to grab the three children who said they were thinking of suicide and talk to them sometime today.  However, it was pretty clear we were not going to be able to do that in all the hubbub.  This was difficult for me, since my training is certainly not to let it go when a child says they are suicidal.  The fact that we had already let it go for 24 hours was disturbing enough, but there really wasn't a way to even find these kids (whom we did not know), let alone assess them.  Finally, Amelia went and spoke to the head counselor, and we agreed we would talk to the kids before assembly the next day.  After another swim, we headed back down the beach to the bus and the tap-tap, and back to camp.  We were due back at 2:00.  We arrived close to 3:30.

After dinner, Amelia asked Daniel if he would like to talk to us about the earthquake, and whether he thought some other kids would too.  He said yes, and told us he would ask around to see who wanted to come.  At about 8:00, we sat down on the porch to talk to Daniel, Christopher and Christopher's cousin, Marie, age 10.  Each told us what had happened to them during the earthquake*.  I asked each of them what they thought was happening, and they all had different ideas, but each of them mentioned that it had crossed their mind the island might be sinking into the ocean.  This was not something that had even occurred to me, but then, I don't live on an island.

We discovered that none of them had much of an idea what causes earthquakes.  This seemed important.  Even though earthquakes can't be predicted reliably, I surmised that the idea that they "just happen" made their fear that it would happen again more pronounced.  I was right.  After a brief lesson in plate tectonics, all three of them visibly relaxed.

We spent some time talking about the definition of bravery.  The kids, both this group and the many others, did not seem to feel they had been brave during the earthquake.  They were using a definition of bravery that equaled not being scared, and they felt that no one had been brave.  I asked them what they thought the most important thing to do during the earthquake had been, and they told me it was to get outside and away from buildings, to pray for survival and to find their families.  I pointed out that that is exactly what they had managed to do.  They may have been scared, but staying alive was their number one priority, and they had done it.  I also told them that I knew it was hard to talk about this, and so the fact that they told us their stories and how scared they still were meant that they really were brave.  They like that.

It was 10 PM, and Marie was visibly exhausted and wanted Christopher to walk her to her tent in the dark, so they left.  I told Daniel he needed to go to sleep, but he refused.  I asked him what time he went to sleep usually, and he said 11 or midnight.  I asked him what time his mother wanted him to go to sleep, and he said 9, looked embarrassed, said goodnight and headed toward his tent.  I went inside and, as I tried to sleep, contemplated something that another volunteer, a Haitian-American, had told me at the beach:

It's good that you're here.  Only by coming here can you know that these children are human.

* You might reasonably be expecting me to relate the children's stories at this point.  I have struggled with how much to share, because what they say is supposed to be confidential.  I have decided to strike a balance by only relating what I believe anyone who knows them already knows and what I said to them, rather than all of what they had to say.

Tomorrow -- The Work We Came Here to Do

Over the next several days, I will be sharing my thoughts and experiences from my week in Léogâne, Haiti.  Léogâne was essentially the epicenter of January's earthquake, and 30,000 people, more than 15% of the population, were killed.  I went to Léogâne to provide crisis intervention and assistance to children attending a summer camp there.

The first several days of this "serial blog" are my travelog.  I'm devoting a day in this space to each day of the trip.  I'll then wrap things up with a day or two of reflections on the experience, lessons learned, etc.  Because I'm writing about real people with real traumas , I'm changing everyone's name to protect their privacy.  I hope you find this interesting and informative.  I'll be back to my usual combing of the news for various awful things in about 10 days.

Day 1 -- Friday, August 6, 2010

My travels to Haiti began when I caught a plane from Detroit to Fort Lauderdale.  My flight to Port-Au-Prince on Saturday was to be at 7:30 AM, so I flew to Florida the night before and took the shuttle to the hotel.  Amelia, the Haitian-American woman going on the deployment as a translator, had called Thursday night to ask me to leave some space in my luggage for some materials which a friend of hers would be delivering to the hotel Friday evening.

Something you should understand -- my husband does all the packing in our house, whether or not he is going on the trip in question.  In this instance, he had managed to pack the body of my suitcase with my son's outgrown clothes to bring to the kids in Haiti, and my  clothes for the trip were packed entirely into the pockets of the lid.  He made sure I had about 11 pounds of allowable luggage weight to play with for the materials.  My backpack carried the things I would need if my suitcase never made it to Léogâne:  toiletries, medications (including some antibiotics, just in case), a change of clothes, my journal, mosquito repellent, mosquito net, flashlight, flip flops, passport, wallet, cards and iPod.

When Amelia's friend arrived at the hotel, I immediately saw we had a problem.  The materials, which had been sent by the coordinator for this deployment, were, unbeknownst to both Amelia and me, 50 fairly lengthy workbooks for children, they weighed a lot more than 11 pounds, and they took up a lot more space than I had in my luggage.  This being a trip on Spirit Airlines (slogan:  "We Can Get Blood from a Rock, and We'll Charge You For It!"), all checked and carry-on luggage has a charge, you are limited to one of each, and you cannot go over 50 pounds even if you are willing to pay for it.

I stuck out my arm to shake Amelia's friend's hand, just at the same moment he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek.  "Oh, I forgot," he said, "You're not Haitian."  I laughed and said, "What, don't I look Haitian to you?"  We shook hands and then kissed, and I was struck with the sudden realization that I needed to start remembering that I was not on my turf.  The last thing I needed to do was come in to Haiti expecting to do everything my way, the American way.  One cultural faux pas down, a zillion to go.

I wrestled half the books into my suitcase and half into my backpack, which now weighed rougly five thousand pounds, give or take.  My back was going to hurt.  A quick shower and it was time for bed.  Tomorrow would be a long day.

Tomorrow:  My first glimpse of an absolutely devastated country.


Photo copyright istockphoto/yinyang