Jhpiego's Blog

In Delmas, A Mother Mourns A Friend’s Lost Child

January 22, 2010 at 8:16 pm Leave a comment

They still cannot find my friend’s little girl. She is under the rubble. She is two-years-old, the same age as my son. Last night I dreamed that the little girl was still alive. I’m hoping, but there is no hope. It was a five-story building and they only found the body of the grandmother. How can I comfort my friend, how can I comfort her?

Marie Flore Trevant, Jhpiego’s office administrator in Port-au-Prince, is camped out in the court yard of her mother’s house in Delmas. Her immediate family survived last week’s earthquake that rocked Port-au-Prince. Her home in a nearby community received minimal damage. She has food and a generator to help the family cook but they are sleeping outdoors because they fear the next tremor will engulf them as the first engulfed thousands of their fellow Haitians.

In a conversation on Skype with a French-speaking colleague at Jhpiego’s Baltimore headquarters, Flore asks about the team that is due in Port-au-Prince to help set up a clinic for pregnant, women, newborns, mothers and children. She talks about the loss of close friends, the bodies in the street and the fate of Haiti’s children.

When is the team coming? Tell the team to be careful because of the dead bodies in the streets. They have to be sure to protect themselves.

I get water at a camp ground at the United Nations and I have a stock of food . . . We sleep in the streets. When there is a tremor everybody runs. My little boy is very afraid. You can see it in his face and the way he acts. He is 26 months; he does not really understand. My nephews are little older and they are always telling me, ‘ I’m afraid to die.’ I tell them it’s over now, it’s over now.

Privately, Flore worries if it is really over.

Sometimes I swear I feel like the quakes continue all the time. Where I live there is a crack in the wall as if the earth is splitting in two and the house is lifting off the ground.

Beyond concerns for their physical safety, Flore and her family are fearful for the children. Rumors are circulating about child abductions, trafficking in orphans and desperate people using someone else’s child to parlay their way out of the country.

At night, parents cannot close their eyes to sleep. They must check on their children, to keep an eye on them. On the street, I heard a woman say, she lost a child who was sleeping next to her. . Ils volent les enfants! They steal children!

But the loss of life remains overwhelming for her.

Where my mother lives in Delmas it has been less touched but most houses have cracks and are ready to fall. There is a building with 10 apartments that collapsed after the quake. There are decomposing bodies in the street. We have to eat food quickly so the flies don’t get to the food. Some of the bodies are picked up, other people are burning them. The ones who are under the rubble, you can’t get to them. . . Where we are, in the street, the smell . . .

From time to time, we have to get out of this neighborhood. But to go where? It’s everywhere the same thing.

Entry filed under: On the Ground in Haiti. Tags: .