It was on a mild January afternoon in 2010 when the ground underneath Port-au-Prince and its environs began to violently shake. People were just arriving home as office businesses were starting to close. Kids were on their way home from school or playing with friends. The market places were full with shoppers buying food for dinner and children were doing their homework or watching TV. The initial shock was so huge that Drack said it sounded like a deafening roar – a thumping series of tremendous loud noises as the earth split apart.. At the time, he was talking with teens in a building in the slums about his vision for a future Haiti.
Immediately he KNEW it was an earthquake and ran quickly to avoid the crashing concrete of collapsing buildings all around him. Within minutes he witnessed hundreds of dead and dying some with missing heads and limbs with blood running everywhere. The screams of people permeated the air as large dust clouds rose into the skies from the devastation. He ran to find his car – luckily, it was only slightly damaged.
Drack was still able to get a cell signal and called his fiancé Stephanie who had arrived home a short while before and was miles away up in the hills above the city. They spoke briefly and reassured each other that each was safe. Drack said he would be home when he could but he had no idea of the time because many thoroughfares were blocked by massive piles of concrete rubble, broken telephone poles with bodies everywhere. He tried to help get people to safety and was stopped by one man who begged Drack to give him his car’s jack so he could help his sister get out from under a fallen wall. He told Drack that he was going to cut his sister’s arm off to save her life. Drack never heard what happened. He finally made it home hours later. Both Stephanie and he were some of the lucky survivors.
A total of 250,000 people are estimated to have died in the earthquake a number that approximates the amount of Haitian lives lost to AIDS in the last 30 years. With AIDS deaths, most victims were given Christian burials by devastated family members. But the authorities had to dig huge pits in and around Port-au-Prince where the decomposing bodies were unceremoniously buried.
Yves, a childhood friend of Drack’s recounted how he was living in a two-story house in Port-au-Prince. They were all students that had just returned from afternoon classes and were getting ready to eat their communal meal. Wearing just their basketball shorts and no shoes or shirts, they sat down to enjoy their student rations of rice and beans with spicy fish sauce on the second floor where a breeze cooled the stifling air. Seconds later it sounded like bombs going off in rapid succession. Suddenly the front wall facing the street crashed to the ground. Without a moment’s hesitation, Yves jumped and slid down the wall into the street followed by his screaming roommates. Then there was a calamitous roar as the entire building collapsed on its foundation. No one died except for their cat.
Everywhere he saw mangled bodies surrounded by families wailing over their lost loved ones. Barefoot, he lead his friends out of Port-au-Prince in large columns of fleeing refugees as the aftershocks continued to toss them off their feet and tumble weakened structures. They walked almost 50 miles in two days on their way back to their homes in Aquin. Family members met them at a river crossing and brought them to the relative safety of the central interior where damage was less. With tears in his eyes Yves told me that 600 of his fellow students and most all of his teachers perished in that first hour including his best friend. Unfortunately, they had not left campus.
The aftershocks went on for months and buildings continued to fall killing thousands more desperate people that had sought shelter wherever they could from the rain and cold evening temperatures.. Drack said that there were so many dead which had to be buried within a matter of days that huge pits were dug and decomposing bodies where dumped en mass and covered over.
It really seems as if the people of Haiti have suffered an inordinate amount of tragedy in their history beginning as slaves from Africa. Certainly, they are proud of the fact that they were the first black republic established in the world and the second democracy after the United States in the Western Hemisphere. At various times, they have been occupied by foreign powers, suffered from tremendous maladies, and from the abuses
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