The Haitian Apocalypse - A Survivor's Tale-(Part 1)

By: Julius N. Fondong*, with intro by Innocent Chia.
When news of Haiti’s earth-shattering quake broke I got worried sick whether my friends and acquaintances had survived.  At the end of a frustrating day of several dead-ended inquiries, I stopped by the home of my close friend and neighbor, Jerome Ewang, to share in the overwhelming burden of not knowing whether or not his brother was alive. Having met his brother a couple of times here in Illinois while on his vacation from Haiti, the tragedy for me was getting unmasked into faces that were familiar and personal. Of all the people that I know in Haiti, Charles Mengale was the one I had last seen, and scenes of his pensive demeanor and quiet presence seized over me. As the minutes crawled into an hour and conversations with Jerome and his wife - Miriam - went on, a visibly restless Jerome was now negotiating with God that “whatever happens, let him turn up alive.”  It was our very own Julius that confirmed to me via Facebook that “when I saw Mengale he was alive but has suffered some serious injuries”. He is currently undergoing treatment in the neighboring Dominican Republic and our thoughts and prayers are with him, his family and the thousands of Haitians for whom the world may never be the same. The Chiareport now presents Part 1 of a survivor’s tale by Julius N. Fondong.

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Tuesday January 12 began as an ordinary day for me. I woke up from bed at 6am as usual, showered, and by 7 am I was on my way to work. My office is located on a ground floor extension of Hotel Christopher, the imposing 6-storey complex that houses the operational headquarters of the United Nations Mission in Haiti in the Bourdon neighborhood of Port au Prince.

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The day promised to be charged and hectic, but not in the sense it later turned out to be.  I had just returned from a two week vacation in the US and was trying to deal with the backlog. My team and I (the Institutional Support Unit) had started an ambitious project to assess the internal revenue base of Haiti’s 140 municipalities. I spent the day analyzing the data we were receiving from our field offices. By 4:30 pm I was happy with what we had achieved so far and I was already feeling upbeat about the impact such an assessment- the first of its kind in Haiti’s history- will have on our local government support program. I was set to go home to a much deserved rest.

Then at about 4:55pm – a few minutes before we were to close the doors behind us for the day - it happened. 

I remember being in the process of logging off my computer when I felt the rumbling. First I thought a military truck or an APC had lost control and slammed on an embankment wall that runs parallel to my office. Then within seconds the trembling and rumbling grew in intensity. The building was literally rocking from side to side. Concrete debris was falling everywhere. It dawned on me it was an earthquake.
Realizing that the building was going to collapse at anytime, I sprang out, at the same shouting at my colleagues to get out. Not like they needed to be told though. Even as I ran out I could hear the pillars exploding and the building collapsing just inches behind my back. Out into the parking lot, cars were literally bouncing up and down.  The earth was rumbling underneath my feet as I ran. Houses - multi-storey apartment complexes and modest homes alike - were collapsing left and right like a pack of cards in a child’s hands.  Children were screaming for their parents; parents were screaming out their children’s names. High tension cables were falling all over the place. The entropy was like I had never seen before. I summoned my last energy and ran and ran… I stopped running because there was no where else to run to.

The road was a dead-end; houses were still collapsing uncontrollably and the intensity of the rumbling underneath told me it was just a matter of seconds before the earth breaks open and swallows us all up in its boiling belly. All around me people were praying hysterically and loudly confessing their sins. Sensing that the end had come, I closed my eyes, said a prayer and silently confessed my own sins. Pulling from all what remained of my power of concentration, I forcefully invoked the images of my children into my mind. One after the other I whispered their names: Joan, Michael, Daniel, Sadmia, and tried to imagine what their faces looked like the last time I saw them. And at that point I took a decision that if this was going to be the end, I won’t like to be buried in a mass grave. So I double-checked my name tag and made sure it was well strapped in. I checked my wallet, placed my credit cards where they could be easily found, moved the wallet from my back pocket to a hip pocket, secured it with a zipper, closed my eyes and waited.

Then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

It was then that everyone started desperately trying to call but the phone connections were all dead. Occasionally there will be aftershocks eliciting a new wave of wailing and crumbling of houses. We huddled together, cried and embraced each other. And we waited, not knowing how we would get out of there. By 2am, a UN Brazilian military contingent was able to work its way up from their base 20 kilometers away to come to our rescue. We were conveyed to the United Nations Logistics base across town which had largely remained unscathed by the earthquake because the base is housed in containers and prefabs.

As we drove through the streets that night it was then that I was able to comprehend the full scale of the destruction that the forces of nature had unleashed on us.  Not even one single house within a 15 km stretch of road was left standing. Important landmarks had been completely obliterated.

Almost immediately the first batch of the wounded started arriving at the logistics base and they came in all shapes and sizes: broken hips and backs, compound fractures, bleeding skulls, etc. They came in cars, staked up behind pick-up trucks and in wheel barrows.  The screams of pain and suffering could be heard miles away. Makeshift medical tents were set up and a nearby warehouse was quickly converted into a hospital “ward”. Anyone with basic medical/or nursing skills was helping. Even though I was still dazed by what we had just gone through, I tried to organize a system for receiving and dealing with the steady stream of patients. I was soon overwhelmed and gave it up.

By 10 am, January 13, some 17 hours after the quake, I had not yet been able to make contact with any of my family and friends to tell them I was alive and well. I knew they’ll be worried sick when the images of the destruction, especially that of the UN headquarters where everyone knew I worked, will be beamed out to the world. I kept wandering from office to office, checking extension lines for a dial tone. And thankfully I found one that was working and immediately placed a called to Alex Ngati, my trusted childhood friend in Maryland USA. Alex had not gone to work and had practically remained glued to his phone waiting for me to call, fearing the worst but hoping for the best. He let out a cry of joy when he heard my voice at the other end.  For the better part of two minutes we cried together, uncontrollably. Then I charged him to let the world know I was alive and well. I had to get back to work immediately.

Even though I had made a decision not to leave Haiti, in spite of the fact that the UN had ordered the evacuation of its staff, I wasn’t still sure what precisely I was going to do to help with the relief and humanitarian effort. As the aid began pouring in almost immediately, I knew the challenges of coordinating its delivery will be enormous. The government was in ruins and the UN mission, which normally provides technical and logistical support to the government in such times, had been decapitated by the ferocity of the quake. I tried to do what I do best under such circumstances: think fast and think strategically.

I found a computer and sat down and within 10 minutes I developed talking points and an agenda for an initial planning and coordination meeting between the government and the UN mission that was due to meet in a few minutes time. In the talking points, I summarized what I believed were the top priorities of the moment and how I thought they could be dealt with. I ran into the Prime Minister as he was arriving for the meeting and slipped a copy of the talking points in his hands. I went on to draft an aide memoire for the attention of foreign relief agencies explaining Haiti’s institutional framework for the management of risk and disasters. This was intended to provide some guidance on how to better coordinate the relief and humanitarian operations. Not satisfied with just drafting talking points and memos, I started looking for some hands-on field operation I could get involved in. It was still too risky to venture out of the base because the streets were still clogged and the security situation unclear. I was already growing impatient and frustrated from sitting in one place for almost 2 days doing almost nothing when I was offered a God-sent opportunity to get out and do something useful.

At about 4pm on Friday January 15, I received a mail from Andrew Kline, a classmate of mine at Harvard  (whom I had not seen since we graduated in 2003)  requesting me to assist one Elizabeth Dowling  to get out her adopted daughter, Jenna Dowling, from an orphanage in Port au Prince to the US. To hear Andrew and Elizabeth say it, the orphanage had been partially destroyed and they had less than 2 days supplies of food and water. Without second thoughts, I grabbed a car and went out in search of the orphanage. When I got there, little Jenna was having her hair braided and somehow she didn’t seem to like it and so she was crying frantically. I took her and held her in my arms; she wrapped her little hands round my neck as if she’d known me all her life, stopped crying immediately, and within minutes was fast asleep. In a fleeting moment, with Jenna deep asleep in my arms, it became clear to me why I had chosen to remain in Haiti. And so for 3 days, the challenge of getting Jenna out of Haiti to her parents in the US became something of an obsession for me. When finally on Sunday January 17, I drove Jenna and 4 other kids to the embassy for them to catch their flight to the US and to a better life, I could feel this sense of accomplishment in me that I had not felt in a long time.

In a way Jenna and the all the other kids at the orphanage gave me a purpose, a vocation, and some sense of direction at a time when my faculties couldn’t come up with any. I distinctly remember this sharp-witted 3 or 4 year old vivacious little girl who, on the very first day I arrived at the orphanage and started inquiring after Jenna, had nicknamed me “Papa Jenna”.  After taking Jenna to the embassy, I went back to the orphanage to see how the other kids were doing. This little girl ran up to me, looked at me straight in the face, and asked me to promise her that I’ll come and get her the same way I came and got Jenna. I was dumb-struck! I didn’t know what to say, so I muttered something like “I’ll try”. That didn’t seem good enough for her. She sat on my laps and made me promise I’ll come get her. Not knowing what else to do, I promised. I’m happy to note that all the kids - including my very tenacious and talkative young friend - have since been airlifted to the US to meet their adopted parents.

Drawing from the gust of energy and sense of direction I had garnered while trying to get the kids out of Haiti and to the US, I immediately immersed myself fully in the relief and humanitarian effort.  I started visiting some of the worst affected municipalities outside Port au Prince to assess the damage caused by the earthquake, worked with mayors to activate the local committees for the management of disasters, and coordinated aid delivery with several agencies. As I drove from municipality to municipality I saw firsthand the magnitude of the damage. Not just the infrastructural damage but the human carnage as well.

Corpses were staked up on the streets in their thousands like garbage heaps. The stench of death and desolation was every where. Unable to cope with the growing numbers, the population soon took to burning the corpses. Some didn’t burn completely and you could see some un-burnt body parts, especially the heads, sticking out of a pile of smoking corpses. Elsewhere dogs were feeding avariciously on a rotting corpse. Nature has this uncanny way of dishing out its calamities in manageable doses. Before the January 12 earthquake, it had rained in Port au Prince virtually every blessed day over a 10 day period. Ten days after the quake, it has not rained in Port au Prince. I wonder what it would have looked like, had it rained with thousands of corpses rotting in the streets and millions camping in the open.

Many have asked me: shall Haiti ever recover from this calamity of near apocalyptic proportions? Without any modicum of doubt I say yes.  Haiti shall recover not because of the much vaunted resilience of the Haitian people (for even resilience has its limits) but because of the realism of its people. I believe it is this realism and the matter-of-fact manner with which the people of Haiti confront adversity of any sort that physical, emotional and psychological recovery shall be possible. 

I have yet another anecdotal evidence of this. On Tuesday January 19, I received a mail from one Melissa McRobbie from San Francisco who introduced herself to me simply as “daughter of a Kennedy School classmate”. Melissa wanted me to go to a locality called Riviere Froide and check on the status of a school run by the St Therese order of  nuns; she believed the school may have been badly hit by the earthquake.  I immediately complied.

Riviere Froide is a small hamlet tucked up on a hillside some 50kms south-east of Port au Prince. As Melissa had feared, the school had truly been badly hit.
Its 3-storey building was now mere rubble and you could feel the smell of death oozing out of the wreckage. Even then I could see kids playing soccer and men playing dominos just a couple of yards away from the ruins. I approached the school’s principal and asked her how many kids were in the school when the earthquake struck. She said 200. I asked her how many she thought could be still under the rubble. In a calm, composed, unemotional voice, she told me more than 100! I would later be told that after the earthquake, the local community, aided by a team of visiting American volunteers, mobilized themselves to save their children. With their bare hands they had succeeded in pulling out 25 kids alive from the ruins of the collapsed school. After sometime they gave up, accepted their fate, cut their losses and went about their daily business. Even though I had referred their case to the agencies involved in the search and rescue operations, I still had my doubts as to whether a rescue team will be able to move heavy equipment through Port au Prince’s clogged streets and up the narrow dirt road that leads up to the hamlet.

This kind of calm, composed, unemotional display of realism in the face of a calamity of immeasurable proportions is what I believe will help Haitians heal their wounds, put this tragedy behind them, and begin anew the never-ending task of building the world’s first black republic

*Julius is a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a Civil Affairs Officer serving with the United Nations Mission in Haiti.

Comments

[kilo]

Thank goodness you came out in one piece, thank God for you, you are alive.
I think the forum is not yet ready to lose you especially the gibberish write ups you fill us with.
What about Dr. Sama Walters, another Cameroonian working with the UN, did he make it?

[Emmanuel N. Nchamukong]

If i didn't know you, i would have thought this was a beatifully written piece of fiction. Even as i read your narrative of the earthquake, i cannot help asking whether Haiti will really ever recover from it. This is the closest i have gotten to human suffering and deccay. We thank God for people like you. God save Haiti.

[Ntam Charles]

The writter of this well presented article, was my teacher at one point in my life.He was the first person i thought of when i heard of the disaster as i had known from one of his earler articles in this same "Chia Report"that he is based In Haiti.What strikes me in ur narration sir,is the courage to stay on after going through the experience.The point is,rescuers are quite often not victims themselves.Those who go through such frightening experiences would definitely quit the scene especially with earthquakes and after shocks and especially when offered the opportunity.You were a victim and a rescuer at the same time.Ur narration emphasizes the need,to be always prepared as one never knows what tomorrow comes with.Yes as humans,we just always have to give the best to the people we interact with because one never knows when and who would be the next to fall.
Ntam Charles

[Judith Foyabo]

Thanks again Ni Julius,
May God continue to protect and guide you as you do His work. With the help of people like you and support from the rest of the world, Haiti will achieve some semblance of normalcy sooner than later, blessings.
MaJu from L.A.

[Roberta Oster Sachs]

Julius - thank you for the work you have done to help the people of Haiti. I am very proud of you. And how incredible that your and Andrew - our classmates from Harvard - pulled together during this crisis. That's what it is all about. Your story is so moving and I am sending you prayers and love from across the ocean. I remember our fun times together at Harvard but I also remember what we learned about leadership, teamwork, strategic thinking, and the importance of public service. You embody that spirit and you are an inspiration to all of us! I would love to see you again soon. With Love and respect, Roberta Oster Sachs

[Alice Geh Deffo]

Julius, I just want to thank the Almighty God for people like you. He saved your life for a purpose and you are fulfilling it. May He continue to give you the spiritual and physical strength needed in the performance of your duty-call. May you continue to serve as an inspiration to all with humanitarian hearts. Remain blessed.
Alice Geh Deffo

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[Verla Gertrude]

Julius, thanks for the good job. I am so proud of you. I would say, you were sent to Haiti for a purpose and you did accomplish your mission. May the good Lord continue to guide and bless you. Thank God you are alive. Verla Gertrude

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