Prose of death

The capital of Haiti has turned into a city where the dead are disposed of like garbage, and life resembles paintings from the Apocalypse

To one of the field hospitals deployed by rescue services in Port-au-Prince, 29-year-old Max-Darlene Azor traveled with an open leg fracture for almost three days. The bodies of her uncle and aunt were left in a collapsed house in the prestigious Petionville neighborhood, built on a hill. In the end, she and her mother managed to reach the central square of the capital of Haiti. There she was met by a Newsweek correspondent - the girl was lying on a cardboard and moaning in pain.

Her leg will be operated on, but then she will have to go back to the square, which is located opposite the collapsed presidential palace and is called the Field of Mars. In recent weeks, it has become a gigantic refugee camp. Those who are very lucky sleep in tents, and most do not even have a piece of cardboard to put under them. At night, by the light of burning tires over the Champ de Mars, religious psalms are carried.

Statues of the founding fathers of the nation - Dessalines, Christophe, Pétion, Toussaint-Louverture and Capua - serve as a hanger for wet clothes. In the shade of Toussaint, several old ladies sleep. They arranged their shoes in a neat row, and against the backdrop of total chaos, such an order looks absurd. Children squeal and cry, some families cook something on small braziers, people swear at soft drink vendors.

There is a stench of excrement over the square - in Haiti it has always been unimportant with sewage, but now people prefer this smell to the heavy spirit of death that has soaked the whole city. Out here, they say, at least nothing else will fall on them. Fears are not groundless - every day after the earthquake, either during the day or in the middle of the night, weaker tremors are felt, which are quite enough to finish off the half-surviving buildings. Their mangled concrete skeletons hang over the streets like a sword of Damocles.

“People in the square told us there was nowhere to go – all the hospitals had collapsed too,” says Elange, Max-Darlene's mother. - It was scary to move around: thousands of people poured into the streets, everyone was screaming, dragging bloody bodies, fighting. There was no crowding, and some streets were filled with rubble so much that it was impossible to pass. The country is simply over, over!”

TALK WITH FATHER

On January 12, the earthquake spared neither the rich nor the poor. Under the hill - the ruins of the slums, on the hill - the ruins of the villas of the suburb of Petionville, a haven for diplomats, businessmen and tourists. One of the villas collapsed, but the round pool in the yard, lined with blue mosaics, remained intact. After a couple of hundred meters, a rescue team from Colombia is digging up the ruins of the Montana Hotel.

“We found three survivors, literally just now,” one of them says. - One woman can speak, others have lost consciousness. Let's try to get to them. It will take many hours." The task seems wild. From the graceful building, columns and boutiques, a concrete crumble was left, covered with a surviving roof. The ground underfoot shakes again, and rescuers drive out of the ruins of an overly emboldened Japanese reporter.

In the courtyard of the hotel, Dunel Laurent, an employee of the Haitian Ministry of Health, and his two brothers are sawing boards for coffins. The body of their father Andelor Laurent was taken out at night from under the ruins of the hotel. Mother during the earthquake was in the church, which was also razed to the ground.

Andelor, who worked in a hotel bar, managed to survive the earthquake itself. “We talked with my father for 12 hours,” says Dunel, “we managed to make a little progress, but there were not enough tools. The father said that he could not breathe and that his leg was injured. I think he even drank there.”

Finally, American rescuers came to the rescue. They punched a big hole in eight layers of concrete. By that time, Andelor had already died. “But the cashier, Mademoiselle Darling, was alive. And we will bury my father in the Malik cemetery, on the opposite hill,” says Dunel.

LET YOUR GOVERNMENT CALL

Coordinating dozens of rescue operations proved to be difficult. A lot of time was wasted in traffic jams. Some teams, having received a signal from the local population about voices heard from under the ruins, went to the place to find rescuers from another country there. Other teams tried to check the messages by sending a couple of people with dogs to start with. And rescuers were sent only if signs of life were found.

With the coordination of methods of work, too, everything is bad. The Europeans, who discovered a living woman under the ruins of one of the houses, began work. At this time, the Haitians, who were working on the other side of the ruins, decided to act on their own. They connected a bulldozer to the case, and soon accidentally cut off the woman's head.

The UN headquarters, which has turned into ruins, is no longer alive. Rescuers work there - Chinese, Filipinos, Brazilians. A Frenchman is trying to supervise them. “All six floors collapsed. My wife was there too. We worked here for five years,” he says.

Israeli rescuers disassemble the rubble of the building of the tax office. “The whole building is full of corpses - the legs of one stick out right here, one and a half meters away, we had to cover it with a bag so that we could work,” says Nir Hazut, a rescuer. The Israelis found one survivor, 59-year-old director Gilles France. They made their way to him for five hours, put on a drip and began to pull him out. “Have you really flown half the world to save me? - asked the taxman lying between the pipes, wires and crushed faxes and, having received an affirmative answer, asked: - Give me the phone, I will call your government to say thank you.

When Frans collapsed, he managed to call a relative and give his coordinates. “I thought our building collapsed. And he tells me: the whole city is in ruins and they won’t get to you soon, ”he recalls, lying in a hospital bed. “I was waiting for the civil servants to be dealt with earlier than others, but as the days passed, I began to lose hope.” Frans could only move his right hand. Somewhere nearby, a woman's voice was heard, but then it faded away. On the third day, my whole body ached. They saved him on the fifth day after the disaster, when he was already completely desperate.

CITY OF THE DEAD

In the first couple of days after the earthquake, everywhere you could see people who were rummaging through the ruins with their bare hands, trying to shout to their relatives and friends. But then hope gave way to apathy. “Our house has collapsed, my mother has died, we have nowhere to go and no help so far,” says 23-year-old Evans casually, climbing out of a tent in a refugee camp.

Residents of the capital of Haiti have adapted to live next to the corpses. At the beginning of last week, in the Delmas district, sheeted bodies lay outside houses every few meters. Cars drove past, women carried some boxes on their heads, and merchants unfolded trays with fly-infested chicken legs, coal and water, prudently covering their noses with a bandanna. The dead - and there are tens of thousands of them around the city - were simply ignored at first. The bodies were periodically picked up by a truck. He drove them out of town and dumped them into a hastily dug hole like garbage. There they were burned.

The city is dangerous. Cars with rescuers and trucks with humanitarian aid do not risk leaving protected areas without escorts armed to the teeth. Local policemen are not visible - they save their own families.

Ruins remained of the central police headquarters, which also served as a prison. Prisoners fled, about 30 policemen died under the rubble. From one corner of the building comes the smell of decaying bodies. There is a group of policemen standing there. What they are waiting for is unclear. “Many friends died here, the head of the department is also considered missing,” says police officer Steve Belize. Rescuers were here, but they did not find the living and left. The surviving police officers would like to do their duty, but those who could give them orders are no longer there.

At nightfall, the city turns into a death trap. With marauders these days they are treated simply - they scare away with shooting. Bandits, who still have nowhere to put, are shot on the spot. On the fifth day after the shock, the bodies of three of them were thrown out near the city cemetery.

There are also casual victims of lawlessness. Milton Martos, 57, from the Dominican Republic, lies outside on a cot and says he's come to see the president's ruined palace. There, on the square in front of the palace, they got into a shootout. “The thief tried to steal something from the stall, people chased him, shooting began - a bullet struck my friend in the face, and hit me in the back. Miraculously, he survived,” he says. The bullet was pulled out for him, the pressure was stabilized, but they demanded to immediately make room for the next patient.

WE DO NOT ACCEPT BODIES

In the Dominican field hospital, all operations are carried out on ordinary tables in the open air. After treating the wounds, people are laid down on the asphalt, where relatives drive annoying flies away from them.

Until the American military hospital ships arrived, the tent hospital that the Israeli army set up on the football field is considered the best. In the tents, resuscitation and children's departments were set up. A third of the doctors in the hospital are from Russia. The hospital operates 24 hours a day - under an agreement with the UN, the most severely injured are delivered there. Processing an open fracture in the operating room takes half an hour - like on an assembly line. Amputations are made even faster.

Nine-year-old Wilsmith Joseph winces in pain as he tries to get used to his new crutches. At night, his gangrene-affected toes were amputated, and in the morning he was given antibiotics and asked to make a bed for the next patient. The older brother explains that they are going to a refugee camp. “We don’t have a home,” he says.

Doctors have no choice whether or not to leave the operated ones. There are only forty beds, and tens of thousands of wounded. “It is clear that this is an abnormal pace and abnormal conditions,” says Dr. Alexander Zegerman, an anesthesiologist from the intensive care unit. - There are almost no such places in the world - there is always at least some kind of rear where you can send the victims. And there's nothing here."

A two-year-old girl with an open hip fracture is connected to the artificial respiration apparatus - her head shudders from every jet of air. The girl had to be resuscitated twice during the night. In a neighboring tent, a healthy baby was born that same night - the fourth son of 26-year-old Jean-Michel Gialan. “This is symbolic and proves that if a woman is pregnant, she will give birth, even if the earth is shaking,” smiles gynecologist Dar Shir.

Another new patient is a one-year-old baby just pulled from the rubble with superficial wounds. When examined, he does not cry, only a barely audible squeak, but immediately grabs a bottle. Nobody knows his name or relatives. Several countries have already announced fast track adoptions for children from Haiti. It is possible that the rescued baby will soon go to new parents.

A dark blue pickup truck drives into the yard of the only surviving hospital in the city. There are no hospital beds left for a long time, most patients sit on the ground in the yard, a few behind a thin green screen. The screams of the wounded are heard. Five guys jump out of the back of a pickup truck. They drag out the mattress to which the sheets-covered bodies are tied. Swollen blackened legs stick out from under it, a cloud of flies soars above the body. The guys stack their stinking cargo here in the yard, quickly jump into the back, and the car reverses. But then a nurse jumps out with a wild cry, and an armed UN soldier runs up behind her. The nurse angrily demands that the family pick up the corpses. The mortuary is already overloaded, and there is not enough space in the hospital for the living. As a result, they have to take away the mattress with the bodies. Forgotten in the midst of the bustle, a small white bundle with the body of a three-year-old child remains in the yard.

ABROAD

The aid that began to arrive in Haiti was delayed, largely due to technical problems. When gasoline supplies ran out, planes with humanitarian aid began to be sent to the Dominican Republic, which shares the island with Haiti. From there, the goods were transported by cars, and as a result, they appeared in Haiti with a delay of a day. Only ten water treatment plants have reached the city. Therefore, the only source of drinking water for many was a narrow, dirty canal.

The Dominican Republic shook only slightly, but the consequences of the tragedy began to be felt after a couple of days. Field hospitals in the border regions of the country filled with thousands of wounded - and here too there are not enough doctors and medicines. In one of these hospitals, where we visited, fractures were fixed with cardboard and ropes.

The Dominicans hurried to send help to Haiti - ambulances, field kitchens, volunteer detachments. Although the Minister of Foreign Affairs ordered to facilitate the entry of the wounded from Haiti, checkpoints with armed soldiers appeared in the border zone in order to prevent a massive flow of refugees. Our documents were carefully checked at four checkpoints.

In many places of entertainment, Dominicans have decided to observe mourning for their neighbors, calling them brothers and sisters. But local residents are still worried: relatives crowding around makeshift hospitals are turning cities into refugee camps and do not want to return home. Many have nowhere to return.

Haitians, without any earthquake, left their country by the thousands - the poorest and most dangerous in the entire Western Hemisphere. A thousand kilometers to the north is Little Haiti, Miami's immigrant neighborhood. Here everyone is trying to contact relatives and thank fate for the fact that they managed to leave on time.

“I dial their numbers endlessly, one after the other, and so far no one answers,” says John Sebin, who arrived in Miami in 1981. - No brother, no sister, no uncle, no aunt, no friends. Complete silence. Hopefully it's because they haven't found a way to get in touch yet." However, he fears the worst: all relatives lived in two of the three most affected areas - Delmas and Carrefour.

John is unemployed, and therefore these days he drives his neighbors to the church of Notre Dame de Haiti in his old pickup truck. Someone is praying, someone is helping to collect humanitarian aid, and those who have already received a message about the death of relatives are looking for support from others. Nobody turns off their cell phones in church these days.

Sebin's prayers are skeptical. He is more reassured by the decision of the US administration to freeze the deportation of illegal immigrants - about 800,000 immigrants from Haiti live in the US. "People will be able to work and send money home, and the country will be restored, and America will not be left behind," he said. According to him, in the United States, many Haitians live below the poverty line. “But after what happened, I vowed never to complain again,” says the immigrant.