by Jesse Hagopian

Since my family and I survived the te tromble—Creole for the 7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti—I have returned home with unshakable thoughts of life and death.

Only two days before the quake my son Miles and I had accompanied my wife, Sarah, to Haiti who works regularly in the country as an HIV educator for healthcare workers.  When the Enriquillo faultline shifted at 4:53 pm on January 12, 2010, our bed was sent across the hotel room, the other side of the building collapsed, and as we would soon find out, Haiti was devastated.  We had one Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) at our hotel and when the word got out that there was a trained medical professional, people began flocking to what became a makeshift medical clinic for hundreds of badly injured Haitians.  The EMT quickly deputized my wife and I as orderlies in his driveway “emergency room” and without any prior medical training, we assisted in whatever way we could—ripping sheets to use as bandages, setting splints, tying tourniquets.

It was during the second day after the quake that I witnessed, for the first time, someone die.  This beautiful boy was about eight years old and I remember he was wearing a bright yellow shirt with a graphic of the sun rising over mountains. His father had worked all night, a translator relayed to us, digging him out of the concrete debris that had been their home.  His son’s screams, which had served to guide rescuers to his location, had turned to irregular intervals of low moans by the time he reached us.  The boy was laid out on a cream-colored polyester blanket with part of his brain exposed where a brick had crushed his skull and his father knelt at his side blowing frantically into his mouth.  The father was not administering CPR—I doubt he had formal medical training—rather it was a devoted attempt to animate his son’s listless body with his own life force. Yet even as we began dressing his abrasion the boy took his final breath.  The father, with a look of anguish that made me avert my eyes, quickly fled the area to grieve in seclusion and the child’s motionless body lay on the blanket for some time before anyone could bring themselves to remove him.  I have since learned that some 270,000 other Haitians were also crushed to death by falling cement walls and ceilings—which were themselves a product of the crushing poverty that has left the people of Haiti with the barest of building materials.