The Dividing Line (story on Haitian earthquake)

[n2doc]

By. Wright Thompson

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The man who died is buried in an unmarked grave. The digger worked fast that night. Business was good. He jammed the coffin into the opening at the bottom of the above-ground crypt, and when it got stuck, he covered the end in a half mound of quick-set cement. Before going on to the next grave, he scratched "Died on 12 2010" into the wet concrete. Just a day and a year. No month. No name. No epitaph. When the sister of the man who died sees the shoddy job for the first time, she stares at the grave, and then at the digger, her pain turning to anger, storm clouds rolling down her face, her anger building, casting its own shadow. She looks at the anonymous grave and she screams.

The man who lived stands before the entrails of his office. He's confronted by evidence of the thing he now knows in his bones: The line between living and dying is thin, a few seconds making all the difference, a capricious reality that has little to do with faith or good works. The Haitian Football Federation headquarters looks like it got killed in a slaughterhouse. A three-story building pancaked into a story of rubble. Ripped sheets of tin rising at morbid angles. Tangles of iron rebar turned to balls of spaghetti. Femurs of concrete snapped in half. Some bricks came out in pillars, 8x2, and others came out one by one, gathering like pools of blood. The everyday accouterments of office life disemboweled: hollow hard drives … the innards of printers, red and green and blue wires hanging from the back … splintered desks. The man who lived spots his office chair amid the waste; it's just brown stuffing now, shapeless. Mostly, he sees faces. Thirty-seven people died here, including one of his best friends, who now rests in an anonymous grave. Three of the dead are buried on the side of the lot beneath a tree. Thirty-three remain beneath the rubble, lost forever. He thinks of them, trapped, their last hours filled with terror, and he thinks of those who escaped, standing outside this building, helpless. "We heard them, but we couldn't do anything," he says. "They were banging. One of them banged for three days."


http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=100427/Haitisoccer