This chapter is an intensely personal one for me. Like anyone who
has ever lived there, I remember exactly where I was - sitting in my car
at an intersection I was at daily on my way home from work - when I
heard the news of the earthquake on the radio. As soon as I heard the
magnitude, I knew what the number 7 meant. I looked at the Getty
station on the corner where I was waiting for the green light and
imagined it crumbled. I knew that many buildings I knew, loved, had
been in, had lived, studied, and worked in had been destroyed. I knew
that people I cared for, had taught or studied with were gone. I was not
prepared for this.
No, I had never been in the National Palace, but like the Getty station
I had been next to when I heard the news, it was a building I passed
four times daily on my way to and from work at the
Haitian-American Institute
where I taught English. That link goes to a whole new building. The
building where I taught was an old mansion on the east end of the
Champs-de-Mars on Rue Capois. Like the National Palace, it had
collapsed - probably while evening classes were going on at the busiest
time of day there.
On
July 4,1942, Haitians and Americans founded a bi-national center to
reinforce friendship and cultural ties between their two countries.
Located in the heart of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian-American Institute
has enjoyed decades of continuous community service and remains faithful
to the ideal of its founders.
The Haitian-American Institute
itself stands on a landmark site. The original building was the house
that once belonged to former Haitian President Elie LESCOT. This
building, pictured in the pen and ink drawing at the top of this page,
was destroyed in the January 12, 2010 earthquake.
It is a bi-national center run partially by the State Department. It's great to see this grand new facility!
In
the old building, I loved teaching at six in the morning in the
classroom on that very top floor. You could see the city waking up. I
would walk up the many flights of stairs early just to go out on that
balcony and watch for a few minutes before the students arrived. When
Dr. Ainslie Minor was director, as was his position as Cultural Affairs
officer at the embassy, he was often on the front steps to greet me and
the arriving students prior to the early morning classes. We all loved
him! He loved the institute and everything about it. We teachers were
disdained by some subsequent directors until Millie McCoo arrived.
She, too, loved the institute, the students, and the teachers.
Passing
the palace, on my way to work, I was usually on foot. I nodded to the
guards in the guardhouse every day - several times a day. I later
learned that the police headquarters adjacent to the palace had also
crumbled to the ground. I was in there regularly on my annual trek
through the ministries to renew my visas.
All of those ministries were gone. So were the people in all of them. All the people in all of those buildings. My
HAI and all of the government buildings.
It
was beyond my imagination, much the way the collapse of the twin towers
had been on 9/11. I heard the news only one traffic light away from
where, that September morning, I had heard that a plane had flown into
One World Trade.
How could it be? Who could have survived this? How on earth could my poor, dear
Haïti Chérie recover?
As I had over those
"green weekends" in June 2009
when the Iranians were protesting their elections, I took to Twitter. A
girl had texted, trapped in rubble beneath a supermarket that I knew.
One where I had shopped. Many of us continually retweeted her location
(and many others). 24 hours later, on the news, I saw her pulled out
alive and well and wept. The reporter said they had found her from the
tweets.
That tarmac, where I had boarded and disembarked so many,
many times was the tarmac where Hillary landed only five days after the
worst disaster in memory in that country - the very first high foreign
official to set foot on Haiti's shaken soil after the quake. This was
no photo op or campaign junket. Hillary's visit was from her heart. It
was dangerous, responsive, and crucial.
That, and much more was
in my heart as I started reading this chapter and Hillary's words about
landing at the airport that, when I lived there, was named for François
Duvalier and had undergone a major upgrade just before I left the
country for good.
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Hillary was in Hawaii on her way to Asia when the quake - that came to be known as "Haitiquake" - occurred.
January 13, 2010 by
still4hill
Hillary had to change her plans. She flew back to D.C. immediately.
January 13, 2010 by
still4hill
She was at the White House the next morning and the pain was in her face ... the terrible pain.
I
followed her progress to Haiti partially thanks to Greta Van Susteren
who tweeted generously from the plane where she sat beside Andrea
Mitchell and less so thanks to the old State Department Twitter that
went by the handle "Dipnote," which, in retrospect, was not so bad and
pretty democratic.
When Hillary landed I thought of her as really
and truly "superwoman." I am sure the Americans at the airport waiting
to be evacuated thought of her that way too - or as an angel of mercy.
She
was landing on menacingly shaky ground. People who demand further
service from her ought to consider the risks she has already taken, the
sacrifices she has already endured, the time in the air and on
sometimes dangerous foreign soil, away from her family. When does this
"superwoman" get a chance to step back and let someone else take the
reins?
January 15, 2010 by
still4hill
The
guy with the argumentative comment on that post was wrong. She did
come in by military transport, as I had predicted. She brought needed
supplies and left the press entourage behind to bring injured Americans
out. The purpose of her visit was to get an agreement from the
President of Haiti to allow American military to take over the airport
operations so that aid - waiting and blocked - could begin to flow.
Sometimes, in a disaster, you must, judiciously, let one important
visitor in for the greater good. Haiti was no textbook case. Who knew
there was such a thing as a portable airport control tower? That is
what the FAA sent and that would not have happened without Hillary's
intervention and visit, i.e. sometimes more is more.
January 15, 2010 by
still4hill
January 16, 2010 by
still4hill
January 16, 2010 by
still4hill
January 16, 2010 by
still4hill
January 16, 2010 by
still4hill
Over
the course of some of those posts I heard from some aircraft experts
that I had misidentified the plane as a C-130, but Hillary, in her book,
validates me. Sometimes it takes
years to be
validated! My dad was an aircraft expert, not I. He built them and
knew anything that was in the air that was not flapping its own wings.
But once you have been floating on the Hudson River and seen a C-130
over your head on its way to Newburgh, you know one when you see one.
It's sort of like the Queen Mary over your head.
January 16, 2010 by
still4hill
Hillary was accompanied by Cheryl Mills and USAID Director Rajiv Shah
(2nd and 1st on the right respectively above). Cheryl, from what
Hillary says, must have been the one who got the "people-finder" set up
as well as the text system for sending donations easily from your cell
phone.
Rajiv was on the ground at the Champs-de-Mars in front of
the collapsed National Palace where it seemed much of the Port-au-Prince
population was camping out. I remember him finding some enterprising
young folks who had managed to have two car batteries and one car. They
had set up an enterprise allowing people, for a fee, to charge cell
phones off one car battery while another of the crew ran a taxi service
to charge the other battery. It was
so Haitian!
January 15, 2010 by
still4hill
So
this is where she starts - on the tarmac which is serving as the seat
of government largely because it is flat and open and if you sit in a
tent and there is a big aftershock you won't be crushed. Most roads
were impassable and for the first 48 hours, planes could not land at the
airport.
January 15, 2010 by
still4hill
Hillary reminisces at this point about her honeymoon trip to Haiti when she and Bill went to one of
Max Beauvoir's voudou shows at
Le Péristyle in Mariani and saw
TonTons Macoutes
(VSN) and Jean-Claude Duvalier en route somewhere. 1975 was the first
Christmas that I came back home - well to Florida where my sister was
living. - or maybe I would have met them.
After the earthquake, President Préval told Cheryl Mills that he really needed Hillary and needed her
now! He was Hillary's friend. He needed help. I perceived him as a nice guy, but not as a strong leader.
January 18, 2010 by
still4hill
In
retrospect and fairness, and after having had my own house blown apart
by Sandy, I have to say that at the time I probably did not appreciate
Préval's state of mind with his house having collapsed before his eyes
(and thankfully not over his head) just as he and his wife were about to
enter. With most of his government officials missing or already known
dead, the poor guy must have been in deep shock. When you go through
something like that having a buddy like Hillary - well - yes, I would
call her, too. If I needed to pull my country together after something
like that - yes, I too would call her. But Hillary also sees that there
was a need for him to go out among the people camping on the
Champs-de-Mars and
everywhere. Their question/complaint at the time was "Where is our president?"
When
you run for the office, before you even win, you need to consider this
kind of situation and how you will react - even if you did just miss
having your house fall on top of you. That is the role you assume as
leader of a country.
Try to imagine the White House or the Capitol this way. This is what happened to Haiti.
When
Hillary arrived, injured Americans were being cared for by a devoted
embassy nurse who worked non-stop. Our Cultural Affairs officer,
Victoria DeLong, had been killed when her house collapsed on her. I
had been in that house several times on very happy occasions. Dr.
Ainslie Minor and his lovely wife, and later Millie McCoo had generously
invited the teachers to barbeques and parties. I had danced the
merengue under that roof and met Millie's sister and brother-in-law,
Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., there. Now that roof had killed a
Foreign Service officer.
There was a massive and effective U.S.
response. Hillary remarks that U.S. military felt so refreshed at being
welcomed somewhere.
One year we had no electricity from the last
night of Carnaval in early February until about mid-June. The lights
went out when Carnaval ended at midnight. From then on sectors got one
hour of electricity a day on a rotating weekly basis. If you needed to
do anything that required power, you needed to be home at your hour for
that week. If you were working at that time ... too bad. From
Boutillier, the mountaintop above the city, you could see a sector
darken and another light up on a clockwork schedule.
Then the
United States Marines arrived with generators and I don't know what all
else. I would be leaving my early morning classes at the institute (we
taught from 6 -9 a.m. and from 3 - 6 p.m. or 4 - 7 p.m.) and they would
be on the steps of the Hotel Plaza waiting to be picked up. We cheered
them every time we passed them. "Thank you!" Our electricity was
returning. Nice that after the earthquake the troops got the same
reception. We have a sort of edgy relationship with Haiti as far as
troops go. Americans built the best roads there - during the occupation.
In
this case, the distrust engendered by the history of the occupation
could have been Préval's political enemy. Yet to unblock the shipments
of aid at the airport and seaports, someone needed to be in charge -
not to take over the country - just to lubricate the flow of aid.
Hillary got Préval to sign an agreement that U.S. military would,
temporarily in the emergency, administer the airport and seaports.
January 16, 2010 by
still4hill
The
plan was to establish camps. Préval worried that putting displaced
people in camps would make camps permanent. The U.N. contended that
camps provided the best efficiency for necessary distribution of aid.
To my mind, and this is just me, the camps were newer, safer, cleaner than the neightborhoods
some
people had come from, like Cité Soliel, but many were not from those
slums, so there was something to be said on each side of the argument.
For
Haiti, the approach would involve both short-term aid and long-term
plans for development that had already been in the incubator.
January 18, 2010 by
still4hill
January 18, 2010 by
still4hill
January 19, 2010 by
still4hill
January 20, 2010 by
still4hill
The
outpouring of support and assistance from around the world has been
extraordinary, and I’ve been very proud to see generous Americans from
every corner of our country open their hearts in solidarity with the
Haitian people. These are the times when we remember our common
humanity, when we pull together across cultures and borders to help
those suffering and in need.
January 25, 2010 by
still4hill
Today,
Secretary Clinton announced that she will run an International Haiti
Donors Conference in March at the U.N. You may remember her words at the Haiti Donors Conference last April in D.C. That speech was simply spot-on.
March 15, 2010 by
still4hill
March 16, 2010 by
still4hill
March 31, 2010 by
still4hill
We
have had over 140 nations working to support the Government of Haiti in
delivering food, temporary shelter, and medical care to thousands of
survivors. But the emergency relief is only the beginning of what will
be a long road to recovery, as the Secretary General just pointed out;
one that will require global support.
Some people wonder, “Why
Haiti? Why this great outpouring of international humanitarian concern
and commitment to Haiti’s future? Why is Haiti’s fate of such
consequence to the region and the world that it deserves sustained help?
Why should we hope that this time, with our collective assistance,
Haiti can achieve a better future?” These are questions that deserve
answers and I believe that this conference will begin to do so...
Before
the earthquake, Haiti was on a path to progress. The government, led by
President Preval, had started enacting critical reforms. Haiti’s
economy grew by nearly 3 percent last year. Two international chains
launched new hotels, a sign of a rising tourism industry. New factories
were opening and others had been contracted to begin production. But
with the earthquake, the results of much of this hard work were wiped
away. But the people of Haiti never gave up. As they mourn their losses,
they gathered the resources they had left and began working around the
clock to put their lives and their country back together. They relied on
the strength and the spirit that have carried them through tough times
before. But they need our help. They cannot succeed without the support
of the global community, and we need Haiti to succeed. What happens
there has repercussions far beyond its borders.
Hillary
sees development as a key component in national security and USAID as
an essential agency which played a huge role in addressing long-term
plans to assist Haiti. She recounts the war against USAID waged by
Jesse Helms and celebrates this initiative which she and Rajiv Shah
initiated in 2011 and she proudly saw launched earlier this year.
April 3, 2014 by
still4hill
A year after the earthquake, Hillary returned to see the progress of
the response (including to the subsequent cholera epidemic) and met with
the presidential candidates. There remained many challenges but
things looked greatly improved.
January 30, 2011 by
still4hill
"Shifting
our focus from aid to development ... The United States was not
abandoning traditional aid ... especially as part of an emergency
response ... we sought to break the cycle of dependence that aid can
create .... Aid chases need; investment chases opportunity." (Hard Choices)
October 22, 2012 by
still4hill
She
recounts a personal moment with Préval after the disputed elections and
credits him for being the exemplar - the first in Haitian history - to
turn over the reins of leadership peacefully to a successor not of his
backing but chosen by the people. When she speaks of the toughness of
democracy, the danger of the running and the peril of the vote, my
memory rewinds to the Aristede election when Haitians literally risked
their lives at the polling places and some were, in fact attacked and
killed just for trying to vote. This time, indeed, there was progress,
and despite everything Préval might not have been, he, maybe, is their
John Adams in some ways.
These images of the former and current
presidents, Préval and Martelly, celebrating at the Caracol opening
together were historic.
In
the book, Hillary provides a thorough and fair accounting of what has
worked and what has not in the aftermath of this disaster. Shortly
after she returned to the department following her health crisis in late
2012, this report was issued.
January 11, 2013 by
still4hill
Helping
other nations build, profit, and rise among the economic powers on the
globe is to everyone's advantage, Hillary posits. Especially our own.
In the case of Haiti's disaster, the U.S. was, it cannot be disputed,
the indispensable nation, but we were certainly not alone in the aid or
in the investment, and that, Hillary points out, makes all the
difference.
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