Last week an earthquake ravaged the capital city of the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Today as many as 2 million people await emergency relief aid.
This is not the first time a country has been devastated by a natural disaster. It’s not the first time the world watched in horror as the number of casualties from a tsunami or a hurricane flashed at the bottom of television screens. But it is the first time this has happened to my country.
I was born in Port-au-Prince in a hospital that has most likely been reduced to a pile of rubble. For three generations now, my mother’s side of the family has owned and operated a store in the downtown area of the capital city. Until last week, my father drove into Port-au-Prince for work every day.
I didn’t experience the earthquake first hand, but every tremor that reverberated through the streets of Port-au-Prince reached me somehow. My experience was mostly lived through online conversations and phone calls.
At first it was just one word in an instant message: earthquake. Then there were the numbers, 7.1 on the Richter scale, 5.2 aftershocks, 15 km from Port-au-Prince.
I tried to keep myself busy. I dialed every number I could think of to get information. I went online to see if I could reach anyone who knew anything. I was glued to the television screen.
Finally I got a call from my mother in Montreal. I was sure she would know what to do. I was sure she would give me instructions and tell me to calm down and that it was going to be alright. But when I heard her voice crack on the other end of the line I knew things were bad. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, “this is terrible, I never thought we would live through something like this.”
She was sobbing.
After that, I sort of fell apart. I knew the only thing to do was wait, wait for more phone calls about who had lived and who had died. It was the worst two hours of my life. I thought that in one fell swoop I had lost everyone, my father, my grandmother, my aunts uncles, my four year-old cousin, just to name a few.
And then another phone call, this time it was my dad. I’ve heard my dad’s voice a million times, but when I heard his voice last Tuesday night it felt like the first time ever. He was alright, and some of my aunts and uncles were alright too. There was hope some people had survived the earthquake.
My dad’s voice pulled me out of the abyss. Knowing he was alright gave me hope that other people would be as well.
The next 24 hours were filled with more waiting and more numbers: as many as 100,000 dead, 3 million affected. I knew that Haitians in Canada and the United States were all waiting like me. Some of them would get phone calls with good news, and others would have their worst fears confirmed.
I’ve since learned that all of my family members are alive. Some of them have lost their homes, and all of them have lost friends. I am very grateful that they all made it and are presently all together at my father’s house.
This is just the beginning of a long and difficult journey for Haitians. Millions of people in Haiti are without much needed food, water and medical care. Even those who did not lose their homes are sleeping outside in case of more aftershocks. The security of millions hangs in a precarious balance as frustration mounts.
Like the thousands of Haitians immigrants in Canada, all I can do is wait and trust that the many organizations leading the relief effort will reach enough people in time.
