ITV:
TITLE:
LANGUAGE:
DATE:
TIMECODE
00:00:45
Amelia Shaw
Video Editor, Public Information, MINUSTAH
English
April 1, 2010
TEXT
WHAT IS YOUR NAME AND WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN HAITI FOR
ALL THIS TIME?
My name is Amelia Shaw and I work in Public Information, in Television, as the
Video Editor.
00:01:02
YOU WERE HERE ON JANUARY 12TH. I WANT TO KNOW, WHERE
WERE YOU ON THE HOUR OF THAT DAY (DURING THE
EARTHQUAKE)?
During the earthquake. I remember I was sitting at my desk in my office. And my
office is next to our cameraman’s office. So I was looking through the doorway. We
were just talking about going home. I remember him joking with me, because we
share a car. “Come on man! Let’s go home!” and I was saying “I just need 10 more
minutes to finish this script. And then we can go.” So I was typing, and I remember
this noise. It was like a big truck coming down the driveway of our office.
And It struck me, what kind of a truck makes a noise like that? So I stood up to look
out the window to see the truck. By the time I stood up and I got about two steps of
the doorway I noticed that the walls were moving, not just shaking, they were
swinging and the floor was coming up and down. And I can vaguely remember that I
put my hands on the Plexiglas where the window was, and then I was on the floor and
trying to get up again and then I was on the floor again. In my mind I don’t think I
thought that this was an earthquake. I wasn’t scared and I had no feeling at all. I was
just thinking “Hmm, this is interesting, what are you supposed to do in this situation?
Do you jump under the desk, do you run outside or do you stand in the doorway?”
And I thought for some reason it was ‘stand in the doorway’, so I was trying to get to
a doorway. I couldn’t make it, I was 4 ½ months pregnant at the time and kept falling
down and finally just gave up and fall down on my stomach. Our cameraman, Blago,
who was right behind me, came and he kind of went on top of me witch I think back
of and it always kind of touches me, because he was trying to protect me.
We had this other photographer who was totally crazy, Logan, and I could hear him
coming down the halls, sounding like he was bouncing off the wall and he was
screaming “Get out! Get out! Get the fuck out!!” Somehow we were lying face down,
and he came by and the next thing I know is that we were stumbling down the stairs
of our building. Our car had crashed into the building and the next I remember – it’s
all like little pieces - is being on my knees outside of the building and just counting
1
and it was shaking, shaking, shaking “I’m just gonna count to ten and then it’s gonna
stop”. I wasn’t scared and I wasn’t concerned really, because I could look to my right
and our little building, our little annex, where the Photo and the Video where, was
still standing and I look in front of me and there is one of our TV producers Agatt,
who was just saying “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, mon Dieu”. And there were Logan and
Marco and Blaggo kind of dusting themselves up. Looking to my left towards the
parking lot where the building was, I was not able to see anything because there was
just dust. And at the time I thought “Wow it’s kind of beautiful it’s the dusk, golden
dust everywhere. That it was sort of beautiful”. I didn’t think anything about it at the
time and then I heard Logan say “The building fell down”.
I don’t think I believed it. I thought he was exaggerating. What was amazing to me is
that our guys - they are journalists - so their instinct is, ‘go grab a camera and go start
shooting’. My instinct was, ‘I’m going to walk down this hill and I’m going to go
down to the bottom’. And so I went down to the bottom and the others turned around,
went back to our building, took the cameras and went over to where all the dust was.
I walked down the hill and there were people just starting to collect. No one knew
where to go. There was no one in charge. I remember a UN Poll Officer and some
military guys and I remember going up to them and ask, “OK, we are in an
emergency, what do we do?” And they were like “I don’t know…”. And I remember
one Brazilian who came by and he was bleeding a little bit, covered in dust and he
said “The building came down, and I jumped in the pool, I think I hurt my foot” and
he was just shocked. And I started to then say “Oh my God”, I think it took me about
twenty minutes for myself to verify that there was no more headquarters there. People
were slowly trickling out and I remember looking around and not seeing too many
people and thinking “where is everyone?”. I don’t know how much time passed. It
was still light out, but then I saw our boss, David, come out, completely stammering,
and he said “The building is down, we had to climb out the window. Everyone in that
building is dead, they’re dead.” And I still couldn’t believe it.
It took me until, we walked back up to where the Filipino camp was and they turned
on the generators, because it was getting dark at that time, and lights flooded what
remained of our office building and there was nothing there. I couldn’t understand. It
was reminding me of September 11th - I am from New York - looking at where the
towers used to be and being like “They’re not there”. My brain just did not compute.
It was the same feeling of looking at this suddenly empty space where before there
was a big six-story building; it did not compute.
2
00:08:34
YOUR FEELINGS OF HOPELESSNESS AND EXCIETY AND SURPRISE
WERE ALL MIXED AT THAT TIME, BUT DID YOUR THOUGHTS GO TO
SOMEONE IN PARTICULAR OR A GROUP OF PEOPLE THAT WERE IN
THE BUILDING, OR TO ALL OF THEM COLLECTIVELY?
I think my first thought, after I saw David, my boss, was accounting for everyone of
our team. For a little wile we thought we lost one of our television people, because
we couldn’t find her. And so that was the first concern. For me it was like radiating
circles of proximity: where are the people that I work directly with? OK, all
accounted for. We ended up finding the woman that we thought was lost. It turned
out that she had gotten out. And then it went to the next level: where are the rest of
my other colleagues, in Public Information? And verifying where those people where.
Because I think in a way of the people you work with, that are with you everyday, in
a sense that they are like your family. The next circle of concern was the family
members of the people that we work with.
It’s hard for me to remember, but I remember looking around. We had some
colleagues who were married or with spouses in the mission. There were some
colleagues with children. I remember looking at them and just observing and
thinking, because there was no cell phone or communication. You couldn’t call
anyone. The only way that you could verify that someone was alive is if you saw
them. There was no way to know otherwise.
I was just looking at some of our colleagues from our office that have husbands and
children who work in Haiti, trying to gage what was going through their minds. They
were just sitting there looking at the rubble. One woman in particular who I know,
she is a friend and her husband is a friend and she has a child up the hill in her
apartment. I was watching her and kind of the stead fast calmness, it was like she was
made of marble and just waiting and waiting and waiting, for hours waiting not
knowing if her husband was in there and not knowing if her house was still standing.
Not talking, not reacting, not doing really anything but just sitting there and
watching. And I found myself thinking about her a lot in particular. It was very sad
for many people, for all of us, to find out later that in her particular case, her husband
did not make it.
I remember another thing that struck me in the first couple of hours. It was dark, the
generators were on and they were able to pull a few people out from the top. The
soldiers; they came and they were there pretty fast. As fast as they could get there, the
Filipinos - more were coming in - they were running through the streets, because they
couldn’t get to the Christopher. The streets were blocked, so they were showing up
little by little and they would get up to the top, over the rubble, and they were able to
poll some people out.
There were maybe 50 or an hundred of us, sitting at the Filipino camp, watching, just
waiting, because we thought at the time that it was the safest place to sit and
assemble. There would be like a collective sort of gasp when somebody would come
3
out on a stretcher or they would carry them out, and some people who had been in the
rubble even walked out. You could almost hear, like a whisper, going through the
crowd “Who is it? Who is it?”. People were kind of straining to see if maybe it was
one of theirs, one that they knew, a loved one or a friend. I remember that.
I remember trying for myself, refusing to think of anything, refusing to consider what
was going on just there, just waiting. I remember thinking a lot about my family.
Knowing that - my family is in New York - it was 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock, 7 o’clock, the
peak news hours and knowing that my family was probably at home, making dinner
and listening to the news, and was about to get a major shock and not be able to know
where I was or where we were. And my parents have been to Haiti. My parents have
one of their best memories of visiting the UN. We even once went out on an APC,
the militaries took them around on an APC when they visited. We had lunch at the
Hotel Montana, they came to the headquarters and met the staff. I could picture them
at home, just remembering these locations and being panicked or in despair to hear
that the UN HQ had fall down and to know that I was there. That is one of the things
that I remember thinking about that, and at a certain point I had to put that in a box
and put it away, because I couldn’t do anything. There was nothing you could do.
I remember also that there was one woman, a Haitian woman, one of our colleagues,
I don’t know who she was, but she was screaming “Jesu! Jesu!” and putting her
hands in the air and kept screaming loud. She was crying, hysterical, and I remember
to trying to help her to sit down and to stop screaming. I was trying to calm her. I
remember our spokesperson at the time, who was seven months pregnant, Sophie
Bruto, who was coming over and taking the woman by the hands, looking at her in
the face and saying in French “you must stop now, you must stop screaming, because
you have to think of everyone else, we are in this together, but you must stop
screaming” and the woman did. I remember thinking “wow”, and Sophie, who was
pregnant, her husband was somewhere else in Haiti, in the UNDP building, doesn’t
know anything about him. She has a child at home and her ability to still manage
herself and take control and try and manage other people so that everything could be
calm and orderly and we could all get through this the best we could. I remember just
being very impressed with that.
4
00:17:20
NOW, THESE ARE DEFINITELY THE FIRST FIVE, SIX HOURS AFTER
THE EARTHQUAKE. TRYING TO SIMULATE WHAT HAPPENS WITH
YOUR EMOTIONS. NOW, WHAT HAPPENED IN THE FIRST HOURS OF
THAT NIGHT? WHERE DID YOU SPEND THE NIGHT? HOW WAS IT?
I don’t know. I know it was a long night, but I didn’t sleep. I don’t think that anyone
slept.
I remember, this is so funny, really regretting what I wore that day to work. I wore a
maternity dress, a strapless dress, and I had on jewelry which I then later thought was
absurd, you know, in the middle of this. I had high heeled shoes on. I remember
being frantic about needing different clothes, feeling so absurd with this. So I found
like size 15 military pants. They were huge and I remember putting those on and
finding some rope and tying them on and somebody lend me their sneakers. I was
taking all this other stuff off, earrings. I just felt all of the sudden “I just don’t want
any of those things on me”. And I was being very careful to keep my bag. I was one
of the lucky ones; I was able to keep my bag, with my wallet and all my papers in it.
Around about 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning I heard some people talking about going
up to Petion where we lived, and taking their passports. I wanted to be in that car at
all costs, I had to go. We crammed probably seven people into a car, we were
cramped in the back, and I was with my boss, David, and other people from our
office. I remember that at the time I had a sense of relative safety, because I was with
David. He was like a paternal figure in a way or an uncle figure, I don’t know. “I’m
with David, nothing will happen”, because you had no idea of what was going on in
the rest of the city. I think many of us felt like that the disaster somehow was located
inside of our walls. I could hear people screaming outside, it was a unique sound, like
tens of thousands of people all over the hills of the city screaming at the same time,
wailing in pain and in fear and in sadness, grief. I never heard a sound like this before
and it would come and go in waves.
When we drove outside the gates, we had to weave through cars in the streets. People
had kind of left their cars anywhere. There were things that were falling. It was dark
and sometimes you couldn’t see what was falling. Everybody was looking out of the
window and I remember going on a side street to get to one of the main roadways in
the city, Dèlma. There was this huge round cupola, it was a roof that had tumbled off
the top of one of the houses and was just lying upside down on the road. It was like a
huge Hershey’s Kiss, on the road. And I remember passing that and that everyone in
the car was like open mouth.
Later I remember thinking that the magnitude of what happened in the city is so big
that I could only process it in small pieces.
Then suddenly we were at my apartment building, I don’t remember what happened
in between. It wasn’t much talking in the car, but we decided that each person would
have half an hour. There were still tremors at the time, so you would have half an
hour to grab what you could and then go. I remember thinking about it as a game,
5
thinking in my head “OK, this is almost like a party game, where you go to a party
and you ask hypothetical question: if you have half an hour to take your most valued
possessions, what are you going to take?” And I was just thinking I’m going to think
about this later. For me the valuable things were my passport, the cash and all the
photos that I had. I wanted all my photos. So that is what I took, and underwear!
I remember thinking there is so much dignity in having clean clothes and clean
underclothes. It’s something that is so important to for me, for a person’s humanity,
to feel dignity.
When we pulled up to my apartment I was seeing my landlord and his wife and two
or three Haitians, sitting in the long chairs in front of my building. My landlord had a
shotgun over his lap. I thought “Wow, you know, these are people that are prepared
or are expecting a looting” and it made me feel like, “how are these days going to
turn in to? What’s going to happen next? What’s going to happen tomorrow?”
00:24:03
WHEN YOU PICKED UP YOUR STUFF, WHEN YOU WENT DOWN THE
HILL WITH YOUR BOSS DAVID, DID YOU GO TO A SAFE PLACE? WAS
THERE A DESTINATION? DID YOUR KNOW WHERE TO GO? ANY
DIRECTIONS?
No, there were no directions at all. The security officers were trying very hard to
manage the situation, but the first thing was to get the people out of the rubble and
the other priority was to try and manage the surviving staff. There were talks of
convoys, evacuations, people were talking about the Mission that was going to close
up and leave. People were talking all kinds of things; no one knew what was
happening.
When we drove out of my apartment we drove back to the Christopher. First thing I
saw was our spokesperson Sophie, who had rejoined her husband and they had gotten
their child, who was at home. That, to me, was like every good thing had happened,
every person that was saved, every person that turned up alive; it was like a bright
moment in a very dark and gloomy, dark and grim period. One of the bright moments
was seeing her pull up in a car and I remember running over to the car to see is the
baby inside, and she was on the other side of the window and saying “The baby is
here! The baby is here!” and I remember that was like a celebration for me. Ah, just
thank god.
A couple of hours later, people started talking about moving down to the log base,
which appeared to have not been very affected. We were told to follow a security car
or military car down and we were following a car with Brazilians. I think it was their
second day in Haiti, and they didn’t know where they were going. So we were
following them and we said “Wait, this is not the road, this is not how you get there”
and we had to get out of the car, and ask them to follow us. So in they ended up
following us to the log base, because they didn’t know how to drive there.
6
There were a lot of little moments that you look back on and were kind of comedic,
little comic. It came to a time where you had to find reasons to laugh. There was so
much ugliness and sadness that these little moments that were funny, you do cherish
them.
When we got down to the log base, there was no direction. There was nothing. I don’t
know what I expected. We kind of got down there and of course, our unit is Public
Information, everybody went to work, photographers were like “Got to send my
photos!”, television people, us, we were like “Must get an internet connection, must
start sending out to the world”. And we were looking for an internet connection and
we were in the office and it seemed that the only person who had an internet
connection was the then acting - I guess he was the Head of the Mission - the CMS
Office (Chief Mission Support), and I remember there being with a laptop and being
like “I’m on a mission, got to find Internet and hook this up”, and people were
around, trying to figure out what to do and account for people.
And so I was trying to plug the computer in so that we could send. I had actually
edited the footage from our cameraman, which I edited in the car on the way over. I
have edited a two or three minute piece about the Christopher Hotel falling down and
the rescue efforts and I had to send that piece to New York, to our UN Television
partners in New York. We were looking for the internet connection and the CMS
officer comes in, and he says “What are your doing?”. And I said, “I am a journalist
here, I work for Public Information and I need to send this material to New York
right away.” And he said “Nobody sends anything until I authorize it.”
I was like “and who are you?”. He said “I am in charge here now”. We were stopped
from doing what we were trying to do and there was only a small delay but it was just
like people were trying to figure out who was in charge, who was in control, what
kind of decisions to make, what to do with the staff. It felt like that period just lasted
for the three or four or five days that staff were showing up. Some people were able
to find beds, other people weren’t. There were these “meals ready to eat”, MREs, that
would appear. And people would run and take one and try to take one for their
colleague, and then they were gone. So you weren’t sure what there was to eat and
some other people would show up with chocolate and peanut butter, anything they
could grab from their house, orange juice. So everyone was sharing their MREs with
the food, but I remember thinking that there was no one really in charge here, how
are we going to get food tomorrow? Is there water? Is there a place to sleep?
It is not a criticism, but looking back it was very difficult I think for the Mission to
kind of set itself up right away. In particular, organize volunteers, organize work
crews, and organize to communicate. There was no email, no cell phones, it was
tough. I think that you had a situation where people were milling around, a lot of staff
members, peoples whose offices were now physically lost, who also lost their
function that was no longer really required, like finance. They were just milling
around and wondering what to do now. It was very confusing, but at the same time,
people were I think forming their own little communities of support, friendships and
7
solidarity. But my overall memory of that time is just a lack of direction. We never
knew where to go or what to do.
00:31:58
SO YOU KEPT ON WORKING UNDER THOSE EXTREMELY DIFFICULT
CONDITIONS, AS THE REST OF THE PEOPLE. BUT YOUR WORK IS
MORE DIFFICULT THAN OTHERS, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO GO OUT
TO FEEL WHAT IS HAPPENING. THERE WAS REALITY INSIDE THE
CAMP BUT THERE WAS ANOTHER REALITY OUT THERE WHERE
YOU NEDED TO REPORT ON, SO HOW/WHAT WAS YOUR ROLE IN
THAT TEAM? BECAUSE YOU WERE PREGNANT YOU WOULD NOT BE
THE ONE GOING IN THE FIELD. HOW DID THIS GET ORGANIZED AND
WHAT WAS YOUR ROLE INSIDE THAT TEAM?
First of all, all of Public Information went into this building that was later condemned
because the walls were cracked and everyone was packed in there; the Radio, the
Photo, Television, Media Relations, David, packed in. There were still shakes going
on and I remember that every time there was a shake, the entire building would go
like “WOAAAAAHH!”. They would run out. You could almost check the progress
of the cracks in the walls, every day. They finally condemned the building and we
were forced to evacuate it.
But I got off easy in the sense that I was 4 ½ months pregnant, nearly 5 months, and
there were a lot of people putting pressure on me even to leave Haiti, that I should be
on the first plane out. But I didn’t want to go. I wanted to be a part of what was
happening and I wanted to be part of the people that helped.
So I made a bargain with myself; “Why don’t I stay behind and be the editor and try
to help manage all the tapes and send all of our material out?”. And so we organized
ourselves into about two to three TV teams and I was the receiver of all the stuff.
They would go out in the morning, shoot something, come back. They would literally
throw me the tape, say “Gotta go”, and go out again in the afternoon, shoot
something else, come back and throw me the tape. And I would be the one behind,
going through all the material, editing it and sending stories out to the world.
Our first story that we send out, when we eventually get an internet connection and
got the authorization to send our material out, our first story was used by more than
5,000 broadcasters. People on the outside of Haiti were so hungry for news, images,
8
information, that what we were doing became very critical because we were some of
the only journalists here at the time. It took others, like BBC and CNN, 24 hours to
get people in and we were already there.
And so I watched everything from a screen, very unrealistic. I knew there was looting
downtown, because our cameraman brought back the tape. I knew there were 10,000
more bodies piled up, because our cameraman brought back the tape. I knew that the
National Cathedral was down, and the arches were still there and the crucifix with
Jesus on it outside that said “God is Great” or something on it, was still standing,
because our cameraman brought back the tape.
So it was kind of a surreal experience for me, I saw what they saw, what they chose
to bring back. And I knew, even for me it was hard to see those images, but I knew it
was much harder for them.
It was hard for me to look at those images; they were so painful and graphic. But I
knew it must have been much harder for them, because they were out there, they
weren’t just seeing it; they were smelling it, feeling it. They would talk about what
happened to them when they went out. Some started wearing something to cover their
nose and their mouth because the smell of death just covered the city.
And I remember one of our cameramen, who has two young children. They didn’t
talk about much, their feelings. When they come back they would just say “Here’s
the tape”. It was so much about: “let’s get the story done, we’ve got to shoot this
story, here is the tape, what is next? I have half an hour to eat, alright now I am
leaving again”, boom. “Here’s the tape”.
They didn’t talk about how they felt, what they were looking at. But I knew it was
bad when one of our cameramen came back who has two small children and he
couldn’t really talk. I said: “Are you OK?” and he gave me the tape and said “This is
the tape, from the children’s hospital. It was bad… there were dogs and …” and he
didn’t even have to finish the sentence because I knew what was happening at the
hospitals around the city. People, Haitians, had no idea where to bring their dead.
Maybe some of them were injured and on their way to the medical centers, but many
of the medical centers had fallen down. So, they are on their way, trying to do
something with these people that they love and get help for them or maybe they were
already gone from this world… and they would just leave them outside the doors of
the hospitals and the medical centers and the morgue.
Looking at the cameraman, I can tell you he was thinking about his own children and
he was getting at the point that he couldn’t go out there anymore. I think that that was
the time when all of us was starting to think “Ok, we have been here for a couple of
weeks, we have been working every day, 10-15 hours a day, for the past 22 days, we
need help, we can’t continue, we need help, from outside”. And we were looking at
some replacements and people were able to go away from Haiti. We were the lucky
ones, we could leave.
9
00:40:33
YOU WERE PREGNANT, YOU ARE STILL PREGNANT. BUT THE FACT
THAT YOU WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR TWO HUMAN BEINGS, NOT
ONLY FOR ONE, HOW DID YOU COPE WITH THAT? WHERE DID YOU
DRAW A LINE TO: “I SHOULDN’T DO THIS, BECAUSE I HAVE TO
THINK OF MY CHILD” OR “I HAVE TO DO THIS, BECAUSE IT’S MY
DUTY”? IT’S MY WAY OF COPING WITH THE JOB. I KNOW THAT
UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES YOU WOULD HAVE CLEAR
SIGNALS FOR YOURSELF AS TO WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN NOT DO.
BUT UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES THE LINES WERE VERY
BLURRED AND WHERE YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE THE ONE MAKING
DECISIONS FOR YOURSELF, BECAUSE NOBODY WOULD DO IT FOR
YOU. HOW DIFFICULT WAS THAT FOR YOU?
It gets very difficult for me, at the time it was very difficult for me, and still now. I
wonder sometimes how I will judge myself later, but I think many times I was faced
with the choice of what to do, what to risk. Because I really believed I needed to be
here, I was needed here. I needed to help. On many occasions I felt that when I was
faced with the choice of picking up and doing work or fading into the background
and saying “no, I need to protect this life inside of me”, I think I chose to work.
I have got a lot of criticism from other people in the mission, who were saying “You
shouldn’t be here, why aren’t you thinking about your baby?”. And I got mad, I
resented it, “Who are you to tell me? No, I’m in charge”.
It was when my husband came down (he had just been recruited to the mission) and I
was sleeping outside. I was sleeping at night with mosquito spray all over and
somebody gave me some Deet spray. I didn’t even have a tent, just slept outside. And
my husband came down and looked at where I was sleeping and said he brought a
tent, “Let’s set up the tent”. So we moved in to a tent - which was a five star
accommodation for us - and we stayed there for two nights.
My husband was observing everything and said “I don’t want you to be here
anymore”. I was like, “how could he tell me that I have to stay” and he said “No, you
are being selfish, you are not thinking clearly and I know that this is important to you
and I know that you want to be here, but you have to hand this over to other people”.
I got mad and we got into an argument, and I realized as soon as we started the
argument that I can fight a lot of things; against an earthquake, against my
colleagues, against all this stuff going on, but I can’t fight against my husband. If he
doesn’t support me I have got to go. He said “This is not about you, and that is my
baby too”. When he said that I realized that I had to go.
It was very hard for me. I felt like I was abandoning our colleagues, the work, and the
country. I was behind the walls all the time and I had very little contact with Haitians,
and that was where I drew the line, because the sanitation in the city was just
horrendous and there was talk of Cholera, Typhoid, NTB and Malaria and infection
was everywhere and I knew that I couldn’t go outside the walls.
10
So, I left on February 3rd. I was here for almost a month and I remember when we
boarded on the day of our evacuation, we boarded a big military plane, that it was the
kind that you could drive things on to, from the back ramp, and you had to sit in this
little plastic chair and you had to put earplugs in and it was really loud and we flew
out to Miami and I remember it was very emotional. I was thinking this might be the
last time I see Haiti. I had no idea what was happening. I had one little suitcase of
stuff, and when we arrived in Miami and the back ramp of the plane came down, I
turned around in my seat and could see Miami airport gleaming glistening there and I
started crying. I hadn’t really cried until that moment and all the tears came out.
The American immigration people came over and I am American so I was like “great,
these are our people!” They herded us into the immigration area and I took my
passport out and I gave it to the immigration officer and he opened my passport and
he looked at us. We were like refugees. Just dirty. He knew where we came from and
he looked at all of us and he looked at my passport and he looked at me and he said
“We’re so glad to have you back Ma’am”. And I just cried about all the other people
we have lost and all the people that country lost and how it was so unfair. It’s unfair.
I don’t know, no one is responsible for an earthquake, but I just felt like God was
unfair. About what he did to the country and to the people that are suffering and all
the people that we loved. That I could only console myself with thinking that the
people that we loved and we lost, were still with us. That they were watching us and
that they were just invisible, they were right here, somewhere, invisible. They are
probably consoling us, saying “it’s okay, I died, but I’m not in pain, I’m fine, it’s
okay”. That is how I consoled myself, because there was nothing else consolable
about the situation at all.
00:50:15
WHEN YOU LOOK BACK AT THAT EXPERIENCE, WHAT YOU WENT
THROUGH, HAS IT CHANGED YOUR WAY OF LOOKING AT LIFE IN A
WAY? HAS IT CHANGED YOUR PERSPECTIVE OF THE HUMAN
BEING? HAS IT CHANGED YOU IN SOME WAY, FOR GOOD OR FOR
BAD?
Has the experience changed me? I don’t know. I realized a couple of things about
myself going through this. I learned about myself, I can say that in general I function
very well, in situations of high stress and conflict. Function. I don’t say that I am
healthy, but I tend to make clear decisions and I can follow through on tasks. Looking
around after this happened I remember that the people’s ability to cope was falling on
a wide spectrum. There were the people that were highly functional, almost over the
top with adrenaline and excited, and I was more on that end.
And there were the people that just closed down. And they just stopped. And I
understood that human beings are so different. And that we all react in different ways
and there is no right or wrong way to be. It’s just the way that you are.
11
I also learned that, while I am very good at keeping the machine going, I was not very
good at making decisions for myself. Taking care of me. And I think, as time goes
on, that it was hard for me to see myself or evaluate myself and it still is. I don’t
know if I have changed, I don’t. I think if anything has changed, I want to enjoy
things more. And I recognize that so many people thought this is the last moment of
my life on that day. Maybe in a way it demystified for me what death is. I am going
to go, and it might be in a calm peaceful way, or it might be in this ugly violent brutal
way that so many of our friends and people around us went, and it’s not really going
to matter in the end. I think it makes me in a way feel calmer about the whole thing.
00:53:33
ANYTHING ELSE?
One other thing that I think really struck me during that whole period, and still strikes
me in particular, is people’s tenacity. I came a way with so much respect and
admiration for our national staff colleagues. Because all the pain that we were going
through, and we were foreigners here, many of us are here by ourselves. We are not
here with our children, or wives or husbands or whatever. Some of us are. But most
are not. So we are just here fending for ourselves. And this happened to us, and we
did our best, and we were doing our best to help other people, and help each other
and help ourselves, and help Haiti and do our best. But when you are Haitian, the
MINUSTAH staff who were Haitian, they had everything we went through but
multiplied by about a hundred. Because they had their children, their husband and
wife, their mother, I main, peoples mothers who have Parkinson’s disease, or their
father that is elderly and had a stroke about six months ago and somebody’s diabetic
and the medicine in inside the house but the house fell down. Or I am the sole
survivor of my family, or I am the only one in my family that can work now, and
support the twenty cousins that have just shown up on my doorstep and I have to find
a way to feed everybody, find a shelter for everybody and I have to find a visa for my
kids to get them out of here. Or I have to whatever it is.
I have to bury somebody.
I lost my child.
I have to find a coffin.
I mean the logistics of just dealing for these people, and all through that, they still
came to work. There was no transport, there was no nothing, people walked here.
And I just look at those people – the people that serve us coffee in the cafeteria, take
our money – I remember just walking up them. They were skinnier, pasty like dusty,
eyes with more wrinkles and said “Bonjour, how is your family?”, and they say “a
sad story” and then “but let me get you some coffee”. And I was wondering how
these people were doing this. I would come away from that experience with a sense
12
of admiration at people’s tenacity, at their determination to put one foot in the other
trying to get back to normal.
And try and rebuild their life. With dignity, just as best they can. I think I will never
forget that.
00:57:50
ON THE EMOTIONAL PART, DO YOU FEEL THIS EXPERIENCE IS, IN A
WAY, SETTING YOU BACK?
I don’t feel set back. I feel it’s something I carry. I feel it’s like inside me and I feel
that there are times when I cry. I cried this morning on my way to work. In the car,
driving, passed places that are so familiar and yet so different now. And I think that
that pain will never go away.
And I think that maybe inside you find a way or a place to memorialize the things
that happened to you. The scars, they stay scars, but they don’t hurt so much after a
while. So I think that we’ll all always have the scars of what happened. We’ll get to a
point that we will be able to look at it and touch those memories and not feel the
same pain or the same sense of loss. It’s just grief, it’s grief you know.
But as I said, I have realized that one of the biggest feelings I had right after the
earthquake happened, the day after, was: a lot of people died, I didn’t! I survived, I’m
here. And I don’t have the right to lament the things that are happening to me,
because I still have my life, and a lot of people don’t. So I need to live in a way that
honors them. And I need to enjoy what I have and I need to do the best I can. And
never feel sorry for myself but live, live, live! And that is what I just try to do.
13