Two Separate Cities

Nearly three weeks after the Jan 12th earthquake, Port au Prince has become two separate cities. In one, the bustle of daily life slowly resumes. In the other an endless swath of rubble, partially collapsed buildings, with roofs awkwardly canted, remains frozen in the moment of Haiti’s worst nightmare. It is dead.

In the living Port au Prince, petty traders have returned to the streets, selling just about everything from sugar cane to cell phone batteries. In the morning freshness, before the heat sets in, women carry buckets filled with the day’s supply of water on their heads back to makeshift shelters that have sprung up on sidewalks, in parks, football fields and other once-open spaces in the city. Men carry wooden poles, doors, and slabs of corrugated metal rescued from the rubble to build new, temporary homes.

At the main university hospital in downtown Port au Prince where International Medical Corps volunteer doctors and nurses tend the injured each day and the seven mobile clinics in outlying areas where our volunteers also work, earthquake-related wound care is now mixed with more mundane complaints of everyday medicine. Patients awaiting aftercare of earthquake-related wounds wait patiently next to head-ache sufferers.

Rubble has been cleared from most of the streets, traffic moves—or doesn’t. The influx of international aid groups, United Nations agencies and a small army of media has only added to a gridlock in central Port au Prince that was notorious before the earthquake. As darkness falls, the streets narrow further as city residents use white cinder blocks and chunks of concrete rubble to carve out their sleeping spots for the night.

And all around them the dead city of Port au Prince remains. Schools, hospitals, office-buildings, hotels and endless private homes squat lifeless and quiet--flattened into a fraction of their former size. That many are mass graves only magnifies their stillness.

Sometimes the two cities meet. Sunday morning a couple of house wives living in a tent camp across the street from the collapsed Presidential palace, found a practical use for iron rods of the formidable green-painted metal fence erected to protect the now-destroyed palace: they used it as a clothes line.