Haiti Earthquake Anniversary:

Finding a Skull in the Rubble

by Lisa Armstrong 

 

 

One year after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, one man is still trying to rebuild. But instead of finding bricks and metal in the rubble, he found his 11-year-old neighbor's remains. Lisa Armstrong reports from Port au Prince.

Damas Negrial started the day Wednesday clearing rubble. He is trying to rebuild his house in Fort National, a hilltop neighborhood in Port au Prince that was almost completely destroyed by the earthquake last January, and was salvaging bricks from the neighboring plot. As he dug, he felt something far smoother than the jagged, broken bricks and twisted metal beneath his fingers. It was the skull of his neighbor, 11-year-old Stephanie, who, with her three siblings had been entombed when their home fell exactly a year before.

Wednesday, at Fort National, Negrial gathered with dozens of neighbors for a moment of silence at 4:53 p.m., the exact time that the earthquake began. Hundreds of silver balloons floated in the air, so high that they looked like stars in the afternoon sky. But the moment of silence never happened; a drunkard started arguing with people and caused a small scuffle.

Damas Negrial gestures toward the skull discovered in the rubble near his Port-au-Prince home. (Credit: Andre Lambertson)

 

Negrial walked the precipitous path, down a steep hill littered with rubble and glass, to his house. He uncovered the girl's skull, which he had wrapped in an old T-shirt and tucked it into the rubble.

Stephanie's mother has moved away, and so Negrial says he will either burn the bones, as he does not have money to properly bury them, or give them to the people he says sometimes come around to collect bones for research.

"It did not really affect me too much, finding these bones…We suffered through the smell of these bodies for months, and we have suffered through so much else, so we are used to it."

"It did not really affect me too much, finding these bones," says Negrial. "We have to be resilient. We suffered through the smell of these bodies for months, and we have suffered through so much else, so we are used to it."

Negrial, 36, also spent last January 12 digging through rubble. His sister Marie Michele and her three children had been living on the second floor of a three-story building, and were trapped when it collapsed. Negrial was sure that they had been killed.

"When my mother came, I told her, 'We have lost everyone,'" says Negrial, "but someone said that since we are a family who always pray, we are servants of God, my sister and her family must have survived."

Marie Michele, 26, was making spaghetti for dinner the afternoon of the earthquake. Her children, Starline, 6, Lysondya, 11, and Michela, 18 months, were watching television. When Marie Michele walked over to change the channel, she felt the ground shake.

"My children did not understand what was happening, and I was just calling, 'Jesus, Jesus,'" says Marie Michele. "Then I saw the wall falling in front and another falling behind. They fell together, like two mountains meeting."

Marie Michele passed out. When she woke up, she felt that her lips were cut and bleeding. She had fallen on top of Michela, who was trapped in a small space, wriggling, trying to free herself from under her mother. Lysondya was next to Marie Michele, with her arm around her mother's neck. Neither could move because a wall had collapsed on top of them.

Marie Michele called for help, however, Lysondya asked her to stop, because each time her mother cried out, the rubble shifted slightly, and the shards of brick were cutting into her arm.

"Then, I asked Lysondya if she had seen or heard Starline, because the whole time, we had not heard anything from her. I said, if we don't hear anything from her soon, then we know she is dead," says Marie Michele.

At that moment, Starline cried out: "Mummy! Come help me. I need to go to the bathroom, and I'm thirsty!"

About an hour passed, and Marie Michele heard her brother and mother outside, crying, however, when she called out to them, her voice was lost in the rubble so that they could not hear her. For the next three hours, Marie Michele and her daughters lay beneath the debris. Negrial and the other neighbors had run up to the main road, because they were afraid that the aftershocks would send more buildings tumbling down.

Marie Michele with her daughter Michela. (Credit: Andre Lambertson)

 

Marie Michele could not cry—"My eyes had no water," she says—and eventually, she and the girls were so exhausted, they could not even speak. It was the one thing that had sustained them, because at least as they spoke, they could each tell that the others were alive.

Marie Michele was certain that they were going to die. A live wire had connected with the metal bars of the house, and the electric shock was burning Lysondya's leg. Lysondya made a pact with her mother: "If I die first, you pray for me, and if you die first, I'll pray for you," she said.

And then Marie Michele, who is deeply religious, says she heard a voice. "It was a real voice, not the voice of the neighbors or my family, but a voice from somewhere else telling me that we would live."

"I said, 'Lysondya, let us gather our strength and make one last call. If they don't come, then we are going to die,'" says Marie Michele.

When the two cried out, a pastor who lived on the floor above them and had come looking for survivors heard. He, Negrial, and neighbors dug for two hours, in the pitch dark, to free Marie Michele and the girls.

"When I came out, at first I felt good, I said thanks to God. But then I realized that my body had collapsed everywhere. It was 11, and the blood all over my body was making me cold. I couldn't feel my legs," says Marie Michele.

The next day, Marie Michele's boyfriend drove Lysondya and Starline to Santo Domingo for medical treatment. Lysondya's right cheek had been completely sliced through by a sharp piece of brick, and Starline's legs had been badly damaged.

Marie Michele stayed behind with the baby, who, except for some swelling, was fine. But when the cuts all over Marie Michele's body did not heal, Negrial decided to take her to Santo Domingo as well, a week later.

Marie Michele does not have a passport, and so they knew that she would likely be turned back at the Haiti-Dominican Republic border. However, Negrial was determined to get his sister to the hospital.

"I said, even if they kill me, I will make it through," he says.

As it turns out, the border guards were preoccupied with the many journalists trying to get through from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, and so they did not even stop Negrial and his sister.

But on this anniversary, Negrial and his family were focused less on the suffering and death that came when the world around them collapsed a year ago, and more on the things they do have.

"Today, I feel great," says Marie Michele. "I went to the church to say thanks to God, because I am alive."

Lisa Armstrong is reporting from Haiti for The Pulitzer Center 

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Emily TroutmanContributor

(Freelance journalist Emily Troutman wrote her first story on Haiti for AOL News on Jan. 16, 2010. She has reported and photographed more than 55 stories since then. Follow her on Twitter.)

People in Haiti are always telling me their earthquake stories. I am prepared, but still a little surprised, when the moment arrives. The stories seem too personal. The personal is public now.

We stand in hallways as they tell me. We sit at the beach. We are climbing the stairs or maybe I am just about to get out of the car. It is almost never what I would consider an appropriate time or place. Then again, what would that be in Haiti? Certainly, not the therapist's office.

Emily Troutman for AOL News

In Haiti, a woman mourns the loss of her family and her home on Feb. 2.

First they tell me their own story: I was at the house. My husband was coming home from work. I called him, angry, convinced that he was out having a drink somewhere and didn't know about the earthquake. He answered the phone, said, "I'm stuck in traffic." He couldn't explain the buildings, the body parts. "I'm not at the bar," was all he said.

Then they tell me someone else's story: The public official, wonderful woman. Lost her staff. Dragged nine people out of a building, walked home. Realized then, after eight hours, she was only in her underwear.

The stories of the collapse are followed by the stories of the reconstruction -- misery and corruption, mostly, politics and misspent money.

"And what did all the misery of Jan. 12 get us?" they seem to say.

They look at me as if I might answer. And it's tempting, for a moment, to play the analyst: What I think isn't important; it's what you think that's important.

But they already know that. I'm 31 years old, an American, a journalist. Even if I did have an answer, which I don't, it would obviously be circumspect, philosophical, wrong.

Still, people beseech me with their stories, and I have to think it's because they know I'm a journalist. I'm a trained listener. I know when to ask questions and when to nod. I've taught my face to behave like a doctor's or a judge's. I don't grin or interject. I know the funny bits are actually the saddest.

Emily Troutman for AOL News

At a distribution of tarps in Leogane, Haiti, on March 2, men and boys clamor to get a place in line. For months, the landscape here was dominated by desperate scenes like this one.

I listen to all of them, knowing that somehow, Haitians are redefining themselves now, in terms of this great truth. Saying it out loud makes their experience truer, and also, less true, less hurtful. Every story is important -- a thousand little blocks built like a wall against the pain.

But I listen, also, to Haiti's silence. I try to understand why people tell one story and not another. They never, ever say they're sad, for example. They talk about the government's failures, but they never talk about change. They don't believe in it, or don't want to. They don't talk about the people who died.

For me, the question is what to do with all these stories. I'm not a therapist or an aid worker. My main credential is having a camera around my neck and a pen in my hand. I didn't come here to document that one particular moment -- those 48 hours of catastrophic post-earthquake horror and death. Despite whatever the one-year coverage says, people here want to move on.

I'm just trying to do my job. But what is it, exactly?

If I spend all day shooting in a camp, I find that I can pretend until I don't feel like I'm pretending anymore. There's a lot of urine in the gutters and parents who beat their kids, but I walk around with a straight back and smile at small children. I laugh with old ladies and share beers with old men.

I find the dignity, where it surfaces. I look for it. I write down what everyone says and feel useful. Then I come home grim, depressed.

Mike Mahon

Writer Emily Troutman, pictured, traveled to an orphanage in February with Dr. Michael Mahon, a dermatologist who has worked in Haiti's orphanages for years. They passed this baby around because she was severely attention deprived and would not let go.

If I'm working at home, like today, I'm looking out at the island from a hotel on a hill. Finally, I am appreciating what is beautiful here. Then it rains. I think about the tents, but since I'm not actually in one, both my guilt and my gratitude feel disingenuous.

I try to accept my pain and my anxieties as a gift -- it's better, I think, to feel than to be the sort of person for whom sad things stop seeming sad.

I don't know how other people deal with the normalcy of tragedy. But the people I know best all seem to drink a lot. Or work a lot. Or chase a lot of women. My friends, by and large, are not other journalists. I consider journalists friends, but we don't really hang out. It's competitive. It gets weird.

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When we run into each other, we feel a professional and friendly obligation to ask, "What stories are you working on?" Then we demure, and smile politely when the answer is, "Oh ... this and that."

Once in a while we run into each other unexpectedly, and if it's dark enough or we've had enough to drink, we tell the truth. We talk about how hard the first weeks were after the earthquake. How strange it is to seek out other people's misery, and also how easy it's become. How it seems to seek us out, now. The conversation inevitably turns silent, and in our fog, we realize: This is why we never hang out.

There are a lot of stories I'd like to tell but no one wants to hear. "Inside baseball," my editor says. There are a lot of stories people want to hear but I can't tell.

We keep talking about the "rebuilding" and "reconstruction," as if there were something grand here to begin with. There is an enormous mythology about progress. And in our photos, we're constantly trying to prove or disprove its existence. We talk about measuring it, without talking about whether or not that can be done. Or whose job it ought to be.

We're not supposed to write about our own lives. We're not supposed to write about all the listening and the deciding. We're not supposed to keep talking about loss.

I have an earthquake story, too. And this is it, I guess. My story is about exhaustion and long, hot days. It is about late nights and complicated friends. It's about what happens off the record. It's about collecting other people's pain and trying to hide it, write it, catalog it, transform it, understand it, avoid it.

I am trying to memorize and forget everything all at the same time.

My story is about the earthquake, true. But it's also about deciding what truth I want to tell, and to whom. Mostly, I realize, my story is just a collection of other people's stories. It's about how words can capture something complicated and make it seem simple, painless.

The personal is public now. And like everyone else, my silence will say more than I can. I told the truth. Imagine all the truth I didn't tell.

>via: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/15/a-journalist-in-haiti-a-year-of-collecting-...