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The smell of death hangs in the air everywhere. People who are masks, or they just use bandanas or kerchiefs. You know when you’re passing a house that has dead bodies in it. We just were racing along the road to try to get a connection to be able to speak with you. Signs in English, because that’s what people think aid workers will respond to, say along one building, “Dead bodies inside." Along another—and we’re in the capital of Haiti, we’re in Port-au-Prince, where, if there are any services, most of the service are—another sign said, "We need help. We need water. We need food.” And this is the situation all over Haiti.
I was just speaking with a doctor, doctors who came in from Denver Children’s Hospital and local hospitals in Colorado to somehow give relief. And he said when they came into the airport, they were shocked by the massive tents. Those tents contained aid, and also he said they were filled with soldiers, with doctors, with aid workers. And he said he could only think, why here? Why at the airport? Why not going out through Haiti?
And what we did yesterday is what few journalists have done: we left Port-au-Prince, and we went along the coast to Carrefour and to Léogâne. This is the epicenter. This is where the United Nations issued its statement, saying they acknowledge 90 percent of the buildings were down, that thousands of people were dead. But, they said, unless they could ensure security, they would not be providing aid there. Now, this is tremendously frightening.
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We talked to a young man who was there digging through cement. Imagine your porch, and you take your bare hands or a mallet. And he is digging. He’s covered in dust, in cement dust. And we asked him, “What are you digging for?” And he said, “My grandfather.” He said, “My grandfather.” We asked how he knew he was there, because he had made a circle, and he was digging within this circle. But, of course, while he was standing at our level, this was the second floor, not the first. And he said that his grandfather had gone into the kitchen to get his grandmother something to eat, and that’s when the earthquake struck, the tè tranble, he said. And that’s why he knew just where his grandfather was. And he had been digging for hours, in fact had just dug out his neighbor, a woman who was twenty-five years old, formed that same circle. And she was on the couch where she had rested after preparing dinner. And they had just brought her body out. The smell was overwhelming.
People everywhere, pulling at us. “Come to my house.” “No, to mine, to mine.” We went to a house. Again, remember, it’s as if we are looking at a bomb-scape. And we don’t even know where one house ends and another begins. And a group of young and old men and boys are standing at this house, and they show us to climb in the rubble. And we get up. And they have climbed, again made that circle, and they had smashed through it with mallets, with their hands, with hammers. And we saw the bassinet. They had just pulled out a one-year-old boy and buried him in the reeds, in the reeds next to the girl of twenty-five, some other young people, and where the young man’s grandfather would hopefully be, if he could find his body and bury him with dignity.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Amy—
AMY GOODMAN: These are the scenes of Haiti.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/19/haiti_is_shaken_to_the_core |
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