Port au Prince & Food Distribution

Today was hard to describe... an experience. Eye-opening.

Early this morning we headed into Port-au-Prince to look around before heading to our food distribution center. First we stopped at one of the main cathedrals that was completely destroyed by the earthquake.

There are meters of rubble, surrounding by partial walls, and chunks of concrete still hanging from re-bar. Children and adults run around on the piles of rubbles, and there are people begging everywhere, and workers are slowly chipping away at the structure, taking it down, to recycle the re-bar.

A spoke a little bit with some of the kids, but many of them don’t know very much French, and are shy. An elderly woman with a dislocated elbow was begging and Sydney (one of the MD’s) tried to put it back in place, but it had been dislocated since the earthquake last year, and he wasn’t going to be able to fix it without surgery. Below you can see the woman showing us her elbow, then Sydney trying to fix it.

From there we went to see the presidential palace, and the adjacent slums. The presidential palace looks almost exactly the way it did right after the earthquake, 16 months ago. I was amazed at how little seemed to have changed since the earthquake.

There are entire “tent cities” built mostly from UN and other foreign aid tarps, rubble and scrap metal and wood.

In the photo below, notice the little boy peeing in the street... I had no idea he was peeing when I took the photo!

The kids are friendly, and come out to play. They are always excited to see the cameras, and some of them seem like the happiest kids on earth despite the fact they live in a tent on the side of the street.

People are very negative about the government, and refer to the presidential palace as “the Devils House”. They explained to us that they can’t understand how they have slum cities right across from the presidential palace (which is still in ruins) and no one is helping them. A year and a half after the earthquake, they are still living under tarps.

 

Coconut water anyone? Looking back, I'm not sure I would have indulged, but at the time his little coconut-station looked pretty organized and tidy, and the coconut water was very refreshing, right from the shell! It was also relatively sanitary, since he cut the coconuts open right in front of us.

I took some photos to document the state of the city of Port-au-Prince. The rubble still litters the street and most of the building which were damaged or collapsed remain exactly as they were 16 months ago.

There does not appear to be a [functioning] system in place for dealing with garbage in Haiti. You see dumpsters, empty, with months and months of garbage piled all around them on the street. Garbage piles up among the rubble, and even just on the side of the street. 

Here, people are lined up with buckets at a clean water station in downtown Port-au-Prince.

Then we went to the food distribution center. When we got there were already crowds waiting, even though we arrived nearly an hour early. We arranged all the bags, with beans, rice, vegetable oil to last a family for 4-6 weeks, and a large bottle of water. Tickets had been handed out to families in need at the clinics last week, and we were expecting 500 families. 

The food distribution was taking place inside of a locked compound, and even though we could control the flow of people into and out of the distribution center things got very chaotic and stressful; people would try to sneak back in to get “seconds”. 

There were far more people waiting outside that we had food supplies for, and we quickly ran out of water, then out of oil. Initially we were also putting the rations in reusable shopping bags (like Lulu lemon, and Walmart ones), but those ran out quickly, so we started using pillow cases, then rice bags, then finally shopping bags, and boxes, and once those ran out we just had to hand people the bags of rice and beans. Once we ran out of oil, people started getting upset, because they were told they would be getting oil. Even though we only handed out tickets for as many food rations as we had, somehow we ended up with 45 people in the compound (many more still outside waiting to get in), and only 15 bags left, so we opened up all the bags and divided the rice and beans into 3 parts, but then people were frustrated that they didn’t get a full ration. It was stressful because you are trying to do a great thing, and yet you feel guilty because there are families of hungry people who have been standing in line, in 35+ degree weather, for hours, and you don’t have food to give them. 

Myself, and a number of other people in the group even handed out our sandwiches and pop that we had for lunch because at least we’d breakfast that day, and we felt guilty eating when we knew how badly these people needed food. Some people were very grateful and thanked you very sincerely when you gave them their rations, but I was amazed at how some people look at you, know you have a lot you could give, and glare at you because all you are giving them is rice and beans. It’s a bizarre feeling. But in reality, the majority were thrilled to get the rations, and was these people I will try to focus on. 

After the food distribution we stopped at the mass grave on the way home; it is now covered up, and decorated with many little black wooden crosses, but after the earthquake it was a massive open pit where the put all the unclaimed bodies from the streets of Port-au-Prince. There are somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 people in the grave. 

 

A lot of the crosses had fallen over, and so we stood them back up and pounded them back into the ground, out of respect. We discovered a lot of black widow spiders on the crosses, which was eerie. 

On the way back to our camp at Cabaret, there was a major accident on the highway between a motorcycle (carrying 3 people) and a a "Tap-tap" (a popular method of local transportation; a pick-up truck, with wooden-crate type back, carrying lots of people, without seat belts). We were one of the very first vehicles on the scene following the accident, and in Haiti they don’t have the services in place to deal with accidents like that properly, even though they happen all the time, and so there were mangled bodies all over the road, and no traffic control and no one had covered up the bodies. It was shocking, to say the least, and difficult to talk about. Many people on our team pretty shaken up from this, and everything else that had happened during the day. We had a quiet night back at camp, and prepared for another day of clinic.