Slideshow: On the Ground in Haiti [Watch]
Audio: A Message From Charles Sandefur in Haiti
[Listen]
This is a first-hand account of one ADRA employee currently on the ground in Haiti
It's My Party & I'll Cry if I Want To
By Michelle L. Oetman
Credit: Dan Webber
Today’s my birthday. Before you think this is about cake and presents and parties, I should explain: I’m in Port-au-Prince. This is hardly a celebration town right now. A day when one’s life is to be celebrated seems nearly choked with the incalculable deaths and thousands of fragile lives encircling me.
While I sit in our cramped office, overflowing with water, logistics, medical, sanitation, and food specialists, just 40 meters away, a brick wall separates me from a camp of nearly 15,000 people. Just 18 days ago, they were scattered across the Carrefour neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in homes and surrounded by family. Today, many have lost both. It’s the same all around town.
When I first drove into town, a body lay between lanes of traffic and shoes attached to feet were sticking out of crushed homes. Tent cities had sprung up on scarce open spaces, yet some 609,000 people remain without shelter, and still more remain in need of food. Thousands of new amputees, requiring physical therapy and prosthetics, are engulfed with stunned grief and fear of nearly non-existent resources for their new needs. The threat of cholera, and the wave of death it brings, breathes down Port-au-Prince’s neck
This week, the Government declared the search and rescue phase over. Now it’s merely search and recovery. Hope for life under the rubble has been diminished. They’ve confirmed more than 110,000 deaths in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, a number that’s sure to climb.
Those who survived still find life precarious. There’s extreme difficulty moving around Port-au-Prince due to rubble in the roads and traffic congestion. They face nearly daily aftershocks, fuel and food is scarce and expensive, and intense desperation often leads to violence.
What a contrast to the life I left just a short while ago. As I ran out the door to begin my journey to Haiti, I grabbed a quote-a-day calendar I received for Christmas, ripped out the next two months of the calendar, and stuffed it in my backpack. The quote today brought apt words from the queen of advice, Ann Landers: “When life’s problems seem overwhelming, look around and see what other people are coping with. You may consider yourself fortunate.”
We both know that “fortunate” means one having good fortune. But do you know that if you’re able to read this, you have good fortune? That if you can afford a computer, TV, radio or smartphone to receive news, you are one with good fortune? That if tonight you have more than a blanket or tarp propped up with sticks as the roof over your head, you are one with good fortune? Or that if you are not waiting for ADRA to finish latrines this afternoon for you to have even the most basic sanitation facilities you’ve had for days, you are one with good fortune? And if you are not dependent on the arrival of a bag of rice, beans, salt and water from ADRA for your next meal, you are one with good fortune? But most importantly, if you are alive today, you are one with the greatest good fortune. Did you realize that? If not, listen to Ms. Landers and let me tell you what the world looks like around you.
Your donation can mean the difference between life and death, hope or despair.
Tonight as I leave the office as darkness is falling, like every night before, families will place chunks of concrete from their former homes to block off sections of a sparsely paved and mostly pothole-blemished road. Enclosed within these makeshift boundaries, are people, laying out whatever blankets they have, preparing for another night of sleeping on the road. Without a lawn, this is where you go when your house has crumbled or your fear of an event, never experienced before in your lifetime, keeps you from returning indoors.
Credit: Michelle L. Oetman/ADRA Haiti
Today’s my birthday and there are many reasons to cry, but there are better things to do. My day’s events will be far from a cake, party and wrapped presents. All those seem a bit excessive or ostentatious in a town with the deep scar this one bears. Instead, today, I will celebrate my life and put in another 12-hour day trying to sustain and preserve the fragile lives around me and comfort those who mourn the more than 110,000 loved one’s birthdays that can never be celebrated again. And I will have a lot of help. Today, our ADRA team, and our partners, will work an equally long day initiating projects that deliver food and hygiene kits, set up water purification systems, install latrines, and provide medical facilities and care. Another reason to wipe our tears is the ADRA team here is growing bigger each day with specialists arriving from ADRA offices all over the world to train local communities and new staff to carry on the reconstruction work for years to come. Each frenzied day, they’re all working to preserve lives, too.
Can I ask you to take a pause today and consider; what will you do with your good fortune of literacy, clean water, a roof over your head—another day of life? It may not be your birthday, but how will you celebrate your life today? And, after absorbing Ann Landers’ advice, can you also do something to celebrate a tenuous life here in Haiti?
I will also do one more thing to celebrate. Today, I turn 38 and I’ve chosen to acknowledge my good fortune of 38 years of life by sending an extra gift of $38 to ADRA’s efforts in Haiti. At a time when our world has lost more than 110,000 celebrated and now mourned lives—and the toll is still climbing—can I challenge you to do the same in celebration of your years of life? And one more thing, please say a prayer for more birthdays for the survivors in Haiti.
ADRA is not accepting volunteers for Haiti at this time.
