YK:n rauhanturvaoperaation tiedottajana toimiva Amelia Shaw oli töissä kun maanjäristys iski Haitilla. Sähköposteissaan perheelleen ja ystävilleen Amelia kertoo, miltä tuntuu olla yksi eloonjääneistä ja työskennellä pitkiä päivä vaikeissa oloissa.
Amelia Shaw töissä ennen maanjäristystä
Port-au-Prince, 3. helmikuuta:
Dear practically everyone,
This will be my last letter home. I’ve been told by my boss that I have given my contribution to the cause, and that it’s time to hand the reigns over to our replacements, people from outside Haiti who are more energized – and perhaps less pregnant – than I am. My husband couldn’t be more pleased. He works with me in the UN base. He says he’ll miss sharing our little tent by the airfield. But he won’t miss worrying if I am all right.
It’s a singular experience to live through a tragedy of this magnitude. I find myself contemplating it more and more, the internal emotional process of what I am seeing every day starts to kick in. And even after three weeks, I - like almost everyone I meet - still struggle to accept the reality that this really happened. It’s one thing to read the figures reported on the news – 150,000 dead. A million homeless. But what is that? The numbers are so mind-blowing they become meaningless.
Until in some private moment in some humdrum task on any given day, it hits home like a bullet to the heart.
I was driving on the road I used to take to work in that other life I had before the earthquake. The one where I had mundane things like my own apartment, an office, a commute to work. I used to drive by a big school that was a few stories high. A smart looking place painted peach and white. The school children were constantly causing traffic jams when they crossed the road in their little uniforms, their hair tied in pigtails, holding hands and grinning at their shoes or at the sky. At the time it annoyed me. I remember joking once how life would be so much better for us commuters if Haiti would just close all the schools. I never knew that I would live to regret – to deeply regret – those words.
Well this morning, there were no uniforms and no pigtails. No shiny shoes or holding hands.
There were tractors. Scooping up the jagged, bone-crushing shards of what was once the walls of the classrooms and the chalkboards of the school. More than 700 children died that day, in the 45 seconds that the earth shook and tore the city down.
I couldn’t help it. I stopped the car. I got out to stand with a small group of people quietly watching the machines chomp their way through debris. There were a few kids who scuttled like goats over the rubble, picking up a piece of paper and studying it, or tugging at a piece of fabric buried under the stones. Many of them were students who had survived, who came back to collect what they could. Others were parents, hoping for a sign of a child lost forever.
The principal was there, wearing probably the same tight, dark suit he always wore. He was sweating, constantly wiping his head with a handkerchief. He told me he was going to re-open the school in a tent if he had to. The children, he said, couldn’t afford to lose a whole year.
A teenage boy in a blue t-shirt stood near me looking over what is now a graveyard of his friends. “And the ones like me,” he said, “the ones who survived. How will we go on?” He said he didn’t know which was worse, going back into a school with a ceiling and four walls, or sitting among the empty desks inside.
I hung my head and staggered under that enormous weight of it all. Papers fluttered at my feet. One was a report card. Another a photograph of a young girl. I got back in my car, put my head on the steering wheel, and just cried.
These moments pierce me every day, unexpectedly, like small shards of glass in my heart. Over time, I expect they will fit together into some sort of mosaic, showing the big picture. I'm hoping it will help me understand and accept that this really happened.
I am looking ahead now, to leaving. To a time when this land will be a memory, the secrets and sorrows it holds will be buried deep in the soil. But not forgotten. And I feel the sadness of leaving my work behind. But also relief at moving forward into fresher, cleaner air. Towards a baby that, I’m sure, will shake up my life in a completely different way.
At this moment, on every street of this city, people are picking through the wreckage with bruised and bloodied fingers, searching for what can be salvaged, saved. For all of us who lived through this, the poking and tugging mirrors what we will all do inside in months and years to come; sift quietly through our debris, and pull free what matters most to the heart.
Love,
Amelia
Port-au-Prince, 27. tammikuuta:
Dear practically everyone,
I got a few requests from people to send out some more news from down here. So here it is...
I was looking at what is left of the commercial district of Port-au-Prince. It’s like walking through a technicolor photo from war-time France. It's as if the city was bombed.
Today marks two weeks since the earthquake. I have to say, it’s still hard for me to link the words “Haiti” and “earthquake”. I mean, people expect earthquakes in Los Angeles and Mexico City. But what would you say if you woke up one morning and an earthquake had leveled Wichita? Or Pittsburgh? It would be just plain weird.
But if I have learned anything from these past two weeks, it’s that the onward march of time is relentless. Time waits for no-one. Not for the missing, not the dead. And certainly not for the living to catch their breath. People survive. They put one foot in front of the other. They face the impossible and they go one.
Haitilla kaikki on aloitettava alusta.
Kuva: UN Photo/Sophia Paris
The other day on the street, I passed a motorcycle store that had collapsed like a pancake on its display of bikes. The front wheels of about a dozen motorbikes were sticking out of the rubble like a row of crooked teeth. Groups of young men were heaving and pulling on the tires to yank them free. Some people would call this looting. But in another sense, It’s a form of collective recycling - sifting through the debris to look for things that can be transformed or repaired, and used again.
One of my good friends works for an NGO that specializes in building major infrastructure, like bridges and roads. Since the quake, she’s been helping the government to clear away rubble from the hundreds of collapsed buildings around town. She is a tiny Korean-American who just broke her sacrum snowboarding in California over Christmas. She hobbles around quake sites with a cane and a baseball hat, in work boots up to her knees, and directs a team of tractors and bulldozers through apocalyptic landscapes. She is hiring Haitians by the hundreds to pick through the debris, to find things that can be re-used, like wires, or tubing, or cement for building roads.
The grim reality is that there are still bodies in there. So she spends much of her time screaming into her cell phone for somebody to please find more body bags. She told me about a t-shirt factory her NGO supports downtown. It was a major supplier for big American companies. It was also the hope for Haiti to revitalize its textile industry. But it collapsed into a pile of dust two weeks ago with about 750 workers inside.
I stop to think about the tragedy of that. The jobs lost. The lives lost! Each one of those people a wage earner, each one loved by a mother, a lover, a child. All gone. The immense cost of cleaning it up. The factory owner goes to the site every day, exhausted. But not broken. He is determined to start again, and build a factory bigger and better than before. And certainly more resistant to earthquakes.
The landscape of this entire city is in flux. The only thing that is sure is the big question mark on everything.
Geologists expect another big earthquake soon, but when? The dead are still lying in the streets. As people clear out more rubble, they come across broken bodies crammed into crevices, frozen in poses of struggle and flight. How many died, does anyone really know? And the survivors, where will they live? Will they stay in the city, or march like armies of ants back into the countryside to eke out a living on tiny plots of land? Hundreds of thousands of people live in tent camps on every available patch of grass and green in the city. Some say the government might build new houses - but where? And when? And last, what will happen to Haiti when the news fades, when the world loses interest and the humanitarian aid teams leave, off to parachute into the next disaster someplace else in the world?
I have no answers to any of these questions. I don't even know if I will have a job in 6 months. I do know that in these two weeks since the world here changed, we have remembered what it is to sleep outdoors. To conserve our precious water. To laugh in the face of chance. And to grieve our dead. As I look around this sun-wizened and weary city, I see the small signs of a population beginning to pick itself up and dust itself off. It’s just the first step of the long hard road of cleaning up the wreckage. And soon, people will start building again.
As I write this letter, I feel the first kicks of tiny baby feet inside of me. It feels like a miracle. It is all I can do to bow my head in thanks that amidst this tragic landscape of the destruction and loss, life is determined to go on.
Love,
Amelia
Port-au-Prince, 19. tammikuuta:
Dear practically everyone,
So first of all, my first missive went out to the world and went viral. I had no idea it would do that. I have gotten responses about it from people I don't know, who start their emails with "you don't know me but..." and they go on to say something heart-rending about how touched they are and how much they have been inspired to contribute to a cause and could I please suggest one? (I could - Red Cross, World Food Program, or Doctors Without Borders). And then I get emails from people in various places asking me if they could publish my work, from Utah, to Ireland,to Sweden, New York, and - get this - Abu Dhabi. They are actually using the thing to raise money with the sheiks.
What an amazing spiral effect of this incredibly awful and horrendous thing happening in this tiny corner of the world. And sometimes a person doesn't realize the impact of anything they do. But if one little sentiment set down in a tiny crumby office in an earthquake zone in the Caribbean can make an oil sheik pour some cash into an aid coffer, then I'll be a can of tuna.
Let me give you a sense of these last days. It has occurred to me that there is a word for what I am. "Refugee". It fits. My entire office of more than 30 people is squeezed into a small building in our compound by the airport, comprising 3 rooms. We sleep on camp cots or on the ground outside the building, because no one is quite comfortable in a closed space yet. There is a bit of grass and a concrete pathway. We listen to the drone of military planes landing and leaving the airport all night. I can see the lights of the massive planes fly just over my face when I lay on my cot. It is the only time I really stop to think about anything that has happened, and sometimes I cry. Then I fall into a dreamless slumber, swathed in mosquito repellent, in my clothes, until 7am, and wake with the sun high. We stumble into our office with rumpled hair, smile sheepishly, and smooth out our clothes. If we have other ones we might change them. If we don't, who cares anyway, there's too much to do. Yesterday I was wearing my boss's shirt. No one even noticed. We are lucky to have a bathroom in our office, and a shower. So I do wash. But I don't think I brushed my hair today - I can't remember anyway.
Then, for me, it's a frantic dash to get from thing to thing - Bill Clinton visits, a food distribution goes awry, Ban Ki Moon lays a wreath at the site of our offices, a survivor somewhere is pulled from the rubble, alive by god! Alive! News news news, it never stops, it is an insatiable animal, and I am the news-keeper, I have to keep feeding the machine. So our 2 camera crews go out, they fight their way through blocked, smoking, stench-filled wreckage to grab the images you see every day, then charge back to the office to me, to hand me the tapes. And slam-bam-thankyou-m'am, I cut it and throw it out to the world. To you.
Meanwhile, from time to time, a colleague sits in a side room with a staff counselor receiving some very bad news. You know this happens when they come out red-eyed and broken, but somehow relieved. The news has arrived, the body was found, and now the knowledge sits like a boulder on every movement and thought this person will ever have. But at least they know. And there is a relief in it, to have a place to bury the body, to have a confirmed reason to grieve. And then, more often than not, they go back to their desk, wipe clear their eyes, and get back to work.
One of my colleagues told me last night about his girlfriend, who is lost in the big rubble graveyard that was my office. "I don't hope for her, I know she is dead." He says it and looks at the sky where the planes are passing. He shrugs. "What can I do? Maybe she will come now and visit me in my dreams. I love her. And I don't know how I will go home and clean up her things." And he comes to work every day. And he smiles, and tells jokes. And sits apart, and cries sometimes. Stares, sighs, gets up. And goes back to work.
I guess this is why I don't think about anything until very late at night, watching the tail lights of the aircraft bringing help and hurt across the sky.
My other good friend here has signed up for probably the worst job there is. Her office no longer functions - there are no longer uses for things like "language training" or "career development". Those concepts seem absurd even. So she volunteered for duty at the morgue, and her job is to take photos of the dead. She is young, and beautiful, from Paris - she loves to read Vogue and wear pretty red high-heeled shoes. But she spends her days now photographing the decomposed remains of the people we worked with, the ones that annoyed us, the ones we loved. And it has to be done, there has to be the proof that they are gone. And for some, it's impossible to tell who it is, they must search the pocket for an ID card or look for a signet ring. She sat in my office today, impassive, exhausted, looked down at her sneakers and said, "I think I will throw these away."
One last thing. I work in the news business. So I see the things that the agencies say about us - CNN, the major networks. They decry the slowness and the disorganization, and defame the UN, the Red Cross, the American soldiers. "Why isn't the aid getting through!" they collectively scream, and I would like to invite them to Port-a-Prince on a good day and see how long it takes them to cross the street, much less deliver hundreds of thousands of tons of food and water to 3 million people through stench and wreckage and shooting and burning and blockades built of the dead. And I look around my office, at my colleagues who have lost their husbands and their secretaries, their hard drives and their homes, who sleep on cots by the airport and slam their way through the day so fast - probably so they don't have to spend too much time thinking - and I think, hey man. Cut us some slack. Because we are doing our damndest. And the truth is, we are victims too.
But I am going to end this message on a good note. Today is my mother's birthday, and we talked about how we have so much to be thankful for - our families, our friends. Heck, I even have clean underwear! But for me, maybe the best thing came from my cousin today. He wrote to me on facebook:
"My wife and I just wanted to send you a quick note. She and I have been following your updates since the earthquake and have been touched by your courage and dedication in the face of the horrors that you have witnessed. Tomorrow evening we are headed to the hospital for the birth of our daughter. We decided midway through this last week to change our daughter's name from what we had previously decided (Ginny) to something that represents the courage that you have shown in Haiti. We have decided to name her Amelia Grace Macaulay."
Now if that doesn't beat all. I read that, and put my head down on the desk and cried.
With that I leave you, thankful to be alive, and looking forward to another night tracing planes across the sky. I am sure you will see pieces of me tomorrow, behind the scenes, as you watch the news. I send you my love from Haiti. Please send us your prayers. And don't stop writing, it's some of the best news I get all day.
Love,
Amelia
YK:n päämaja Port-au-Princessä maanjäristyksen jälkeen
Kuva: UN Photo/Logan Abassi
Port-au-Prince, 15. tammikuuta:
Dear practically everyone,
First of all, thank you for all your heartfelt messages on Facebook and email. I read them all, and it really touches me. It reminds me that I do not live in a vacuum, and that the world is watching - apparently with dedicated interest, everything that is happening on this tiny, and now truly, god-forsaken island. It is hard for me to respond to you all, because I don't have much time, and we have very limited computer access - and I am spending most of my time trying to get the material we are filming out to the world.
But rest assured, I am fine. Tired of course, a bit undernourished, but I have enough water and a more or less stable place to sleep. I am right next to the airport, and if evacuations are necessary, then I am in a good place for that.
I want to tell you a little of what has happened to me, and what I have seen - only because I am realizing that many of you are struggling to picture how life is for us - for me - and you want to know that I am ok.
Essentially, the entire world here changed in a matter of about 45 seconds. I went to work on Tuesday morning with a strapless maternity dress on that my sister gave me, and little pumps and a red bead necklace. At 4:48 I was calmly sitting at my computer, thinking about going home soon. I had just been talking through the door that splits my office with my cameraman's office, Blago, about leaving in the next 20 minutes. And I hear this noise that I thought was a really huge bumbly truck coming down the driveway by my office. So I stood up to see the truck - I mean, what kind of vehicle makes a noise like that really? And as I walked to the window, my brain computed that the building was vibrating, then swinging wildly from side to side. I wasn't scared, I was just perplexed, and trying to remember what to do in a situation like that - is it "hide under the desk" or "run outside". For some reason, I thought it was "stand in a door jam" so I was trying to get to the door of the building, which is 7 feet from my office. And I kept falling, and Blago was behind me, and I fell, and he laid on top of me to cover me - I guess he thought the answer was "lay on your colleague in an earthquake". And our other colleagues were behind us, one of them, crazy Logan the camera man who runs boot camp classes in his free time, was bounding down the hall, bouncing off walls and screaming "GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!" He grabbed Blago by the neck and somehow I found myself falling down our front steps, landing on our car which had crashed into our building. and then we were all kneeling on the pavement, rubbing our eyes. The shaking stopped. Then started again. And someone said "where is our headquarters?" Because all we could see was dust. No sunlight, no buildings, no thing more than 4 feet in front.
It took us more than 20 minutes to verify that our 6 story headquarters were no longer there. It's the type of thing that just does not compute. New Yorkers will understand this after Sept 11 - the building is supposed to be there, and you look to see it, but your brain can't figure out why it's not there.
In the shantytown outside our offices, the fates were the same. We sat huddled in the parking lot of our HQ, in the dark, listening to tens of thousands of people scream and cry and wail. Wail. I mean really, like a tide. And every time there were tremors and aftershocks, the hills moaned in panic and fear.
I sat there for five hours, and wondered if my family knew what was happening. I know they listen to NPR while making dinner, and was picturing what they were doing when the news broke. And I was wondering how the news would break, because we had no power, no cell phones, no nothing. And people were wondering about the other islands. Was there a tsunami? What? At around 11pm, I found a person in the lot with a small transistor radio. He was listening to Radio France International, which was reporting a massive earthquake in Haiti, epicenter in Port-au-Prince. Good god, I thought, is God really trying to finish this little island - I mean, how much more can it take? It seemed to unfair that Haiti had to take this on. And it was surreal that we were sitting in the center of the mess, and couldn't know what was going on - we had to listen to news reporting from Paris, that was getting their information from CBS in America. very bizarre. Me sitting there in my strapless maternity dress and heels, smudged with dirt and mud, sitting with my knees up and thinking of my family. And I really was regretting my choice of wardrobe in that moment.
I spent the night watching the rescue operations. Which were very sparse. It's hard to pull people out of hundreds of tons of concrete. Maybe they pulled 10 people out, and we struggled to see the faces. Is it anyone I know? Please be one of ours. I sat with a colleague whose husband was missing, and whose 1 year old boy was in her 4th story apartment in the hills above the city. She was stone-faced and silent, eyes wide watching the rubble. She was able to get home and rescue her child at 2am, her husband's whereabouts are still unknown.
We are just now beginning to understand who is not showing up, whose faces have been absent in the little recovery area we've set up in the logistics base by the airport. This is where I am now. It's an awful experience. To know that the people that you meet for coffee, the ones you say hi to at parties and bars, the ones you have stupid arguments with over email about catty, dumb shit - that suddenly those very people could be dead. Or worse, trapped in a small space, without air, in pain.
I think many of us get by right now on these things. First, the notion that "I survived". I survived. I am still alive. That building came down, and by some miracle, I'm still here. So I better be happy about it and not waste it because many people are not so lucky. And second, "there is very important work to do". There is - tons of it. Tons of rock to be moved, tons of people to be saved, tons of bodies to be picked up, tons of food to be handed out - and water. And for me, tons of TV to be sent out to the world. So we throw ourselves into these things, with gusto. It's better than sitting around waiting, and feeling helpless. And last, "miracles do happen". One of the security officers - a guy who would have been on the team that Eduardo was to join next week - was stuck under the rubble somewhere on what used to be the 4th floor. He could talk on his radio. He was awake, stuck in a hole. And the workers couldn't get to him - there was 2 meters of concrete between him and them, constant tremors, and too many fears of dislodging the whole mountain of stuff to get to him. But finally, today, after nearly 48 hours without food and water, he walked free from the debris, unscathed. And promptly resigned from the UN - who can blame him? When we heard this, many of us cried. "Thank you god - and please let this happen again".
So a few more details, and then I go. I am sleeping on the floor in the logisitics base - outside actually, because nobody really feels that comfortable being indoors and asleep. We all have a reflex to stay near exits now. I have my yoga mat and a sheet. I'm ok. I work all day, feeding TV material to braodcasters. Our camera people go out in the field, I am the one who gets the tape, edits it, and sends it off via internet. We have rationed water, and one MRE (meal ready to eat) per day, and we scrounge around for other snacks. So far I am fine. And with the international crews coming in, I am sure we will get more food and help very soon.
The city is... well. I don't really know how to describe it. It's sort of like everyone you know - EVERYONE - getting into a serious car accident on the same day, at the same time. Some come out without a scratch, and others - don't. Many of my colleagues lost everything. Some lost children, others a husband or wife. Logan lost his entire apartment and everything inside it. Me - in the face of all that - I am doing pretty darn well! And very thankful that Eduardo was not here when this happened. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't find him.
I thank you all again for your love and messages, I read them all, every one, and they give me a happy sort of feeling in this sad dark place. So keep us in your prayers. Donate money or - something - to a valid humanitarian organization. And keep in touch with me, I love hearing from you. I send all my love, I am sorry I can't write more, please don't worry, I am safe.
Love,
Amelia
