Ten Years Later: A Reflection from a Haiti Earthquake Evacuee

I  had the sense about me to grab a notebook as some remaining logic within let out one last cry before being snuffed out again by the will to survive. “I’ll want to remember this,” I thought. Inside the one-subject pad—collected by Americans and intended for school children in the southern hills—I took notes all the way to the embassy.

Four days earlier, we’d traveled the always shifting, bumpy dirt road through Port au Prince heading to the south of Haiti. As the Global Outreach Director for a Louisiana church, I’d all but normalized the travel it took to check on the children we were sponsoring in Les Cayes. If I close my eyes today, I see the turquoise Island skirt best visible right before landing; I hear the Caribbean welcome band infusing baggage claim with the sounds of Rara music. We were an in-between-teams team of three coming into this setting to touch base with our partners and head right back home.

Haiti that January felt like the middle of fall in North Louisiana: crisp, pleasant, and energized. After some hours of popping in, making plans, and swinging children into the air, we took a serene drive back to the guesthouse—the home-away-from-home of my twenties. Silver water glittered through the palm fronds. Women with their strong necks held a week’s worth of fruit on top of their braids. Piles of cassava bread would interrupt the stench of burning trash. Blaring radios, coral-washed houses, and potholes that could send one crashing into a vehicle’s ceiling blurred on by. Though I was beginning to question the role of the traditional missionary, though I was beginning to sense that our help may be causing harm, I was growing in comfort and confidence in-country—hanging on to a thread of hope that God still honored the willing with blessings of safety and the reward of a good story.

I pressed send on an email to update our organizations back home right as my laptop began to jostle back and forth. The bed, a solid box of 2x4s crowned with a thin mattress and my resting body, began shifting inch by inch. I looked toward the walls, speechless and confused by their Jell-O-jiggly nature. With my head cocked like a dog wishing to understand, I concluded that someone must be taking a jackhammer to the building; there was no other explanation.

One of my travel companions ran in from the bathroom, shouting, “Is this an earthquake?!”

“I think this is an earthquake,” I said, slammed by the realization. “Should we stand in a doorway?” I shot out as the only idea I could draw from what I once learned in those junior high natural disaster units.

“I think we should get out into the open,” she advised, intuitively.

The cold stone of the staircase under my feet shook back and forth like a disorienting feature of a state fair’s fun-house. Congregated in the driveway were the rest of the home’s residents, equally far from all trees and columns. I crouched low to the ground, four limbs attempting to steady like a quadrupedal animal while the earth trembled on and an eerie, low noise traveled throughout the air.

I have given birth once, and that otherworldly phenomenon of rule-breaking labor-time which both lasts forever and passes in an instant was present in that eternally short moment now known in text books as the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. And then it was over. Which is a loaded sentence.

For good measure, we waited a number of minutes once the waves had ceased before reentering the house to assess the cracks and lost connections. In a staggering epiphany, someone proposed the question, “What if this wasn’t the center?” We would eventually learn that it most definitely wasn’t.

“We should try to reach home . . .”

One by one our transmissions were checked off as inoperative. With no internet, no TV, no phone calls able to connect, my nerves began to boil. In a last attempt, a teammate sent a hopeful text into space as we pled for its landing. “We are ok,” it read.

“THANK GOD,” was the immediate reply from our families right as all of Haiti went black.

What has happened, we shrunk.  

That dark evening, we sat next to a TV whose makeshift emergency antenna had been wired like a tower into the air grasping for information. Anderson Cooper peeked through the black and gray static every so often as we learned that a 7.0+ quake had struck near the most condensed area of the island a short 90 miles away from where we huddled around in fear and candlelight.

As the aftershocks continued through the night, rattling the remaining teacups in the cabinet, CNN told the world that Port au Prince had all but crumbled as recordings of screams and estimated casualties poured in. With night falling on the island, I sensed we’d be forced to accept that we would know nothing more until the morning. I drew my covers up around my ears, attempting to block out the audible sounds of the earth groaning like a woman in chronic pain, howling in low aching tones as everything shifted, and settled, and shifted again.

I ripped open my Bible with the edge of a flashlight like someone throwing their last coin in a well, and I asked God for anything. Give me anything.

“For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from God. God alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken…Once God has spoken; twice I have heard this: that power belongs to God, and steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord,” I read in the sixty-second Psalm.

You are strong, and you love us. You have to be strong, and you have to love us. I held it like the small and lonesome hope that it was and fell asleep.

The morning met us disappointingly with little news or paths off the island, as did the next and the next and the next. The vehicles—it seemed all of them— had been waiting their turns at the gas station since dawn and more news was coming in by way of neighbors’ neighbors about schools collapsing, mass graves forming, and unfathomable displacement occurring. A satellite phone was located in town and I drank a cold Sprite while sobbing over my mom’s voice on the Caribbean porch of a generous Madame and Misye.

“We’re going to try and evacuate through the Dominican on Friday,” I told my mother, attempting to steady my voice. “No news will be good news. I’ll call you when we land somewhere.” I was twenty-two.

The morning before we left our guesthouse with a pack of sandwiches, bananas, and water bottles, I took a permanent marker and wrote my Social Security number on my thighs, arms, and side. Please just don’t let me end up in a mass grave, I prayed.

Our already typically long drive to the capital was multiplied by a steady stream of evacuees against whom we swam in our attempt to reenter the ruins being escaped to get to a road that led to the country’s western border where we would plead to be granted entry. The outpouring of desperate citizens carrying the people and possessions they had left never ended—a massive, heartbreaking, bloody, dusty migration. The highways looked as if the gods had taken their outer edges, like a bed-sheet and fluffed them right on up into the air, landing them all crinkled, and smashed, and folded under themselves. We wondered what target we’d placed on our backs with our ice chests, filled tanks, and inarticulate Creole. But the people kept redirecting us to open roads, pointing silently to each new way we needed as they themselves conjured that level of survival that we always hope is inside of us, just in case. Haiti was getting us home, despite its own tragic depletion of the concept.

When we reached the city, the atmosphere felt like a child’s panic attack. The concrete structures, bigger than two of my apartment complexes combined, sat in pieces, angled and resting against each other, towering above our truck like we were passing through the set of an apocalyptic movie. Making squares in the streets were bodies, dead and dust-covered, that had been drug out as boundaries for the living quarters of those who had now moved to the outside of their shattered homes. I shot my head around to see the stiff arms of a man whose prostrate figure was being used as a stop sign laid across the dirt, his carcass now a cry for aid workers to stop. I wanted to sob more than anything else, but my sorrow had locked itself away with my breath and my ability to process—things that would take months to return.

With our vehicle’s gas petering after the extended trip, we were forced to redirect toward the American Embassy. “If you can get to the embassy, you’ll get home, they say,” a kind stranger in the city had told us. “There are no promises out of the DR right now.”

I stood in line for hours next to a soiled child with dysentery and her dirty, blood-drenched father who had, just days before, watched the lives of his wife and other children be crushed in the rubble. He could not stop his constant, droning whimper. I think I’ll never forget it. They had been visiting. And now he was leaving with a fraction of his existence.

As supply planes were emptied and reloaded with evacuees who had been waiting for days, we scraped together abandoned blankets and made beds in the grass of the embassy’s courtyard. When it came time to pass out MREs, our team volunteered as some of the only remaining able-bodied humans in the facilities. Rumors of tent cities forming and death tolls reaching the hundreds of thousands were circulating as I realized that once my feet left the Haitian soil, there would be no returning for a while. I was escaping a place that needed working hands and feet, escaping a place by way of a passport’s privilege, escaping as someone completely and traumatically torn.

“If you have the strength to stand for hours and nothing more than a backpack, you may be able to fly out tonight,” an authoritative woman in uniform commanded about ten hours after we’d arrived, “Come get in line.” In a pile with hundreds of other duffel bags, we disposed of our luggage. The cargo plane, like another prop in a movie, was surrounded by cots of UN and aid workers who had swiftly made the tarmac their home base.

Geraldo Rivera approached me with a microphone as I boarded to ask how I felt about finally getting out of the country. In my grief and exhaustion, I fought puking on him while I wondered if he may be a mirage likely to disappear into the dark and sad Haitian air.

“Tell them I am angry that this kind of tragedy is a possibility in this life.  Tell them that I have witnessed incredible strength and incredible love here. And tell them that Haiti got us home,” is what I wanted to say. Instead, I boarded in silence with others who were carrying the weight of fresh trauma. US Air Force servicemen fastened our shivering bodies into the craft, closed its large back hatch, and flew us into a makeshift displacement center in New Jersey where we reentered a world that had not so recently been to the edge of life and death in the way that we had in Haiti.

Parts of this piece can be found in Lee’s book, Deconstructed Do-Gooder: A Memoir About Learning Mercy the Hard Way [Cascade 2019].