It is over 7 months since the earthquake that shook Haiti entombed over 200,000 people beneath tonnes of concrete and steel. And today as the machinery and the people scrape away the mountains of debris in Port-au-Prince they don’t stop when they see a human bone or two, the machinery and the work only stops if there is an unmistakable skeleton; whole, or almost!International Agencies and their workers are not allowed to remove remains, a member of the relevant government agency must be present to verify and catalogue the remains. Only once this has been done can the bones be removed and the clearance works continue. It is a callous reality, but the fact is that in Delmas (where the Salvos are working) and I imagine in other sections of the city too, there is not many debris piles that do not contain the remains of people who long ago were counted as dead but unaccounted for – and to stop work for one or two bones has become unrealistic.
The Salvation Army is not involved in this debris clearance work, but yesterday I spent some time with some men that are. They are big, tough construction type guys, but as they told their stories and visualised their work their eyes revealed a sadness and a deep pain that they were finding hard to deal with. Today they will begin to clear the remains of a house where they know the body of a young boy is buried. The father has told them stories of his little boy; toys and reminders have already been found and collected, but today as he watches them work, he has asked that they do all they can to uncover his boy whole so that he can bury him properly.
Work like this continues daily in many sections of the city – but there are many areas that even now are still untouched - the very obvious signs of death ever present. Some commentators and 'experts' have told us that people should be going back to 'green' houses by now, "they should be forced to go back": and some of them could, and some of them have gone back to areas that are cleared and reserviced - but would you go back into a neighbourhood with only yours and one or two other houses standing and everywhere you look signs and smells of death?
