The Exodus Begins - Exhausted Aid Workers Among those Leaving Haiti [View All]

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By Marc Pitzke in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

While the inflow of aid into Haiti is getting more organized, thousands are trying to flee the country. They include tourists, diplomats and reporters. And, increasingly, aid workers who are worn out by what they have experienced.

Christen Parker clutches a small, tattered notebook. "These are my stories," she says and shows pages and pages filled with cramped, scribbled writing, a gushing of words. Some are blurred, as if they have become wet. Others just break off mid sentence.


Parker, a slight bespectacled woman, is sitting on her backpack behind the half destroyed Port-au-Prince airport terminal. She is surrounded by countless other people who want to leave the city. They have been waiting for hours, some for days. Helicopters rattle through the air. A woman is nursing a baby with a bandaged head.

"My stories," Parker says again and then begins to read them aloud. She tells of a woman whose leg had to be amputated without anesthetic. A young boy who doesn't know if he still has parents. An old man who was rescued from the rubble of his home after five days only to die singing and praying.

By now, of course, these kinds of stories are well known. Yet Parker's graphic retelling reveals the horror all over again.

"It was so hard to hear all this," says Parker, with tears in her eyes. "But I wrote everything down. Every word. If I ever need courage, I will find it here."

Parker, 42, is a translator and lives in New York. She came with a University of Miami medical team to Haiti the day after the earthquake to help overcome the language divide between the doctors and the terrified, desperate patients. "In case of amputations we tried to give them one night to think about it so that they could get used to the thought. Hardly anyone said no." Parker wrote down everything that she translated.

She now sits in the midst of chaos. Hundreds are waiting at the airport to get out of Haiti. Most are Americans: diplomats, tourists, US citizens with Haitian family members -- and above all volunteers who came to Haiti to help and are now so drained that they can't bear it any longer. They have packed their belongings in suitcases, bags and sacks.

The exodus has begun.
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