10 years, 1 hour, 53 minutes
It was ten years ago that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti. It radiated out from Lèogane and everything within easy reach of that city shook for up to a minute. A minute is a long time when building start to topple and people are screaming.
It was just before 5PM local time, which is a particularly awful time for such a catastrophic disaster to hit. In the tropics, the sun regularly starts to set around 5:30PM, and it is full dark by 8PM. The electrical grid is dicey at the best of times, and was completely destroyed during that life-changing minute so people were terrified in the pitch black. Family members were unaccounted for, people were trapped in buildings, and there was no municipal help available because there is never any municipal help available. People suffered all night with the terror of a mass disaster with no support available, and with the aftershocks that just kept coming.
Millions of dollars was promised in aid, but very little was delivered. The promised hospital in Port-au-Prince has still not been built. Temporary relocation camps have become permanent installations. On my first trip to Haiti in 2016, there was still rubble that had not been cleared. There's still buildings collapsed that have never been removed. After a flood of food and clothing donations, the local economy has never recovered...especially in the face of humanitarian aid never really taking root.
The loss is ongoing. It's hard to explain what that means when you haven't been to Haiti, but it is this cultural haunting that is what might be called complex PTSD in the west. It's pervasive and people don't talk about. The earthquake is not discussed much, except maybe as a time marker. Everyone experienced loss, without fail. A family member lost his two children. Another lost one of their twins. Someone who was pregnant miscarried in the aftermath as a result of the terrible shock and stress. It was almost impossible to bury the dead, and priests were overwhelmed the need to complete the necessary rites for departed priests and vodouizan. It left this hole that is hard to fill.
It ripples out from the island, too. The earthquake occurred before I came to Vodou, but the stories of Haitians in dyaspora desperately trying to reach family members when cell phones had stopped working and people were hard to find are agonizing to listen to. They reflect the helplessness felt; it was hard to get news and what news came was often bad. The news of someone surviving was balanced with the news that someone else was dead. It was nearly impossible to get there, but it was equally impossible to send money to help as well.
In the numerous ceremonies held in the wake of the goudougoudou, the lwa came grieving for their children, both the lost and the living. The lwa see many things (and many vodouizan were warned, even in the last minutes before the earth shook) but all things truly rest in the hands of God. Nature speaks for itself and the earth moves as it needs to, and people die and life continues and the dead are remembered.
One of the cultural aftershocks was the evangelical reaction: Pat Robertson (a white devil if there ever was one) blamed Vodou for the earthquake and said that the pact that Haitians had made with the devil caused the earthquake. Haitians heard this and, for folks suffering in a destroyed country, some of them believed it and walked away from sèvis lwa. This became a foothold for the white-carried prosperity gospel nonsense: convert and be saved from another disaster like this, repent and have enough to feed your children.
Others blamed Gede for punishing Haiti and for taking so many, but this too is misplaced. No lwa caused the ground to break open, but trauma is funny and takes hideous forms. I sometimes think Gede was willing to take the blame because death is bottomless and can hold these things when the living can't. I don't know.
It's a sensitive day. Many Haitians say something along the lines of 'm ap gade e reflechi', which means I am looking and thinking/reflecting. It's a kind of introspection that isn't terribly happy; almost like a longview of evaluating a situation or, more broadly, your life. I imagine it's a hard thing to sit and do today, with the weight of loss and survival/survivor's guilt feeling particularly heavy.
But, as folks often say when things are complicated, nou la. We're here. Hope still lives because people still live.
Many blessings for those who felt the land shake and buildings topple, and may the names of those who passed always be remembered.
