From the World

DIARY HAITI / 3. Fiammetta: Guarding the rubble to show we are still there

Redazione

sabato 30 gennaio 2010

January 26, 2010, Port au Prince, Haiti

A letter from Fiammetta Cappellini from AVSI Haiti arrived during the night: in the desolation of a city destroyed, small signs of hope to all indicate that reconstruction is possible. Meanwhile, the work in camps continues, with children hampered by illness and with pregnant women.

In recent days, many things have happened, which seem small among such desolation, so that when these happen, you don’t realize how big they are.

On Saturday, a shipment arrived from the Dominican Republic (picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, sheets, blankets, etc.), accompanied by our colleague Edward Panunzio, other colleagues from CESAL (a Spanish NGO), and several Dominican and Italian friends. Meeting him was a good feeling: for days we had not seen each other, but even more, the last time was before the city had been razed. Even for him it was a shock; he needed time to understand that everything he was seeing was true.

At the camp of Place Fierte, the population has increased: 1,800 instead of the 800 that we counted at the beginning. Now there is a coordination committee. Another good result of these days was arranging for the last 66 pregnant mothers to have mattresses in their tents. The last group of homeless people which has formed at Cité Soleil is not yet a camp, but is a gathering of people who have lost everything and are coming together to face today and to start thinking about tomorrow.

Sometimes, it is disheartening to look under the tents. At least one child per family is sick. Dysentery, parasites and malnutrition. Mothers leave their little ones to older ones to spend hours in lines to receive food. It is so hard to encourage people to gather in the camps, in order to organize, stabilize, and be counted, and then the "big dealers" come along and give to anyone, without rules, even those standing by the side of the road.

In another area, where we have a aid station, there is a very poor community illegally perched on a hill which has almost completely collapsed. It is not a real camp; there is no space and people continue to stand in front of their homes. In that area, we were able to distribute essential supplies to 2875 people. These are people who had nothing and lost everything. They are waiting for decisions that will be made on the fate of their former homes. They cannot afford to leave their debris, risking that nobody will remember them. I really hope that this is not yet another fantasy for these people.

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Meanwhile, the exodus continues. Many flock to the trailers the authorities have organized towards the suburbs. They return to their families of origin. In Les Cayes, in the south, there are 9,000 new arrivals, and the figure continues to grow. The life of every day is to look for normalcy, but in some ways it is complicated. The banks were to reopen Thursday, but were postponed until the next day. Moving within the city requires hours of travel. The lines at the few open gas stations are endless.

On Saturday, there was the funeral of the Bishop, Msgr. Miot, who we knew well, from the earliest times of the presence of AVSI in Haiti. There were really so many people. An earthquake that has claimed so many lives from all social levels, all backgrounds, all ages. Likewise there are the people crossing our paths with warmth and concreteness: university students from l’Aquila and Swiss students, poor Mexican communities, prisoners from Padua, cloistered nuns, Argentinian friends, Venezuelans, Americans, Germans, and many Brazilians who have begun to know our Haiti through a particular connection.

They choose to support a small group of 80-100 people who are fighting for (and with) a few thousand others. In this global machine, we are just a dot, but tangibly close to people from the first day. Not everyone, but those that we are given, with care and attention because the misery and destruction does not take the best from them.

Fiammetta Cappellini

In the United States, donations for the AVSI program "Rebirth of the Human in Haiti " are tax deductible:

- on-line www.avsi-usa.org , via Pay -Pal

- via check ( payable to AVSI-USA) to 529 14th Street, NW, suite 994, Washington DC 20045, with "Haiti emergency" in the memo.