Word from the Ground in Haiti, a Fonkoze Volunteer Writes of the Destruction

We received an e-mail today from Steve Werlin, a professor from Shimer College who works as a volunteer for Fonkoze, a partner organization of BRAC, in Haiti. Steve recounted the shock and destruction he's been witnessing for the past few days:

It was hard, at first, to take the whole thing seriously. We were violently shaken in the office as we closed for the day. One or two members of the staff fled outside. But when the first shock of it was over, we quickly checked the building for major damage. (We found none.)

We called our supervisor, who is based nearby in Jakmel, and we proceeded through the regular step-by-step process we follow to close our office at the end of the day. More like a carnival attraction than an act of god. It never occurred to me to contact anyone at home to let them know I was alright. Of course I was. I always am.

But then we started to hear things. There had been damage in Jakmel and Port au Prince. When we tried to call people on the phone, we discovered that it was hard,very hard, to get through. And rumors kept sounding more and more serious.

The gravity of circumstances began to weigh on me over the course of what seemed like a very long night, and when I went to the office the next morning, thinking less of opening than of figuring out how things stood, I was able to get on the internet and discover how very bad things are. The worst Caribbean earthquake in 200 years. Thousands dead. Tens of thousands homeless.

Just walking through Marigo at midday was enough to give the beginnings of a concrete sense of the devastation. Young people were gathered in small groups here and there around the town, listing friends who were away at school in Port au Prince and were either missing or confirmed as dead. Marigo is a small town, yet if you count only its Port au Prince college students, the death toll would have to be at least a dozen. And "college students from Marigo" is a very small subset of the population of Port au Prince. Even on our small Marigo staff, we have two who may have lost siblings.

And then I went to Jakmel. It's one of Haiti's larger cities, about ten miles west of Marigo. Though it's no closer to where the quake's epicenter is said to have been, the impact could not have been more different. Jakmel was devastated. Whole neighborhoods had been turned into rubble. My driver and I saw schools and hospitals that had collapsed with heavy casualties. Here and there we saw corpses in the streets or the rubble, most of them covered by sheets, but some still in whatever position the earthquake, which had struck about 24 hours earlier, had left them in. We saw what had once been an old man, one of his hands grasping the railing of his front porch and one of his feet stepping into the street when the roof pinned where he was and where he will remain until someone moves him to his grave.

The enormity of the disaster here will only emerge slowly in the coming days. I have no news of most of my Port au Prince friends, and may have to go there to get any.

Part of me is afraid to find out.

BRAC USA is accepting donations to support its partners in Haiti in providing relief and rehabilitation to the victims of the earthquake. Read more about BRAC USA's efforts here and donate directly to the Haiti relief and rehabilitation efforts here.