Those who have lost everything in last week's earthquake in southwestern Haiti, by not having, have no tears. In the Port Salut hospital, in the area most affected by the earthquake, a wounded man lying on a cardboard on the ground screams in pain while Chovel Arcy, a volunteer orthopedic surgeon who has arrived from the other side of the country, straightens his leg fractured. Aaaaiiiiiiii, aiaiaiaiaiaiaiiiii, mezanmi, mezanmi (oh dear! Oh dear!), Shouts the patient in the crowded room smelling of urine, while his wife puts a wet towel on his face. But he doesn't cry. About 30 kilometers away, in the Los Cayos hospital, a 25-year-old woman with a broken leg, Ylet Gertha, says that in the earthquake she lost a 10-year-old daughter, her parents and a sister. But he doesn't cry. "God knows what he's doing," he says. And ask:"Don't you have something to eat?"
Injured by the earthquake and their relatives, in a room of the Los Cayos hospital. Monica gonzalez
No one cries in the makeshift camp on the Los Cayos soccer field, now the epicenter of the tragedy, or among the tents erected in the Jubilet neighborhood, on the outskirts of that city, where hundreds of families who already had very They have lost that little bit and now live under structures made of sticks, plastics, sheets and cloth. "Children eat and sleep on the ground," laments Bosmand Sinal, a 27-year-old woman with two children, before showing one of the tents where a mother and her baby, born this Friday, rest on a mattress. But he doesn't cry. Outside, amid the gray piles of rubble and crumbling houses left by the earthquake throughout the region, squads of men swarm through the wreckage, hoping to find rebar to recycle or something that still works. But no one cries.
A worker at the Port Salut Hospital cleans the room where the wounded from the earthquake that struck southwestern Haiti on August 14 are treated.Monica Gonzalez
Everywhere there is indignation, there are desperate cries and demands for help that does not arrive.
And there are, above all, invocations to God.
But there are no tears.
“Do you know when you press and press a button a lot and sometimes when you press nothing happens ?, explains Dieunord Saint Louis, the medical director of a hospital in southeastern Haiti who has come to Port Salut with a team of doctors and nurses to help those affected.
"It is not because it does not hurt, it is because perhaps there is so much pain that you no longer know how to react."
The earthquake on Saturday August 14, which hit the southwest peninsula of the poorest country in Latin America, only increased the pressure on a territory that, in little more than a decade, has been hit by earthquakes like the one in 2010 left more than 200,000 dead and sowed destruction in the capital, Port-au-Prince;
by hurricanes like Matthew, which in 2016 claimed the lives of about a thousand people in this same region;
and it has suffered an endless series of economic, health and political crises that had their penultimate episode last month with the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, tortured and murdered in his own room by a group of Colombian mercenaries.
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"There is so much pain that you no longer know how to react
Dieunord Saint Louis
This month's earthquake, which has left almost 2,200 dead, more than 12,000 injured, at least 300 missing and more than half a million people with urgent humanitarian needs in the Sur, Nippes and Grand'Anse departments, once again shows all the evils that plague a country that seems doomed to an endless cycle of tragedies.
"It's like nature or events won't let us rest," says Saint Louis.
“But in the midst of all this, many of us have faith.
It seems to be our culture.
Despite the fact that the night is very dark, we hope that the day will come ”.
A buried christening
Saturday, August 14, should have been a holiday for Samson Stephene, a 4-year-old boy with a shaved head and shiny black eyes from which in recent days there have been tears. At 8:29 in the morning, when the earth shook, the little one was being baptized in the Church of the Immaculate Conception of Les Anglais, in southwestern Haiti. The temple built in 1902 did not withstand the earthquake. The facade collapsed on the attendees and about twenty of them died, including two of the boy's cousins - aged 2 and 16 - and three other relatives.
Samson survived, but the debris left him with an open wound on his foot that caused necrosis, as well as a broken arm and scratches on his face.
This Thursday, the team of volunteer doctors to which Saint Louis and Arcy belong had to amputate an affected toe.
Now, in the same crowded room where a few hours ago the orthopedic surgeon aligned a man's fractured leg with his hands, the boy awakens from anesthesia lying on a bed.
His mother, Lowfy Pierre, fans him with a towel, strokes his face, and brushes off the flies that land on his body.
Doctors Reginald Maluvision and Chovel Alcy amputate little Samson Stephen's toe at Port Salut Hospital Monica Gonzalez
She is focused on her work.
He does not want the child to suffer, but other worries run through his head.
The family, who live several hours from the hospital, have also lost their home, and taking the child for the cures recommended by the doctors will mean losing his job washing and ironing clothes.
"We need a place to live and food," says the woman, who has two more children.
"Even if you are an anesthetist, you have to talk to patients to see how you can help them, how you can improve things for these people and sometimes you have to give them hope," says another of the volunteer doctors, Reginald Malvoisin.
The 41-year-old man is from Port-au-Prince: he already knows the trauma left by earthquakes.
Eleven years ago he experienced the earthquake that destroyed the capital.
“We know that people are going to need medical help and psychological help.
That's why we came ”.
Like Saint Louis and Arcy, Malvoisin speaks Spanish with a Cuban accent. The three men studied in Cuba years ago as part of a program of the Government of that country that offered them to train as doctors for free on the condition that they return to Haiti to work in the most remote communities. Now they all belong to a program implemented by the American NGO Higgins Brothers Surgicenter for Hope, which has opened a hospital in the southeastern city of Fond Parisien, on the border with the Dominican Republic, to offer cheap surgical operations to those in need. An opportunity for Haitian health personnel not to go abroad.
Last Saturday, when he learned that an earthquake had struck Haiti, the founder of the project, Ted Higgins, picked up the phone from Kansas City and called the Fond Parisien hospital to send a mission to the affected places with the team that best He was able to tend to typical earthquake injuries: surgeons, trauma surgeons, an anesthesiologist, and a recovery nurse, as well as the medical director, who handled the logistics. The journey began as Tropical Depression Grace passed through southern Haiti and littered the camps where earthquake victims slept. “During the storm they packed the equipment and supplies and brought them to Port-au-Prince. They picked me up at the airport and drove through the mountains to avoid criminal gangs, ”says Higgins,who is a cardiovascular surgeon.
Reginald Maluvision holds Samson Stephen at the end of surgery.
Monica gonzalez
Like them, many doctors, rescuers and volunteers have encountered a problem when taking aid to the areas most affected by the earthquake.
To get to the southwest from the capital, the shortest route is through Martissant, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince that in recent months has been taken over by armed gangs that have perpetrated attacks and kidnappings and have made it increasingly difficult to transportation of people and goods.
The tragedy in the Southwest has also brought the security crisis to the surface and prompted the United Nations to call for a humanitarian corridor to be established to help the victims.
The gangs operating in that area announced a truce due to the earthquake. But that hasn't stopped two doctors from the capital from being kidnapped this week, including one of the country's few orthopedic surgeons, Workens Alexandre. That caused the hospital where he worked in Port-au-Prince, to which 50 of the earthquake victims had been sent, to close its facilities for two days in protest. On Friday night it was announced that the trauma doctor had been released.
Despite the fact that the dispatch of equipment and humanitarian aid by different countries has multiplied in recent days, in the affected communities the feeling is that they are abandoned, especially in rural areas and areas far from the two largest cities. affected, Jérémie and Los Cayos. "What are we going to do? We don't have a government here. We help each other. It is what we have as a quality in Haiti, even when we have nothing ”, said on Wednesday Charly Gonouse, a 72-year-old retired engineer who lost his home in the commune of Cavallion. The earthquake left him homeless, without food and without drinking water, a situation that health experts fear could lead to a health crisis or an epidemic such as the cholera that broke out in the country after the 2010 earthquake.
Red Cross volunteers arrive at Port Salut hospital with one injured by the earthquake.
Monica gonzalez
Haitians for Haitians
In 2016, before leaving office, the then United Nations Secretary General, Ban ki-Moon, apologized to Haiti for the spread of cholera after the 2010 earthquake. It was the first time the UN recognized its responsibility in such a stark way. and open, and it had taken him five years to do so: by 2011, an investigation by the US Center for Disease Control concluded that it was 'blue helmets' from Nepal that caused the disease to reappear. In addition to causing an epidemic, the flood of international aid that the country received eleven years ago led to a series of scandals of sexual abuse and waste by some foreign missions that sowed distrust among Haitians.
“In the South it is known that the capital is far away and that international aid is at the service of itself.
It is a lesson learned over the decades, "wrote the editor-in-chief of the Haitian daily Le Nouvelliste, Frantz Duval, in an opinion column published last Monday, two days after the last earthquake.
"To get up, the destroyed areas must open their eyes wide so that they are not robbed twice."
A child poses for the camera on the Los Cayos soccer field, converted into a refuge from those who lost their homes due to the earthquake.Monica Gonzalez
Chovel Arcy, the trauma surgeon who has operated on six earthquake injuries in two days, is not delusional about the number of problems the country has.
“Everybody knows it,” he says, “but the most important thing is that, when there are needs, you have to be there.
Although there are problems, we leave them to help the people of the South because they need our support ”.
For Higgins, “to see Haitians helping other Haitians is wonderful.
Because they don't have many things to give, they don't have many materials or equipment, but they give what they can ”.
That after all that Haitians have been through they do not give up is something that surprises him.
And he does not hide his pride in having promoted a project that works where everything seems doomed to tragedy.
"It's almost an oxymoron: we have something that works in Haiti," he says.
A child and a woman collect the bags of water that aid organizations have brought in the center of the Los Cayos soccer stadium.Monica Gonzalez
Dieunord Saint Louis believes that projects like this can teach that with the union many good things can be achieved for the future of the country.
"We have resources, but we must know how to put them together, unite better and take advantage of the potential of what we have," he says.
In the saturated hospitals that these days receive the wounded, like the one in Port Salut, all those words become foundations of something, meat against cynicism. Haitians who have already run out of tears, who have less than nothing to lose, still have other Haitians: a procession that accompanies a pregnant woman on her walk among other patients to help her break water before giving birth; family members who fan their sick in the middle of crowded and suffocating rooms; a 19-year-old Red Cross volunteer, Stephen, who has lost his home and goes every morning to carry patients on a stretcher.
This Wednesday, in the general hospital of Los Cayos, two young nurses wrapped the body of an old woman who had just died of diabetes in a sheet, in the middle of a room where they cared for several newborns: they had arrived in the world a few hours after the earthquake.
Each of her cries was a good sign.
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Credits
Text: Lorena Arroyo
Video and photo: Mónica González
Edition: Eliezer Budasoff
Visual Editor: Héctor Guerrero
Coordination: Guiomar del Ser and Brenda Valverde
Art direction: Fernando Hernández
Design: Ana Fernández
Layout: Nelly Natalí