I got the call on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 05:03:00 p.m.—just ten minutes after the earthquake. It was a massive quake registering 7.0 on the Richter Scale centered around the capital city of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and hundreds of thousands were presumed missing or dead. In just a few seconds, Haiti was plunged into the biggest natural disaster the world had seen in a long time. It was time to go to work.
You might wonder at the kind of a job that would have me running to a scene others are desperate to flee. I am a medic. I work for an organization just like Doctors Without Borders, only we are not as well known. It is a crazy thing we do to run into holes filled deep with debris searching for that last beating heart. But I have been doing this work for over 15 years, and I would find it impossible to do anything else. I’m not the type of guy who could sit at a desk for eight hours a day, you know?
After the call, I jumped into high gear. There is a routine to these things, a process if you prefer to call it that (some may even call it a ritual, but that’s not my kind of thing.) I got out my suitcase, fully packed since the last trip, and made sure I had everything I would need. Then, I showered, dressed and shaved. Within twenty minutes, I was ready to go. But this time, there was one last thing I needed to do before I could leave. I grabbed my cell phone off the night stand and dialed.
“Bonjour maman,” I said when I heard a faint voice on the other line.
“Bonjour petit moin,” my mother responded in Haitian Creole. “You are leaving, aren’t you? As soon as I heard the news, I knew you would be going.”
“Yes,” I said. My mother has had a difficult time accepting my work, but I wondered if she would understand this time.
“You have not been to Haiti since you were a baby,” she said, as if I forgot. “I have always wished for you to return one day, but not like this.”
“This is certainly no ordinary visit,” I agreed.
My mother began to cry. “What has happened to my country is truly a terrible thing, but I have lost so much. I don’t want to lose you as well, Jean.”
We have had variations on this conversation for as long as I can remember. It is not that I am unsympathetic; it’s just that there isn’t much I could say that would comfort her.
“You will be careful?” she asked.
I knew this time she was not just talking about my job. My mother fled Haiti literally with the clothes on her back at the height of the terror of the Duvalier Regime (the sadistic father, not the idiot son). For years, she spoke of her experience only in whispers—as if Duvalier’s henchmen, the Tonton Macoute, could be found behind every corner of our small Brooklyn apartment. She is still afraid.
“Of course,” I said. And that was that.
Thirty-two hours later, I am standing in the deepest circle of hell, which happens to be a street corner in the middle of Port-au-Prince. I don’t know exactly where I am because all the street signs were destroyed in the earthquake; as were the buildings they pointed to, and the people who once inhabited those buildings. Port-au-Prince was a fresh pile of rubble and a finely ground white ash that blew through the air to cover every possible surface.
