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Photo Showcase: Habitat for Humanity in Haiti, Day 2
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Like the other Habitat for Humanity volunteers, Shannon Wallace sat nose to the window of the bus, holding her camera, seeing Haiti for the first time.
Click. A kind of spacious tarp-and-rope encampment at the side of the road.
Click. Another tent camp, if you can call them tents. The gray and blue tarps are beat-up but in still-neat rows. As the drive wore on, these encampments — where an estimated 550,000 Haitians live — would turn into shacks and tarp-and-stick dwellings on top of one another.
Click. Two boys standing atop a pile of rubble, one stretching his arm in the air in a friendly wave, smiles on their faces.
That's when it hit.
Wallace wanted to throw up.
This godforsaken, crowded strip of gray brokenness against a beautiful Caribbean backdrop of plantains and palm trees and the ocean. Those boys.
Her boy.
She thought of Ted, her 9-year-old son back in Omaha, probably playing his Wii, probably wearing a superhero T-shirt, probably missing her but otherwise safe and warm in the comfort of his father's suburban home.
She thought of the Haitian boys. Where was their mother? Where was their father? Did they get to eat dinner?
She started to cry.
Suddenly the great distance between post-quake Haiti and back home shrank.
Wallace, a 36-year-old media consultant who helped build Habitat houses in Vietnam last year, found herself shocked.
Habitat staff the night before had warned the volunteers to be prepared for what they were about to see.
Liz Blake, head of advocacy and chief legal counsel for Habitat, said 22 months after the 7.0 quake, Port-au-Prince would look like "an apocalyptic movie set." Though it's been almost two years, little progress has been made.
Mark Andrews, vice president of Habitat's post-quake operation, told the volunteers they would be shocked, saddened, overwhelmed and frustrated — but also energized and transformed.
"The Haitian people are phenomenal," Andrews said. "Their ability to function in a world that would ground most of us in the dust is just astounding to me."
But Wallace and the other Omahans aboard the tour buses Sunday were not ready for what they saw. Weary from a long 24 hours of prep and travel, first to Atlanta, then to an Irish-run camp in Pétionville, near Port-au-Prince, they sat mostly in silence, taking in the paradoxes.
The first was the shiny white Delta 767, its tail fin painted with the blue Habitat for Humanity logo, sitting in stark contrast to the long row of dilapidated, low-slung buildings that formed what remains of Haiti's airport.
The second was the buses — five of them shepherding the 400 U.S. and Canadian volunteers who are in Léogâne this week with former President Jimmy Carter to build 100 permanent homes.
The buses were air-conditioned.
Nothing else, it appeared driving through Port-au-Prince, was. Not any of the still-standing, largely roofless concrete-block buildings, rebar poking through the top support struts. Certainly not the tap-taps, colorfully painted jerry-rigged vehicles in which people — and cargo — crowd together.
Not when electricity in some places is spotty at best. Not when dogs, pigs, goats, chickens and all matter of plastic and Styrofoam waste litter fetid ravines, some used for bathing and washing clothes.
Don Browers, a retired TV account executive who has traveled the world, instantly thought of the poorest parts of India.
Mary Lopez, a recent retiree who plans to ramp up volunteer service, saw mothers squatting in the cramped gray dirt between the too-hot tents with babies and small children and wondered how this country could ever climb out.
The view steeled her resolve about being here this week.
John Bunch, a TD Ameritrade executive, thought he was prepared for how rough it would be.
"But it was much worse," he said. "It's almost impossible to explain, and it wasn't just one block. It was miles."
Contact the writer: 402-444-1136, erin.grace@owh.com
Video: A Habitat for Humanity worker talks about seeing extreme poverty in Haiti
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