18 February, 2010 — The Independent

Direct Relief International Helps Supply Needed Medicines to a Stricken Country
On the small United Nations plane flying to Haiti with Brett Williams and his Direct Relief International (DRI) team, I thought I was, for the most part, prepared for what I would be seeing — I had worked on relief efforts in the aftermath of Pakistan’s 7.6 earthquake, which killed 80,000 people in 2005. But after spending just a week in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, I have come to realize that I had no idea what had really happened there. This earthquake currently ranks as the seventh most deadly natural disaster anywhere, ever, but that sad fact does little to explain how Haiti is suffering. I’m having a hard time finding the right words to describe what I saw and how I felt, both physically and emotionally.

Worn-out is probably the best I can offer: worn-out by the stink of death, which, even weeks after the quake, blows through the city. The body count is as high as 230,000 — roughly the same number of people who live from Carpinteria to Goleta — and thousands of bodies, most of them in Port-au-Prince, still remain buried in the rubble. These bodies were once someone’s mother, someone’s father, someone’s childhood friend.

But I also was worn-out from the sun and the heat; worn-out by the sights and sounds of agony emitting from this tiny Caribbean nation; worn-out by the dirty air, the even dirtier water, the raw sewage, the language barriers, the nonexistent infrastructure, and even by the biggest spider I have ever seen, which was in my room on the first night I was there. But for me, a visitor, all this was just a temporary discomfort. For the people of Haiti, it has become their permanent reality.

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