Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun: A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti

by Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné

  After a few seconds, the earthquake struck again. We saw houses around us collapse.

  Annie, the kids, and I grouped together in the middle of the road, watching the walls sway back and forth with the shakes of the earth. We saw big fissures split the walls. Sometimes they collapsed and sometimes they didn’t. In this neighbourhood, there were relatively few victims.

  Once it was clear that we were out of danger in the middle of the road, my thoughts transported me to Simon. How might the earthquake have left my family? Other people seemed to be taken by similar thoughts about their loved ones. First, we tried to phone, but the connections were dead. I started to descend to Simon to find what I would find.

  It was weird to see how it took just a few seconds to return to a world without technologies that we had come to depend upon. We adapted quickly. In the countryside, they would not have lost their means of transportation. Moreover, the peasants put less importance on telephones and similar technologies. They had less to lose compared to us in the city. In many ways, they were more resilient than us, because they were more self-reliant.

  On my way down to Simon, I passed neighbourhood after neighbourhood. It was tough to pass some of the areas. More and more, it was clear that Annie’s neighbourhood was almost untouched compared to others. Especially where my aunt lived in Delmas 31, there were so many dead that I needed to be careful to not step on the bodies that were spread across the streets. The people had never considered the effects that such an event would have on their poorly built homes.

  The people laid out around me had had less luck than me. There was a young woman who, I could see, had tried to run out of her house. She had almost made it. Half of her body had been out of the house when the roof collapsed on her legs and hips. I could see that she had lunged to escape through the door just as the concrete was falling. That desperate action was now frozen in time as she lay dead, half in and half out of her home. The neighbours assembled around the poor young woman’s body.

  In another neighbourhood, I passed a hospital. I went into the courtyard to see how the patients were coping. For once, the sick were better off than the healthy. Their hospital was fissured, but it remained standing. They were okay. In the courtyard, so many injured had assembled that there was not enough space for a needle. Most of them were more dead than alive. It was clear that they would not survive to see the next day.

  Some had simple broken arms and legs. Many had fractured skulls from falling concrete blocks. But the seriously injured were a different story. Some nurses from the hospital walked among the injured to see who was already dead so they could cover the body. Among the injured, I had the privilege of speaking with a young woman before she died. Her pelvic bones had been crushed. Her head was swollen grotesquely. She told me that she had escaped the earthquake and the aftershocks. She saw, in the house of a neighbour, a toddler all alone. Its mother and father were already outside. Maybe the stress made them forget the child, maybe fear. This young woman heard the child screaming inside. She managed to get to the child but, as she was leaving, a hydro pole fell over during an aftershock. It fell on her hips and crushed her. She protected the child in front of her so that it would not be struck. But she was trapped under the pole. Other people came and took the child from her. They freed her and brought her to the courtyard in the hospital. The medical staff said she had lost too much blood. She could not survive. Now, her only compensation was that the child had survived. She had succeeded.

  I continued. I headed toward Delmas 19. I stopped at the home of my friend Jameson from my choir. I didn’t see him. His house was reduced to rubble. No one could have survived. I tried to find his neighbours. They told me that he was alive. During the first shock, he had been inside the house. The moment he felt it, he ran as fast as possible for the exit. As he was running, the ceiling came down upon him and crushed his arm. He struggled with his good arm to try to free the other that was pinned under concrete. Finally, he yanked his arm from its trap and fled the house as it collapsed. Better to lose his arm to save his life, he calculated.

  His arm dangled by his side, clearly beyond repair. Some other members of the choir that lived in the area would take him to a hospital. They went to Saint Marc, north of the capital, where a medical team was amputating the arms and legs of the victims. Waiting for his operation, Jameson sat with a woman whose head was swollen to the point of exploding, so much blood had collected. Jameson judged himself lucky at that point and raised what remained of his arm to thank God. His friends could not understand what he was thankful for. When the doctors took him into the operating room and told him he would lose his arm, he said that he already knew that, it was okay. He would return to the capital to continue life with one arm instead of two. Jameson never complained.

  I had to pass by Delmas 19, where I lived, on my way to my family in Simon. But to get to Delmas 19, I had to close my eyes to everything around me. Finally, I arrived. It was surreal. In Delmas 19, there had been apartment buildings three stories high. They were rented out to a number of families. Now, in the place of the apartment buildings were piles of concrete behind clouds of dust. People were just returning home to their families from work. As they approached, everyone’s eyes were full of dread, not knowing if they had lives to return to.

  The tragedies of those who discovered the worst mixed together to make a nightmare. I continued on to see if my own friends were alive or dead. If Jelo had been in the main house, then he would not have been spared. It was a large, old structure. I had little confidence that it could have resisted the shocks.

  When I arrived, I saw Jelo standing in the courtyard. The main house behind him was mostly destroyed, the second floor having fallen over to touch the ground. But parts of the house remained precariously intact. I could almost hear Jelo’s heart beating. He had assumed that, if Delmas 33 was in the same state as Delmas 19, I would not have survived.

  When he recovered his calm upon seeing me alive, he told me that he had been on the roof of the house when the earthquake struck. A young man from Tigwav was staying with him. The young man had been standing in the courtyard. From his place on the rooftop, Jelo could see a whirlwind develop in the courtyard below. It spiralled up to the sky taking dust and dry leaves. Then, he said, there was an eerie, deadly silence. He didn’t know what was happening. Suddenly he felt the house move below him. It was as though it was trying to pull itself from its foundations and fly away.

  Behind the main house, there was a one-story building that had been built for servants. It was in those little rooms that Jelo and I lived. Next to those rooms, there was a big orange tree. Jelo launched himself from the roof of the main house to land on the roof of the secondary structure. From there, he jumped onto the orange tree that led him to the ground, safe and sound.

  Once on the ground, he looked for the young man from Tigwav whom he had last seen in the courtyard. He was okay. Jelo called to him brusquely, “Hurry up, let’s get out of the courtyard!”

  He left with Jelo to wait in the street, as far as possible from the falling walls and buildings. When the young man from Tigwav had sensed the land begin to tremble, he had grabbed onto a cherry tree and held on while the walls of the large building before him turned into concrete blocks and then rubble. He told us that he had taken comfort only in nature. He said that as he watched everything that was man-made crumble all around him, he believed reflexively that nature would prove resilient. And so he hugged the cherry tree for comfort and security.

  He asked us to look around. He said, “Look, everything is destroyed all around us. But not a leaf has fallen from the trees. The mangoes are still waiting to be harvested tomorrow. We, human beings, we deserve what we are getting tonight. These big buildings were built badly with money that was taken from the work of the poor. This is the harvest. If we don’t change, we are heading towards an even greater disaster. This is a warning.”

  After listening to this young man, I went into the courtyard cautiously, kee
ping a prudent distance from the main house, half standing and half collapsed. That day, water was rare. I was parched with thirst. Everyone must have been in the same state. In the courtyard, there was a reservoir that we could exploit. I thought I could offer a small gesture for the victims I had passed by bringing them water.

  First, I entered one of the rooms in the service quarters behind the main house. It showed no fissures. It seemed stable. Five plates of rice and sos pwa kongo were lined up on a big metal box. Jelo had been preparing dinner for everyone. Not only had everyone’s appetite disappeared with the catastrophe, but no one dared enter the courtyard now. I took two or three spoonfuls of sos pwa kongo. Then I saw that the flies and ants were going to devour the rest. For them, this was a great day. A feast! Tout sa’k pa bon pou youn, li bon pou yon lòt — things that are not good for one person are good for another.

  I left with two gallons of water. I started to retrace my steps to visit the people who had been in the worst state. Thinking of those who had given so much, like the young woman who would die that night after saving a child, I could at least relieve some discomfort.

  As I carried the water along, I found myself preaching to everyone. The earthquake had broken all that was material. It was time for us too to break with our egoism and greed. It was time to share. Time for compassion. I spoke loudly. People thought I had lost my mind. Looking back, I see that I had indeed gone crazy to think that a catastrophe would make people change.

  I heard people muttering that I had gone nuts. But I wasn’t sure what sanity would look like in this nightmare. Anyway, I knew that I was sane enough to see how to help people in distress. I went to ask them if they needed water, just to make clear what was important this evening. Some were grateful.

  I carried on. People called to me for help. Parents who had saved the lives of their children and were lying in the middle of the street implored me to give them a drink. I explained that it was reservoir water and untreated. No one made the slightest distinction that night. Everyone was parched. The excitement, the efforts to save oneself and others, the dust, the heat — all of that descended on Port-au-Prince in the form of a great thirst.

  I was only halfway back to Delmas 33 where I had started the evening when my reserves of water were empty. I carried on to Annie’s. I went into the house. It was empty. Everyone was in the street, still keeping a good distance from buildings. They had taken only what was necessary from their homes: sheets and pillows. No one wanted to enter any building. But they weren’t sure yet where they would spend the night.

  Mme Bolivar and her family were there. A sister and her family had come from Bon Repos, a part of the capital where the water flowed just below the surface. In the time of the French colony, some of the richest sugar plantations had been located in Bon Repos. When the earthquake struck, the land literally opened up and the groundwater flooded the area. Immediately, the local people took refuge with their relatives outside of the zone.

  Night was falling. Everywhere, people were gathering in the streets, frightened of every noise. Reflexively, they yelled “Jezi! Jezi!” But the noises were not the earthquakes that they feared and expected. The local people, traumatized by the earthquake, began to interpret every sound and every movement as an aftershock. Everyone was hypersensitive to anything that reminded them of the quake. People jumped out of their skin when a door slammed behind them. They lunged for cover when a helicopter passed — helicopters are notoriously insensitive to traumatized people.

  The people started to claim the places in the street where they would sleep. The choices were limited. The roads in Haiti are all rocks and bumps and holes and, in the dry season, dust. Even cars find them barely negotiable. The life of a shock absorber in Port-au-Prince is nasty, brutish, and short. This night, not one person found a flat place to rest. But few slept indoors.

  You could distinguish the different classes of Haitians in the streets according to the quality of sheets they brought from their homes. Professionals and unemployed, police and thieves, nurses and patients, young and old, handicapped and athletes, religious and atheists: everyone was in the same boat. No one could sleep well because every thirty minutes a new aftershock woke us all. Each time, people would begin to pray. The aftershocks were like a button that turned on the prayers. They prayed so much that some continued to mumble to God even after they had fallen asleep. Everyone wanted to sleep, but the first order of business was survival.

  The aftershocks also assured that no one overslept in the morning. Once we were all awake, no one in our group that had passed the night together left until we had prayed together. Nurses and police went to take up their jobs. Those without paid work had lots to do in helping the trapped out of the rubble and offering help to all the victims.

  I started on my way to Simon to find what had become of my family. When I arrived at Delmas 19 again, Jelo told me that my father Deland had already been by to see if I had survived. I was so happy to hear that someone whom I was looking for was also looking for me. And I was relieved to find that my worst fears would not be realized when I arrived in Simon. My father had told Jelo that all of my family survived, even Gloria, my handicapped little sister.

  chapter twenty

  SIMON HAD NOT BEEN HIT BADLY. Most of the houses had roofs of corrugated iron. Even when the houses collapsed, there were fewer concrete blocks to crush the people below. The cinder blocks of the falling walls, however, took a major toll.

  Deland had been at church when the earthquake struck. Two days earlier, his pastor had announced that on 12 January, everyone should arrive at four-thirty instead of five o’clock, as usual. Even among those who could not easily leave their jobs, like the workers at SONAPI, taptap drivers, and street merchants, he insisted that they arrive at four-thirty. He asked that everyone bring their friends and colleagues with them.

  Deland, who was always punctual, took his pastor’s request to heart. He was at the church even before four-thirty. Others arrived on time. Some members had given extra money to the pastor to pass along to those who said that they would not have the money for a taptap. At four-thirty, the pastor began a service.

  They were deep in prayer when the church building began to rock. Because of the prior insistence of the pastor that everyone, without exception, attend the service and that they should even make sacrifices to be there, the church members immediately assumed that the pastor had been aware that something transcendentally important would happen before five o’clock. People believed that they were witnessing the Second Coming.

  During all the powerful shocks, the worshippers kept their eyes firmly closed, afraid to look their Lord directly in the eyes. Some people started to fall to the ground, the pillars toppled over, and the walls began to fissure. Some members could not resist opening their eyes a little to sneak a peek at the end of the world.

  The pastor fell to the ground. He opened both his eyes. He told everyone to lie on the ground in the centre aisle of the church. The perimeter of the church collapsed. However, those who had taken refuge in the middle, according to the pastor’s advice, were saved. The collapse buried them in dust. They started to arise from the rubble, white and dumbfounded. The pastor asked everyone to thank God that He had saved them. Then everyone went home to see if He had saved their loved ones as well.

  Deland hurried home with his head full of horrors. He did not have the heart to look at the people he passed carrying victims with broken arms and legs, crushed skulls, and those who had expired. Each terrifying scene filled him with dread for what he would find when he returned home.

  As he approached, he saw that the front of his home had fallen to rubble. He had passed more expensive houses reduced to dust, but much of his was still upright. He entered and saw his family crying for him, having already given him up for dead. As soon as they saw him alive, the tears stopped.

  Since the front of his house had collapsed and he had no money to rebuild it, he hung some drapes to serve as a wall. They conti
nued to sleep inside as they had before the quake.

  The house also served as his business. Since the space was small, he used to transform the table that held his sewing machine and material into his bed at the end of his workday. Next to his sewing table was a buffet that had a large surface where Deland would lay the fabric out in order to mark and cut it. Each evening, Deland cleared his work from the buffet so that his children could use it as their bed. The smallest kids crawled into the large drawers and snuggled themselves into their dad’s fabric.

  Deland never had a fixed schedule. He would work each day until he was overtaken by exhaustion. In the evening, he would often fall asleep over his sewing machine. Mosquitoes would bite his arms after he had fallen asleep. He could tell by the number of bites how long he had dozed off.

  The mosquitoes also provoked the very exhaustion from which they profited. Deland suffered chronically from malaria carried by mosquitoes. He struggled against the fever in his blood and tried not to let it show in public, but he was always tired. After the earthquake, it got worse. The malaria had never been able to defeat Deland alone, but the earthquake created an environment favourable to diseases.

  Deland could no longer cope. He needed medical care. The only option was state hospitals and clinics that offered free treatment. There, the consultation consisted of a brief “How do you feel?” Based on his response, someone would prescribe him some drugs. He tried to buy the prescribed drugs from the street merchants. If he couldn’t find what the clinics had prescribed among the street merchants, he would have to buy them from a real pharmacy.