I guess my Kreyol must still be okay (or um...okay-ish) because on Thursday night I was an impromptu labor coach. My day job is working with first time new moms, so I have a fair amount of experience with birth, but I am not one of those people who say “oh my goodness, please let me be present at this birth, I love the celebration of new life.” I am more the kind of person who says “well yeah certainly if you need me, but it's such a messy process” I am not so much into the baby coming out process.

Anyway, Heartline, the temporary clinic where I am working, usually runs a program for pregnant women. People have started to come again who are in labor, even people who haven't been a part of the program. This is part of the challenge facing Haiti: resources that were stretched super thin before aren't available at all now. This woman had a place picked out to have her baby, but that hospital is “craze' net” (completely destroyed) now.

So P.D. (as I'll call her) came in the late afternoon to have her baby with strangers. The baby's father hung out for a while and then took off. (PD had predicted this 'li pa gen patiense” he has no patience). And so, labor happened. I was in and out at first and then somehow, I got to play the good cop to the midwives' bad cop (they had to push her to squat, to drink etc) and I ended up impromptu labor coach.

Folks who know me know I am a perennial singer of weird songs, some of my own making. I started singing this song I had learned mostly in Miami, it's sung at demonstrations: “no se yon pep gi gen resistans” I guess one translation might be “we are a strong surviving people” and my favorite verse “nou bite' men nou pa tonbe” ('we trip but we don't fall') This is probably roughly equivalent to singing “We Shall Overcome” while someone is in labor. Maybe not the most appropriate, but I was making the best of my limited repitoire.

I was saying what I hope was helpful things “ you've done other hard things, you can do this too” and “you're doing great job, hold on”or “this is terrible pain but it's not the pain of dying, it is the pain of hope” blah blah blah or other such nonsense. At some point PD started singing my own words back to me “no, I can't do this, it's killing me” and “you're crazy if you think I will live after this, the sufferig it too much” And then I sang back to her “it is terrible, but there is a baby coming. The baby is coming soon.” It was a little bit of a strange operatic situation for a moment there.

PD delivered at 9.58 pm. Within minutes, the brilliant midwife and the labor/delivery nurse who were there had cleaned the baby up and PD was successfully breastfeeding him. I think the apgar scores were like 8/8 or 8/9. something like that. That baby (and PD, although of course very tired) looked good.

Holy crap, I mean seriously good.

The pain of hope rather than the pain of dying is a beautiful thing indeed.

Tags: haiti, haitian earthquake, port au prince

I was able to get into the clinic that was actually the plan A (Heartline Clinic) and I have been working there 3 days. It's just kept me too busy to do any updates of substance.

Yesterday morning we got up and headed for downtown Port au Prince to make the arrangements for where I would be working the next few weeks. I also wanted to see the Sans Fil area where I used to live & work, as well as St Vincent, which was the school I volunteered at when I first moved here.

So. Holy crap.

We almost couldn't find Sans Fil coming from Delmas. The neighborhood I'm sure has changed some since the time I lived here, but because so many of the buildings I would have used as landmarks don't look like buildings anymore we had to stop and ask directions a few times. The main entrance to Sans Fil is ringed by a good sized open air market that sells a lot of meat and has a rather um, distintive smell. That was ultimately the way I fgured out where we were.

You can't really drive through the market, so my friend John stayed in the car and I walked though. I ran into a family that I knew from when I lived in a small house on the nearby soccer field. I can't believe she recognized me after all these years. She even asked about my room-mate, who was also a volunteer with the Missionaries of Charity and became an MC, in fact, and stayed (unlike me of course). The Jardins (not sure about the spelling) said that most of the area was okay, mostly because people had small houses: even if they lost a wall they were able to get out onto the soccer field and be safe. All their extended family that lived in a house dowtown died when their house fell. “at least they were together” Marie Francis said. I didn't know what to say to that (I think this may be the theme of the next few weeks) so I just said “yes, together” and said the Kreyol equivalent of “hang in there.”

I stopped briefly at Sans Fil, which seemed to be in pretty good shape. I didn't know any of the nuns that were there, and they said they were pretty set with volunteers at the hospice and that they hadn't started the wound clinic back up yet. It was strange to be back in a place that was such an important part of my life and have just a 30 second business-like visit: those MC nuns can be positively unpleasant when they don't need what you have...heh story of my life as an MC. I figured I didn't exactly have the luxury of time for an existential crisis since I was supposed to be finding a place to help out in the middle of huge disaster.

The next stop was St Vincent's which is (or maybe I should say WAS) downtown, less than a few blocks from the National Palace. I definitely wouldn't have recognized it had I just been walking by. John and I stood for a moment trying to figure out if it was, in fact, St Vincent, and I asked someone who was walking by. He said we were indeed looking at the remains of the school. I had heard the building was damaged, but that all the kids got out. Several people walking by stopped to chat with us and they said that all the kids hadn't gotten out, they didn't know how many died, just “a lot”

We walked over to the Foyer, which is where the boys stayed. St Vincents was a school for kids with disabilities, most of the kids were from the provinces so it functioned as a boarding school, with the younger kids and girls staying at the main school and the older boys staying at a dorm a few blocks away.. The main entrance to the Foyer was open and so we walked in. It was empty except for some guys cleaning up the mess. I explained I used to work there and asked how things were going. Francis, one of the guys' dorm parents appeared and began telling me about what happened there during the earthquake. He pointed to a wheelchair sitting by itself, covered in dust, surrounded by broken concrete blocks. Apparently one of the kids was sitting in the chair under a concrete overhang and was killed immediately. They removed his body for his parents, but no one wanted to touch the chair.

We stood around and talked for a while, Francis told me he lost four brothers in the quake. We talked about how much misery Haiti could withstand. We talked about how long folks had been trapped under the rubble and how many had survived that were presumed dead. Francis said “The misery of thee Haitian people has made us strong” After a silence, I said “yeah you know white people. We can't go three days without a mcdonald's let alone under a bunch of rocks.”

I held my breath for a moment and everyone in the yard laughed. Um. Yeah.

Francis said two of the boys' bodies were trapped upstairs, that they couldn't get them out, and that their feet were still visible. He asked me if I wanted to see them. I didn't, not even a little bit so I said “um, no thank you” in a way that I hoped was respectful. We shook Francis' hand and he thanked us for stopping by.

He thanked us even though we had done absolutely nothing.

Well, we had listened. I just keep coming back to that. People really want to have their stories heard.

 

 

It certainly could have been much worse. Before we even left JFK I imposed myself with a group that was headed to the bus terminal and we became a spontaneous team, traveling together the whole way and having as much as we could considering the bus transfer/ride took us nearly 12 hours after having spent 4 hours on the plane. .Luxon, our spontaneous leader declared us a family and collected information so we could friend each other on facebook later. Facebook saved my butt that day, BTW, because I couldn't reach John (my friend who was coming to pick me up) by actually calling him using my cell phone, but I could get on-line to on my phone and write on his FB wall. Anyone reading his FB that afternoon was treated to hourly updates "hey John, got the Caribe bus, supposedly leaving at 11 am, will let you know when I cross the border" and "Um, we still haven't crossed the border yet" and "Uh we're at the border, but we've been sitting here for a couple of hours" etc you get the picture. In the end, my seatmate Gregory let me use his phone so I could call John directly. Most of us in roving band are from the NYC area, Gregory lives a few stops away from me in Flatbush, so I am hoping to cook folks dinner in thanks when we all get back. Not getting a thank you dinner? The Caribe bus company. They're charging twice as much for tickets from Santo Domingo to Port au Prince now as they were before the quake. Since commercial flights haven't started yet, the bus is one of very few ways people can get into the country to see their families. Impressive humanitarian show there guys, way to keep families apart!

Er, actually a note about my notes:

Anyone within shouting/facebook.blogging distance of me since January 12 has had to listen to my rants about the way the mainstream media has been covering the quake and Haiti in general, and more specifically not talking to Haitian people, who seem to be treated mostly as pesky background noise to the relief efforts. I certainly don't want to replicate that, on the other hand, je pa we, ke pa tounen. (what the eye doesn't see, doesn't touch the heart” (all Kreyol spellings guaranteed to be atrocious BTW). While the world's eyes are on Haiti now, we have a pretty established history of forgetting other people's pain (it seems to be the forte of the human race in general) and I am hoping that if what we see really stays in our hearts, we will be more inclined to dig in for the long haul and not forget Haiti once it is displaced from the front page by the next professional athlete steroid scandal or Madonna having a breast reduction or something important like that.

Because I am having computer problems so it's taking me a while to write and upload, and I don't want to do mere sound bites if I can help it. Therefore, updates will be delayed a bit. I may do some shorter news on facebook, mostly quoting the words of a specific Haitian person describing their own specific situation/story or some other news if I feel like I can do it in a respectful way.

My pals Dale Sorenson and Michelle Dobrawsky have awesomely made tonight's Superego Showcases into "Send Kelli to Haiti" fundraisers. I'll be opening both shows with a few funny stories about Haiti. Like maybe "Haiti: Now With 50% More Dumb White People" A little appetizer:

In 1987, when I first went to work in Haiti, I was 18 years old, those multi-colored floral jams were in, and I owned a single pair. Until one night, I didn't.

In Kreyol the words for "spit' and "listen" as well as the words for "kidney" and "queen" sound very similar when coming from a novice speaker's mouth. even more so when the aforementioned novice speaker insists that they are pronouncing the aforementioned words correctly.

In Kreyol, the word "li" can mean (among other things): "he" OR "she" OR "it." Can you imagine where I'm going with this?

The 6.30 show is at NYCC, the 9.30 show is at Ochi's (ie upstairs at Comix). Details here.

Isn't it fun learning Kreyol vocabulary through LJ travel updates?

After a late night conversation with my host, we decided that doing the ol' flying into the DR, bus to Port-au-Prince thing was the best option. Wish I was just a little better on a pogo stick. It would be good to have a bouncey alternative.

So that's what I'm doing. Thanks for all the charter leads (especially the amazing mispandora !) and while hopefully I won't need to use them, you can believe I saved all those phone numbers, just in case.

I was also thinking about calling in my Leonard Nimoy connection because, c'mon, don't celebrities know about charter jets? I think Heather would approve of massaging that particular connection for this particular situation. I kind of like the mental picture of Spock in his Starfleet best, coordinating a delivery of nurses and docs to PauP.  Maybe even helping by carrying a big box of sterile 4 by 4s.

okay helpful community. delta was supposed to resume flights today but did not. going to research charter flights as soon as i can leave this terrible poetry slam. but if anyone has leads on a seat on a charter flight to port au prince let me know. would prolly be a group with an extra seat. ideally feb 1 but cant be picky at this point. pl please please boost the signal. will go through the dr if i have to but that's a long haul and not easy to get through.

So I finally just did the degaje (Kreyol for the work around) thing and asked folks I know who are working/living in haiti and are engaged in some non-profit helpywork, if they needed help. I got back a "yes" right away.

( here's what I'll be doing and what (if you wanna) you can do to help )

What they apparently teach about covering Haiti in journalism school.
1. Don't bother to learn the name of the neighborhood you're reporting from. The generic term "Port au Prince slum" will work fine, even though "slum" has no precise meaning or purpose beyond othering the area.
2. Feel free to proclaim a specific area "devastated" by the earthquake without ever looking at any "before" pictures to see if that's actually true, otherwise folks might be reminded that we've been ignoring how bad things are in Haiti for a while now.
3. Always make sure to describe expressions of sorrow in their most extreme physical manifestations so as to continue with the othering mentioning in #1.
4. Photographers, always show white people calm and black people not calm.
5. The more the subject in a photograph is suffering, the closer the shot should be. If you encounter a person who is very close to death and is actually screaming in pain, the camera lens should actually touch their face.
5. Describe all people who eat food procured in ways other than taking what is handed to them by white people as "looters." These same people should be described as "traveling the Port au Prince slums in lawless gangs" even if they are just a family out searching for drinking water.