Haiti Journal -- Day One

I was not able to blog from Haiti, but I did keep a journal, which I'm now posting here as I am able.

January 19, 2011 – Got up at 2 am to get our shuttle to Logan airport for a 5:30 am flight to Haiti via Miami. We made the trip with no problems, leaving Andover in a foot of slushy snow, icy roads and sidewalks. Landed in Port-au-Prince in 85 degree weather. What a switch!

We were met by a Partners in Health (PIH or ZL for Zanmi Lasante here) driver and the indomitable Jackie Williams, mother of Clarkson – a member of our group. Jackie is a legend in her own lifetime – a feisty, steel magnolia from South Carolina. She’s in her late seventies, and a real force! Kind and gentle, but in perpetual motion making things happen. More about her later.

We made our way through a gauntlet of hawkers and luggage handlers to get to our waiting vehicles – bags in one, people in the other. We learned we would not be stopping at the cathedral and convent of the Sisters of St. Margaret because of demonstrations in the streets related to the return of Baby Doc Duvalier two days before. So, we went directly to Zanmi Bene – an orphanage set up by Partners in Health following the earthquake last year. On the way, we passed several blue-tarp IDP camps where people are still living over a year after the earthquake.


Zanmi Bene has 48 children from 9 months to 22 years, most of them developmentally delayed. After the earthquake a wealthy Port-au-Prince couple sold their compound in the city to PIH for “a good price” (Jackie says probably 300-500K US) and PIH opened the orphanage. Several of the 2-5 year olds found us and attached themselves to us. Sweet, adorable children, many of whom lost their families in the earthquake. We ate a lunch of cheese sandwiches at the orphanage while some of the children clung to us. I detected some nervousness in our group about hygiene, particularly as little hands offered to share with us what they were eating. Given the cholera epidemic in the country, the concerns were real, but we were told that there had been no instances of cholera here at the orphanage, and everything we saw indicated meticulous attention to cleanliness.

We continued our journey to Cange, leaving the city and making our way up National Road 3 to the Central Plateau department, climbing for quite some time up the switchbacks on a well-paved road – greatly improved since Paul Farmer’s early days (read Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder for a description of how it used to be).

The countryside reminded me somewhat of Burundi, but even more deforested. The houses here, however, seem marginally more substantial – and there are more cars, fewer bicycles, and not as many people walking along the roads. Hardly a tree anywhere here, it seems. Some of the area between PaP and the Plateau seemed desert-like with an abundance of Saguaro cacti and acacia trees – otherwise only scrub underbrush.

We came to Mirebalais, a fairly large town, still waiting on the newly paved road to arrive. It is the site of a famous slave rebellion in 1804 that overthrew the French colonialists and established the first free democratic nation born of a slave revolt. Between Mirebalais and Cange is the dam that displaced thousands of people in 1959, forcing them to move up the hillsides where there was no water. Jackie and her late husband, Pierce, were part of a team of Greenville, SC, Episcopalians who came at the invitation of Fr. Fritz Lafontant to create a water pumping system to bring water to village in this, the poorest section of Haiti.

We met Pere Lafontant upon arrival, as well as his daughter, Marie Flore. Lovely people. They were both in Boston last week for the funeral of Tom While, PIH’s first major donor and a man who has generously funded the work of PIH here ever since. Together with Jackie we toured Sant Art (the Art Center – in a building named for her) and were then shown to our rooms. Mine is an ample room with a double bed, armoir, table – and even a mosquito net above my bed. Across the hall are Kathy Grant and Linda Borland sharing a room. George, David Lewis, and Clarkson Williams are sharing a dormitory-style room somewhere nearby in another building. Doug and Shane have a room together – and I don’t know where Heather is. After a 45 minute rest, supper was ready for us at 6 pm – rice, a beef stew, fried plantains, and tomatoes. Dessert was a lovely cake with a clear rum raisin sauce. Mmmmm.

At dinner we met some of the PIH staffers. Ali Lutz is the PIH Haiti programs coordinator, who, we learned, lives in Jamaica Plain, MA, when she is not here. I also later learned – after she had left for PaP – that she is a candidate for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church and that we share many mutual friends in the Boston area. Small world. A couple of young doctors (one still a medical student) also joined us at our table. Sabrina is an impressive young woman, Harvard Medical School graduate doing a residency in anesthesiology here. She graduated from Boston University in 2006. I assumed she was African-American, until she told us that she grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and went to high school there. Now she has come back to her home country as a doctor. Another young man, Dave, who sat with us (and he really was an African-American) is currently in medical school at Harvard, and is doing an internship in surgery here. He was a 2006 graduate of Harvard College. Another Dave is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland in engineering. He’s here working to keep the water system running, making sure that 72,000 gallons of water gets pumped 600 feet up the hill from the reservoir every day. It’s what makes everything else here possible.

There were others whose names I did not get. Impressive young people, most of them with some Boston connection. After a long day it is time to turn in. I was impressed with Jackie’s energy, and said to her something about how hard she had worked today. “This isn’t work,” she said. “Work is what you do when you’d rather be doing something else.”