Faults and Sins
Haiti is no stranger to tragedy. Generation takes a look at the impoverished nation through the eyes of the Haitian people.
God is not responsible for the devastation in Haiti. God is not to blame for the country’s 32 political coups, its slavery-stained history or its title as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, according to Pierre Fouche, the people of Haiti hold God close to their hearts—even as the devil’s face of destruction greets them at every corner.
“My people are a very strong and resolute people,” he says, clearly offended by televangelist Pat Robertson’s allusion that Haiti made a deal with the devil for freedom from France in the early 1800s. “My people believe in God and are true believers. Last Sunday, they were having services on the ruins of the churches. They were having services despite what happened. They were attending masses. This is saying something—that my people believe in God.”
Fouche, 32, has devoted his life to his country. He’s working on his doctorate in earthquake engineering at UB’s MCEER, the Multidisciplinary Center in Earthquake Engineering Research. His goal: to learn as much about earthquakes and engineering for natural disasters as possible—and then take that knowledge back to his native Haiti to benefit its people.
Fouche’s timing is tragic in Shakespearian proportions. He’s one of the few Haitians who are acquiring the skills necessary to develop buildings to protect the nation from an earthquake’s forces and is just shy of obtaining his Ph.D. But Fouche was unable to help his country before a magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake destroyed Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding communities, and took the lives of over 80,000 of his countrymen on Jan. 12.
Fouche was at his house in the University Heights when he first heard the news. His first thoughts went toward his family.
“I was upset because I didn’t know how my family was doing. I could not reach them. I spent the night trying to reach them and it was impossible,” he says. Fouche wouldn’t breathe his first moments of relief until the next day, when he was able to contact his sister in Florida and found that none of his family was injured.
“Their house didn’t collapse, but in that moment everyone was shaken, both physically because of the motion of the earthquake and emotionally because of what had happened,” he says.
When Fouche surveyed the destruction on his television, his mind went to the people of Haiti. “I wondered how many people had died because the first picture I saw was that dust cloud over the city, and when you have that you know there is major, major destruction,” Fouche says; sorrow spilling from his lungs as he speaks. “The buildings had pancaked—one floor fell on the lower floor and you have this domino effect and the entire structure is underground.”
Meanwhile in New York City, Vannah Gourdet, a sophomore who recently transferred from UB to SUNY Queens, was horrified by the news about her family’s country.
“On Wednesday morning, when I watched the news and actually saw what was happening I was like ‘oh my gosh,’” she says. “My mom was trying to reach everyone. They had no reception. The cell phone towers went down in the earthquake.”
Gourdet, whose parents are both Haitian immigrants, says that her uncle was nearly killed by the earthquake when the dirt road he was walking on began to collapse.
“Basically the road split in half and one leg was on both sides of the split,” she says. “He said God saved him that day because he was right in the middle.”
The People are Patient
Gourdet eventually learned that her family endured the disaster, though many others were not so lucky. The Haitian government estimates that between 100,000 and 150,000 people perished since Jan. 12—but the United Nations has said that due to a breakdown in government facilities such as hospitals and morgues, the world may never learn the exact number of lives lost. The process is complicated by the fact that rescuers were still pulling people out of the rubble over a week after the incident. Against all odds, a young boy named Kiki was pulled from the rubble on Jan. 21 after spending nine days trapped under debris.
The number of injured is significantly higher than the number of dead, with many placing the figure in the hundreds of thousands. Sadly, that number continues to shrink due to the breakdown in medical services in the nation—many Haitians simply cannot find help for their injuries and illnesses. Ophelia Dahl from Partners in Health estimates that “… as many as 20,000 people will die each day that would have been saved by surgery.”
Many Haitians, already disillusioned from years of neglectful government and poverty, now feel absolutely hopeless, Gourdet says. Even with aid streaming into the country from the sky and the sea, many have failed to find food and clean water.
“My uncle called explaining his struggle to find food and water in Kafoo. He said there are still bodies everywhere and the people are burning them to get rid of them, since there is nowhere to bury them. The stench of their decaying flesh is unbearable,” she says. “Waney, Pétion-Ville. Those places didn’t even receive aid yet. And they’ve been there how long? A week? They’ve received no food, no water. The people can’t get to Port-au-Prince. The roads are blocked anyway.”
Gourdet expressed dismay about the relief efforts so far. “I feel if they really wanted to they could have landed in other places and set up shop there instead of just dropping food to cause more chaos. The people are hurting each other for food; they are killing each other for food—and on the news they’re making them look like animals. The people are starving … I think anyone would do the same—they’re just trying to help their families.”
Fouche finds fault in the media’s coverage of the event. Instead of focusing on finding ways to help the people and showing images of the heroism unfolding on the island, the news is focusing on the violence, the looting and the maiming—which he says is limited.
“Most people are incredibly courageous and are waiting. Not everyone is stealing and looting like they are showing on TV—this is just for the news,” he says. “The majority of the population are just waiting for someone to come to help them. They are just waiting.”
Shallow Shakes
Haiti teeters on a fault line called the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault. The fault runs from Jamaica to the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, and is responsible for the creation of the islands. The rock is generally sturdy—it moved 20 millimeters east last year—but the surrounding plates have been slowly pushing against the fault since the last major quake in 1760. The plates tend to move less than major faults, such as the ones found under California, but when they do move, they push with exponentially more force.
On Jan. 12, the fault finally allowed the plates to slip, creating a 7.0 Mw magnitude earthquake just six miles under the earth. Shallow earthquakes equate to more devastation.
“This was a shallow earthquake … so the seismic waves didn’t have time to attenuate before they reached the surface and that causes a lot of damaging shaking,” says Dr. Andre Filiatrault, director of MCEER. “It happened close to a major city with a lot of buildings that are not engineered, mostly they are made of unreinforced masonry or poorly constructed reinforced concrete, prime candidates for damage.”
The earthquake proved to be so destructive, Fouche says, due to a lack of standards imposed by the government. “Nobody was giving anyone any type of warnings [about building codes]. They were doing everything they wanted to do. Most of the buildings were not fit to withstand earthquakes. Many of those buildings were not designed by engineers or architects. The people sometimes go ahead and build the houses themselves. They are not designed to any code.”
Fouche says that even when an architect designs a building in Haiti, it is generally not build to withstand an earthquake, and often can barely handle the load that a normal building should be able to withstand.
“[Sometimes] they can’t handle the gravity load, the weight of the building and the furniture inside of them,” he says. “The buildings were designed only for vertical loading, when you have lateral loading they will simply collapse; they were not designed to handle that type of load.”
Haiti’s emergency structures are no different, according to Filiatrault.
“Haiti’s emergency buildings—those that need to stay functional after a disaster, such as hospitals, fire stations, communications towers—were not built to more stringent standards as they are in other countries,” Filiatrault says.
They too came crashing down when the tremors sent the land into convulsions, leaving the sick, injured and dying with no place to go and nowhere to turn.
“The Haitians have a saying that felt particularly raw under the onslaught of last year’s hurricanes: that Haitian houses can ‘fool the sun but not the rain’,” says Patricia Polowy, a clinical instructor at UB’s School of Nursing. “But there is no such resigned saying about earthquakes to provide what cold comfort it might, as there is no precedent for an earthquake of the January 12th magnitude.”
The Storm Before the Calm
Polowy is afraid for the people of Haiti. She’s traveled there eight times before with a medical team to provide basic health care and health education, so she’s familiar with Haiti’s health problems, and she fears that they will grow significantly worse after the earthquake.
Polowy is especially apprehensive about people who have crush injuries caused by falling debris—they are at high risk of infections that could be life threatening. She’s also concerned about the water supply.
“The water supply has always been an issue, so clean water availability and distribution will be very key to a successful rebuilding,” she says. “And there will probably be outbreaks of things that are water-related.”
Dr. Richard V. Lee, a professor of medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, and social and preventive medicine at UB, has seen the health problems now emerging in Haiti before, by studying other tragedies around the world.
“There is a pattern of health problems that inevitably follow a natural disaster such as Haiti’s earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina,” Lee says. “The pattern begins with the injuries and psychological trauma that occur—and need care. When that care is not available infectious disease and psychological problems develop and multiply.”
Initially, the people of Haiti will face problems related to “failed logistical support”—those without medical care, safe water, food, and shelter. The few days after that will be deceptively quiet in terms of medical problems, he says, because the infectious diseases that are spreading take three or more days to appear.
However, diarrhea, typhoid, cholera, gangrene of wounds, and Postpartum infections will soon emerge as major issues, and patients with diabetes, heart disease, and renal disease will begin to develop complications. People who require drugs, such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis sufferers, will begin to miss medications and will fall ill. Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B will emerge between two and six weeks after the disaster, and Lee expects to see much worse.
“I expect that the next six weeks will see issues with amputations because of Gangrenous injuries; obstetrical deaths—some unexplainable; and outbreaks of diarrheal disease,” he says.
Many people are choosing to sleep outside—the country has shuddered through at least 33 aftershocks and weakened structures are toppling as a result, and experts are advising Haitians to stay outdoors—but this leads to further complications, according to Lee.
“If there is a surge in mosquito breeding and activity, the incidence of mosquito-transmitted infections will begin—malaria and dengue fever in particular,” he says.
Lee expects to see several outbreaks of malaria in the weeks to come.
A New Direction
Through all of the plight and hardship, the death and destruction, and the continued corruption, Fouche sees a light shining for Haiti’s future.
“Because of what has happened, this is a tragedy, but there is something that comes with it,” he says. “There is a possibility to build things differently. By trying to reconstruct the country, there is a possibility to have real economic development.”
The rebuilding efforts can help the country twofold, Fouche says. The labors will create construction jobs, financial investment jobs and more available to impoverished Haitians. Banks can provide Haitians with low cost loans so they can buy new houses or build their own houses, depending on their financial means. And when it comes time to build these new structures, Fouche hopes to use his earthquake engineering knowledge to construct a sturdier infrastructure.
“[Haiti must] come up with integrated engineering solutions that perform well in every type of hazard, so that solutions can be both economical and structurally safe,” he says.
But none of this can happen if the people of Haiti are struggling to survive.
“The next step right now is to bring help to the people. This is still being done but we cannot put emphasis enough on that aspect—that the people need help right now,” Fouche says.
Relief efforts across the globe exploded after news of the earthquake spread. There are hundreds of charities and non-profit organizations accepting money, clothing and supplies to give to the Haitian people. But not all charities are created equal.
Just days after the incident, the FBI reported that it was investigating a fraudulent charitable organization related to Haiti. They’ve since issued a statement warning donors to ignore spam e-mails that request donations and to be skeptical if someone claiming to be a survivor contacts them and asks for money.
“Exploiting a person’s emotions for profit is really sick, especially after a tragedy such as this one,” Gourdet says.
The FBI encourages people to stick to well-known charitable organizations. Fouche encourages all who are able to send money and donations to the Red Cross, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, and Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s foundation: Yéle Haiti.
At the University at Buffalo, staff and students are hastening to help the stricken country. Several offices—including Student Life, the Center for Student Leadership & Community Engagement, the Intercultural & Diversity Center, and the Undergraduate Student Association—are collecting donations benefitting the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund. Campus Dining & Shops customers may also round up their purchase to the nearest dollar, with all proceeds going to the organization.
Undergraduate Student Association President Ernesto Alvarado said that there are fishbowls at club events and at each office where students can drop money. The group plans to tally the money up and send the Red Cross one large check in several weeks. In addition, Alvarado is planning Hoops for Haiti—a basketball tournament benefitting the Red Cross. Alvarado is also reviewing the possibility of a relief concert with a musician or comedian.
Filiatrault, the MCEER director, left for Haiti on Jan. 21 to help decide which of Haiti’s which structures—especially emergency buildings—are safe to use.
“We are going to Haiti at a time when the need for skilled, French-speaking engineers is dire,” Filiatrault says. “A key piece of the recovery process depends on assessing the physical safety of critical infrastructure.”
Samarth Joseph, a Haitian Ph.D. candidate in UB’s Department of Geography, returned to her home in a trip funded by donations from UB faculty, staff and students, to assist her family and to issue solar cookers to residents.
Fouche hopes to complete his Ph.D. and travel back to Haiti, where many are undoubtedly welcoming his homecoming.
“Some people have said before … this is not a curse, it is a natural disaster and could happen in any other place that these conditions existed,” he says. “This is very sad for me and is something that is very… I don’t know. Whenever I’m thinking of that, I cannot even fathom the destruction and how many lives were lost.”
Source: Generation Magazine
