Port-Au-Prince Journal: It's The Living Who Haunt

I found the following story on the NPR iPhone App:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122945754&sc=17&f=1001

Port-Au-Prince Journal: It's The Living Who Haunt
by Jason Beaubien

NPR - January 25, 2010

For me the hardest part is the living.

There have been so many dead here, corpses are so common both on the street and oozing out of the wreckage, that it's the living who haunt me.

The old man crumpled at the curb calling out faintly, "Mon blanc! Mon blanc!" and asking for water.

The crush wounds. The children who've lost or are about to lose an arm, a leg or both.

The bodies laid out at night like cordwood on the street. Lines of people wrapped in sheets perpendicular to the curb, sleeping on the pavement because either their houses are gone or they're too terrified to go inside.

In the first days after the quake, the women wailing into the night.

Later, the dogs that survive and howl.

A young woman, alone down at the port. She sits on a bag with all of her belongings, waiting to catch a boat out. She lists the members of her family who died: mother, father, sister, cousin.

"It's just me now," she says, 22 years old and alone.

Another woman says, "There isn't a single family in Haiti that isn't crying right now."

She's trying to dig her brother-in-law's body out of a pile of debris.

There's the fear of being inside. Walking with my translator through her old neighborhood, her nervousness is palpable that any teetering building might crash down on us at any moment. An aftershock shakes the rubble under our feet. She runs for solid ground.

What is it like to watch your entire city crumble around you? Walls, roofs meant to protect you become projectiles, blunt instruments and traps. How do you ever go back inside?

A huge challenge lies ahead just to feed and house the people of Haiti in the coming weeks. Then, block after city block needs to be bulldozed. But for Haiti to be reborn, and to avoid becoming a wasteland kept alive on international aid, the living need to heal — they need to dream of a new country and move forward. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

To learn more about the NPR iPhone app, go to http://iphone.npr.org/recommendnprnews

Sent from my iPhone

Why I don't live where there's snow or ice

My latest guilty pleasure is tv.gawker.com. Good for 15 minutes of mental vacation during the day, and to watch the clips of the "Late Night" snipping war. This however was shareable. I sympathize with the driver, just so you know.

 

http://tv.gawker.com/5453885/man-cant-drive-cant-stand-cant-walk-but-can-fall-and-slide-around-like-a-human-hockey-puck?autoplay=true

 

For Haiti

If you can, please click the icon to donate. This is a charity that I have worked with for a number of years now. They do good work and have been in Haiti for several years.

We're off to the NFC Championship Playoffs!!

Suffering in the World

I visited the Red Cross site today, and the suffering in Haiti is something that is hard to grasp. Then I came across this article:

 

http://icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/palestine-gaza-update-211209?opendocument

 

It’s about Palestine and the aftermath of the the three-week “war” that started in December 2008.  Let us hope that the Haitian government will finally do something to improve the lives for their citizens just as we hope that the Israeli’s allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza and the West Bank. Those of us that go home to a warm meal and a bed with fresh linen know nothing of the suffering that far too many deal with on a daily basis.

 

Let's see if this works

I've read on Blogger that I can post to my blog via the iPhone. If
that's true, then I will have a new post on the blog!

Sent from my iPhone

Tales from The City

There is something about San Francisco. I'm taking a moment to just enjoy the sites and sounds. I'm leaning against a planter on California, and there are two cable cars in front of me. I never noticed that the rails make noise when they vibrate. There almost seems to be a rythem to them, almost musical.

Now that my business is done, time to explore.

Observations of the Day

I had to go into the City today, which meant taking BART. For those outside NoCal, that's San Francisco and the commuter train.

It's been awhile since I went to the City, the Financial District to be exact. Probably a year or more. So, as I'm listening to Queen on the iPhone and trying to read a technical manual, I start noticing things.

As we're passing through West Oakland, and a train passes going the other way, with the cranes and containers and rail yards, I could just as easily be in an East Coast city. There is probably someone back East looking out the window on their train and thinking something similar and that just seems weird.

There is a young woman across from me that is studying the ends of her hair and constantly fiddling with her earbuds.

The guy directly in front of me is on his iPhone and finds something on it hella funny. His fingers are moving much faster than mine.

The older gentleman is trying desperately to stay awake. No luck. Same goes for about 3 other people within my line of site.

My station is coming up. Better go.