The Haiti story you won’t read

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000

When I came back to Haiti in early April, after having been injured during the earthquake and evacuated a few days after, I was prepared to be shocked by the transformation of a city I once knew. Instead, what struck me was how quickly I adjusted to empty lots and mounds of broken-down rubble where landmarks used to be. Well-pressed and coiffed schoolgirls still gossip and giggle in the scant shade while waiting for tap-taps to drive them to class. People sleep under tarps and in tents in sweltering, unseasonable heat but still manage, somehow, to look professional and neat. A teenage amputee lies in her hospital bed, drumming her fingers to Miley Cyrus' "Party in the U.S.A" and wondering when she'll go back to school, and when the American missionaries will deliver on their promise to take her lòt bò, to the "other side," the United States. On the street and on crumbled porches, people slap mosquitoes and make jokes, even jokes about the earthquake. And these things are lovely retentions, a heartening sign that the everyday humanity did not die even when so many people did.

Haiti: A survivor’s story

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:02:00 +0000

I was sitting barefoot on my bed, catching up on ethnographic field notes, when the earthquake hit. As a child of the San Francisco area, I was underwhelmed at first. “An earthquake. This is unexpected," I thought. But then the shaking grew stronger. I had never felt such a loss of control, not only of my body but also of my surroundings, as though the world that contained me were being crumpled.

I braced myself in a doorway between the hallway and the kitchen, trying to hold on to the frame, and then a cloud of darkness and cement dust swallowed everything as the house collapsed. I was surprised to die in this way, but not afraid. And then I was surprised not to be dead after all. I was trapped, neither lying down nor sitting, with my left arm crushed between the planks of the shattered doorway and my legs pinned under the collapsed roof. Somewhere, outside, I heard people screaming, praying and singing. It was reassuring. It meant the world hadn’t ended.

Salon.com > Laura Wagner

The Haiti story you won’t read

Haiti: A survivor’s story