The Daily - A Devastating Earthquake in Haiti

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

This weekend, a major earthquake hit Haiti. It is the second crisis to befall the Caribbean nation is just over a month — its president was assassinated in July.The earthquake’s aftermath has been dire, with little help getting through to those most affected. We hear what life has been like for Haitians reeling from the destruction. Guest: Maria Abi-Habib, the bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The earthquake that struck Haiti on Saturday morning was stronger than the one that devastated the country in 2010. Here’s what to know about the quake.For many Haitians, their only source of aid throughout their lives has been the church. After the earthquake, many of those churches are in ruins.  For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Weeks after the assassination of its president, Haiti was struck by a major earthquake. My colleague, Maria Abihabim, was there reporting on the first crisis when the second crisis hit. It's Wednesday, August 18th.

Maria, where were you when this all started last weekend? So on Saturday morning, I'm in my hotel room in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, FaceTiming with my husband and our two children because I've been on assignment and out of the house for about a week at this point. And all of a sudden, I feel the entire room just jolt to the left and then jolt to the right. My husband could see the alarm on my face and he said, you know, what's going on? And I said, I think that there's an earthquake. He said, you need to get out right now. So with my phone in my hand and my kids still on video call, I ran out to the parking lot of my hotel and I discovered all the hotel staff and security guards, the guests that are staying at the hotel in their pajamas, and everybody is looking for some sort of open sky so that they can make sure that, you know, building or trees don't fall down on them. Right.

And I immediately recognized that everybody was just thinking, please, God, let this be over. Let this just be it. Shortly after, my Haitian colleague, Andre Altrain, called me to see if I was okay. And after establishing that I'm fine and he and his family are fine, we then start talking about where is the epicenter and he eventually tracks it down and reveals that the epicenter is in the southern peninsula about 85 miles west of Port-au-Prince the capital. And at that point we start trying to figure out a way to get there. Can we take the roads? No because they're controlled by gangs that are kidnapping people for ransom. Can we take commercial flights? No, because they've been stopped.

And then we kind of figure out that the best way to get there is by hiring a helicopter. And we were able to get there pretty much 24 hours right after the quake struck. And what do you find when you get to the southern peninsula and get out of this helicopter onto the ground? Complete and utter mayhem. And just immediately, there the earthquake struck next to, a pickup truck pulls up and there's a woman in a pink dress lying in the bed of the pickup truck, her left face swollen. And she says that she can't feel her legs. And she had come from an area on the outskirts of Lakai. Her entire house collapsed on top of her and the local hospital had no ability to x-ray her

to see if her back was broken or what was wrong with her. Wow. And so where do you go from the airport? So Andre and I started asking everybody, where should we go? And everybody says, don't go to Lakai. Go to the mountains and the hillsides that overlook Lakai. Because those are incredibly poor towns and villages. And you have houses that are just completely pancaked and are clinging off the sides.

And nobody knows the full scale of the disaster there. And we immediately start driving to the hills and the mountains that surround Lakai. So we drive out and the road is completely cracked. I mean, giant crevice through the middle of it. Entire boulders are in the middle of the road. And then you're just seeing people. I mean, we drove 25 kilometers. Everybody's camping outside of their homes.

You know, they brought plastic chairs to sit on the side of the road or their mattresses from their beds if they were able to recover them or they're just sleeping out on the grass because either their houses have been completely destroyed or they're so badly cracked that they just look like a layer cake that's been flattened and you can't go in when a structure is that unstable because it could collapse with any tiny little vibration so people are petrified and everybody's staying outside because i mean literally at this point i have seen no building that is spared in some way wow so we keep driving and eventually we get to this town about 25 kilometers or 15 miles outside of Lakai. And we enter this church complex with various buildings, including a seminary, secondary school, a guest house for visiting priests, you know, residences for the priests. It's all destroyed. I mean, just veins, marbly veins of just crevices that have been caused by the earthquake. And there's a bulldozer, men with sledgehammers, men with their

hands trying to rescue two women from the residence or a guest house, I should say, or a guest house, I should say, of this church complex. And nobody knows if the women are alive or not. So Andre and I come across this young man named Melchiorod Walter, and he doesn't live in the town, but his sister was there staying at the guest house and working. And as soon as the earthquake happened, he realized that he and his family were okay they started calling her and there was no answer so he hitched a ride and it was just the saddest thing he said something to me like i came here hoping to find my sister and then i saw this and he gestures to the scene and he said and now i have no hope. So I'm walking through this compound and I came across Father Courtney Fortuna. And he told me that he was just about to leave that morning when he felt a shaking. And then all of a sudden the entire house collapsed and he was miraculously spared. I mean, he said it was a miracle.

But the problem was that the front door was blocked from the outside by cement cylinder blocks and he was unable to open it. And so he found a corner of the house that hadn't collapsed and he sought refuge there screaming screaming screaming asking for help finally he heard his name being screamed by friends of his and he screamed back and said i'm here i'm here i'm here and with their bare hands they just start brick by brick trying to find him and he emerges from the rubble unscathed. I mean, tiny little wound on his left foot. Wow.

So Father Fortuna takes us further in, and he shows us the secondary school, which is second floor, just completely collapsed into the first. This school was built in the 1940s, and it serves about 870 students, he says. And a third of them are too poor to pay tuition, so they just waive the tuition fee. And he tells me that these kids, they get a hot lunch every afternoon. And for many of them, that's the only proper meal that they really have in the entire day. And, you know, I kind of start realizing that really the church is the institution. This is where people go and get help. This is the only institution of support that they know.

This is where they can educate their kids. This is where they can get maybe some medical aid. And this is where they have a community. And I'm asking him, what's going to happen? The church is really damaged. I don't see any buildings that can be used. And he tells me, Haiti is a country where every disaster is possible. And there's no government. And we must do what we can to provide for the population. He says that even if these buildings are not going to be repaired anytime soon, come what may, they are going to restart school in September. Because without them, without the church, there's nothing for these kids and they're going to be lost. We'll be right back. So, Maria, of all the damage that you're seeing near the epicenter of this earthquake, it feels like the cruelest is these churches because they represent really the social safety network in Haiti. Yeah, it is the safety network in Haiti.

And every single church that we came across, and we saw many, devastated. Either totally destroyed or marbled with deep cracks in the wall, totally structurally unsound. You don't want to spend any time underneath the roofs because really it could just all come crashing down on your head with any vibration. And a lot of people feel like, you know, the Catholic church, which has been there throughout is gone. It's just not there. There's no government and they've got nothing. You know, just a month ago or so, the president of this country was assassinated.

Right. You know, in this area of the southern peninsula that I did my reporting in, a giant hurricane swept through in 2016 and they haven't even recovered. haven't even recovered. And this hurricane brought a bunch of saltwater from the ocean into the agricultural fields that everybody in this area relies upon. And the soil is just embedded with salt and crop after crop has just failed. And people are poorer at this moment than they've ever been because they can't sell their crops. And then to have this earthquake happen, it just seems so unfair. And of course, there was another devastating earthquake in 2010. Yes, and that was in Port-au-Prince. And the devastation there is still on people's minds.

I mean, I didn't experience it. I wasn't here. But my team, two Haitian journalists and a Scottish security guard who happened to be here at the time, they all told me they had a really hard time sleeping in the days after Saturday's earthquake. all they kept thinking about was the images of bodies stacked on the street in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, people fighting in the street with knives over a bottle of water, the desperation, the inability to even walk into a hospital because the hospitals were so crowded, the morgues were just completely filled. And that trauma still lives with them today. Hmm. How do the people that you talk to make sense of the tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy nature of the last 15, 20 years in Haiti? How do they talk about it? in Haiti. How do they talk about it? I mean, people just, it's this really resigned way. You know, before my colleagues and I set off to Lakai, people were just looking at the beautiful vista from our hotel and shaking their head and just saying, I guide, like, this country just doesn't deserve this. Go on a helicopter ride from Puerto Prince to Lakai, as we did.

And it's just beautiful Caribbean sea and mountains. And some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen. And everybody's just like, how is this country in such a state? I mean, this is the type of place that should be prospering. It's got everything. It's beautiful. It's got everything. It's beautiful. It's got an amazing culture. And yet it's just one of the most devastating places I've ever been to.

And people are just, they just feel like they have no answers anymore. And they're really fed up of all of the tragedy that just seems to, it's just relentless. Hmm. Maria, you started to hint at this when you said that churches play such a central role in the lives of the Haitian people and that the government is not seen as the answer. And I imagine the government is even less equipped to handle the situation given last month's assassination. But is the government in any kind of position to offer any help to the

kind of people you're meeting? Absolutely not. I mean, one analyst I speak to actually says it's not a failed state. It's an aid state. This country has relied on so much aid. And what that has done has basically hauled out these institutions and not built up capacity for the government to do things like launch a major relief effort and distribute that relief. And my Haitian colleagues, I was asking them, you know, what's the situation? What NGOs are here? Who's doing what? We need to tally it for our reporting. And they were just completely shocked. They just said, there's just really not a lot of activity.

There's not a lot of aid coming in. You know, at this point, NGOs just are kind of tapped out. And there's just not enough money in the world right now for Haiti. There's just not, we're not seeing, you know, the immense amount of aid that other disasters in Haiti have attracted, including the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake. And we started asking people in Lakai and in town in the village that we went to outside of Lakai, who have you seen? Who's been here? Government help, NGOs, who's been here? And they all said, you're the only

outsiders that we've seen here. I've seen no one else. So these people are very much on their own. Yes. And that's exactly what they said to me. I mean, one example, when we went back into Lakai, we went up to the general hospital because we'd been in touch with a doctor there. And that doctor said that for the general hospital of Lakai, it was just him and one other surgeon for the entire hospital. And the hospital was so badly damaged. And they were using the parking lot as a triage center and an outpatient center. So they had this shipping container and they were doing surgeries there. But by nature of how small and tight that space was in that container, they couldn't do complex surgeries.

And they were turning dozens of patients away and saying, we just can't handle you. Your injuries are too serious. And they were asking them to go to another hospital, but that hospital was two hours away. And in the parking lot, you had just so many hospital beds where people who had just gone through surgery had been recovering. And we met this one woman who happened to be traveling through Lakai and decided, her and her husband decided, you know what, let's just stay the night. It's kind of late. So they decided to spend the night in Lakai at a hotel. And then the next morning, as they're getting ready to venture out again and continue their journey, the shaking started in their hotel. And as they were running out on staircase,

the entire staircase just overturned. And she had rubble that collapsed on her, but it was her left foot that was completely shattered by this rubble. And the rest of her body was relatively fine. And her husband, you know, in a panic started waving down passerbys, you know, help me, help me. Who can, who can take my wife to the hospital? And this one woman stopped and took husband and wife to the hospital where they then amputated her left foot. And she was under the shade of a tree in this hospital bed in the parking lot with chickens running up and down the parking lot. And I noticed that she had this bar of soap that she had balanced on the branch of the tree that was giving her shade. And I asked her,

so, you know, what's the situation here? And she said, we lost everything in that hotel, our wallets, our cell phones, everything. This woman who stopped and took me to the hospital, she saved my life. I mean, I've had to buy my own soap. I've had to buy my own medicine. I've had to buy my own food after the surgery. Hospital's not giving me any of that. And without her, I would not be able to do any of these things

because I lost all my possessions in this earthquake. And then I interviewed the woman and I said, you know, what made you stop? And she said, I've just learned that in this country, we have to rely on ourselves. There's nothing else. There's no other support network for us. It's just us. And how could I not help this one? How could I live with myself if I had just decided to pass her on the road and continue on my way? Maria, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. On Tuesday, tropical storm Grace pummeled Haiti,

soaking victims of the earthquake who are sleeping outside and impeding rescue efforts. So far, the death toll from the quake has reached nearly 2,000 people and the number of injured has surpassed 9,000. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In their first news conference since taking control of Afghanistan, Taliban officials said they planned no reprisals against those who had opposed them and said they would not allow prejudice or violence against women. But those assurances are being met with skepticism.

During their march toward Kabul, the Taliban was accused of carrying out multiple revenge killings, and the group brutally repressed women the last time they controlled Afghanistan. And the Times reports that classified intelligence assessments over the summer warned of the possibility that the Taliban could rapidly take over Afghanistan, and that the Afghan military could quickly collapse. Despite those warnings, President Biden publicly played down the prospect that the government might collapse and was caught off guard by the Taliban's final push into Kabul.

Today's episode was produced by Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, and Daniel Guimet. It was edited by Larissa Anderson, Rachel Quester, and Lisa Chow, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Dan Powell and Alisha Ba'itu. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.