Life Goes On

Sunday 21 February: My only good chance to get to Port au Prince was to go on Sunday since that would be the only time that most everyone would be around. This was necessary since I would need to be driven around by others. The Boucher family was able to meet me at the airport along with my traveling companion Carl Evans. Dr. Boucher is a friend of the House of Hope which is where I met him and later the whole family. After seeing their home which was substantially damaged in the quake they took me around to see the rest of the city. It was by and large the same as I had seen on television but for me to see it with my own eyes, in real time, was terrible beyond description. Buildings down everywhere leaving people entombed even now while life just goes on around them. Haitian masons recovering fallen block and mixing mortar and putting them back up again; market ladies sat stoically by their small piles of fruit or sacks of rice waiting for the next sale; people walking to and from church and families sitting around eating together. Haiti will forever be a land of ironies the rational and the absurd comfortably side by side defying explanation requiring only acceptance. I believe most of this goes over the heads of the casual observer but to those who know the queues it strangely makes sense. No one living in Port au Prince can ever be the same. Life was changed that day in a thunderous roar some dodging death to die another day and some dying in their tracks. I even saw a rat lying crushed in the street struck by falling debris. By the time we arrived back at the house I was literally unable to take in anything more. But dinner was ready so we sat down and ate because life just goes on. I went off to bed in a very nice home that had survived the quake and was virtually unharmed except for minor damage. The home was built by an engineer who said he built it right; apparently he did! However, in the same city some 250,000 people went to sleep on the ground in their tents afraid to sleep under anything that might fall on them. In case we are tempted to call their fear irrational, at 4:37 in the morning I was awakened by everyone calling out there had been another aftershock. It was a 4.7 on the Richter scale enough to rattle the windows but not enough to wake me up. Life goes on....