I was soon on the already (at 7:30am) congested road to the office: a road pockmarked by potholes and bounded by remarkably neat piles of rubble scraped from the road to the curb. Street stalls selling everything from pungent deep fried fish, bags of water, and FEMA (camp) cots to medicines of all shapes and colours were already doing business in front of mounds of torn concrete and bent steel, the remains of houses and shops.
Erroneously I had assumed that when an earthquake struck, along a defined fault line, that the destruction would be more ‘ordered’, that there would be some sort of pattern to the demolition, but this is not so. The destroyed buildings reveal only how indiscriminate, and unpredictable the destruction is. Alongside a mound of torn and broken concrete there is a building that looks like it was the same, little affected. Buildings that may not have been up to any code, remain intact whilst buildings, like the Presidential Palace, (which you would assume were well built) had imploded and looked like a Lego house after a tantrum.
New communities of tents and shelters of all shapes, colours and sponsors have appeared around the city. One of these is the Place de la Paix, (in Delmas 2, Port au Prince) an IDP (Internally Displaced Peoples) camp which is managed by The Salvation Army with the help of some other NGO partners. About 20,000 people live in this camp, on a soccer field, next to the Salvation Army Haiti Headquarters. These shelters, which range from sticks held together by tarpaulins through to wood frames and corrugated iron roofs are crowded together and offer little to no privacy, but this is one of the good camps. Some enterprising people have converted their shelters into variously stocked shops which offer the necessities of life – and, amidst this colourful and aroma filled canvas life goes on.
