Just as a snapshot or even 5-minute video doesn’t really convey the grandeur of the Tetons in all their glory, with panoramic accuracy and cool-breeze reality, no picture or word stream will put your hand on the rubble that stretches across every threshold of an entire city.
Stunned is how you feel when you stand by a hospital that was bustling with care for hundreds of patients, up and down the corridors of five stories. When the earth shook the afternoon of January 12 for 45 seconds, five stories crumbled into one and no patient, doctor, nurse, guest or janitor escaped.
More swiftly than the World Trade Center fell, a city descended into dust.
It is not occasional, as after a tornado skips its fickle way across a landscape. You can drive for an hour through winding, potholed streets and know only crazy-kilter chaos, with rooftops skewed vertical where horizontal once made life sensical. Slabs of concrete – that once shaped walls hiding the private normalcy of parents and children playing and couples worrying over bills or making love or arguing or sleeping toward another day – shifted into tombs.
Cars and whatever was inside still lay beneath massive, broken chunks of concrete.
Where there were gutters, now there are sewers, with mounds of trashed garbage and torn jeans and mangled shoes and soggy sheets held erect by a mishmash of sticks to form a haphazard network of extended families.
On block after block after block.
That part is shocking – though not altogether new. I asked our hostess, Mirdrede, last night whether most families lived in houses before the quake. She grew very quiet and her eyes filled with tears as she nearly lost composure for the first time since we’d met.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head sadly. “It is very difficult in this country.”
The families in the tent community we visited during our mobile-medical service yesterday agree.
“Last night, when the rains came, it was bad,” said Menard, a beautiful girl who speaks English well and drew me aside. “Everyone stood up and reached high above our heads to hold the tarp, so the water wouldn’t collapse on everything we have.”
That “everything” is meager. There are a few tents, and some mattresses – with ragged blankets carefully tucked into place as at home – lined under a great, slanting expanse of white tarp. The dirt aisles are newly swept.
“The rains came through all the cracks and poured onto the beds and our clothes,” said Menard, gesturing toward the sections where the tarps had been pinned to anything tall enough for support. “When it ended, we curled up into tiny balls to try to sleep on the dry spots. If taking pictures will help to share how we are living with others, you are welcome to take them. We need tents.”
She said she was a university student only a few weeks ago, before the earthquake shook all hope to the ground, along with nearly every structure.
“I was studying marketing and PR,” she said. “You can maybe tell from talking to me that I am no idiot. But my family has 11 people and there is only one tent.”
She proudly led me across their encampment, past the old man sleeping on a mattress and around the girl braiding another girl’s hair as she sat on the dirt, holding a jagged piece of mirror for viewing.
Menard was proud, despite the squalor, because she was leading me to meet her mother and sister, who were washing clothes in a bucket.
“If you know anyone who can use help, “said Menard, her broad eyes growing misty, “my mother has not eaten today and there will be no food tonight. You can see I speak English well and I can translate for anyone who needs it. I need to earn food for my family. They need to eat.”
As we spoke, she drew in the curious children who were peering at this stranger welcomed to their inner circle. Soon, they were laughing into the lens of my camera. It thrilled them to see themselves dancing on-screen after each shot.
This is perhaps what has struck me most during our time here. Where I would expect to find grief and anger and fierce hurt, there is laughter and welcome and a quick readiness to return my smile.
On every corner.
There is nothing I can offer to ease their big-picture plight and I’m almost embarrassed to meet their eyes as our van drives past but, every time – almost without fail – when I smile or gently lift my hand in greeting, something in their eyes lights up and they nod a smile in return.
It’s more than I can say sometimes for my own home, where most families have an arsenal of Life’s Greatest Pleasures and abundant cause for relief to have won God’s lottery.
As we sat out a table and a few chairs in Menard’s makeshift neighborhood, so that medical care could begin, a line formed. The two Haitian medical students serving as doctors finally realized that the two of us assigned to help them for the day have no medical background whatsoever.
“Tell us what to do and we will do it,” Brad and I assured them. That is how we became pharmacists.
After each patient’s diagnosis, they would pass along a sheet detailing the pills we should scoop with a spoon into tiny zip baggies. We penned directions for use on strips of tan bandaid tape and, when we ran out of that, Brad simply wrote instructions in ink directly on the bags.
By the end of the day, we had overcome most language barriers and worked out an efficient system, even as the mosquitoes swarmed around us and the relentless line of new patients wanting to catch care while it was parked in their midst.
“It is imperfect,” said our doctor-in-training, shrugging, “but it is what we have.”
He spoke for an entire nation.
