Haiti – Part IV (Violence)
By La Guevara.
April 26, 2010
My nightly lullabies consisted of gunshots and screams. The gunshots started at around 10pm. If they started from the back of the house, soon thereafter the gang that lived across the street from the front of the house would echo those shots. It would go on for a few minutes, sometimes even hours. The screams were horrifying. They weren’t necessarily associated with the gunshots though. This time it could be rape, murder, or a voodoo ritual. The heart wrenching screams, mostly from women, painted a very visual picture of what might be going on just a few meters from my cot. Sometimes they ended abruptly, like how a life would end, other times, they turned into cries until she fell asleep.
Back in February, the first day we started the clinic, we had two gunshot patients. The shooting had just happened across the street in the brightness of noonday, and the victims were immediately brought into the clinic. A man was taking money out of his pocket to buy something and was robbed and shot at. The bullet went in through his elbow. The robbers kept shooting and a lady, an innocent bystander, was impacted as well. The bullet went in an out the back of her neck. A third person was shot, but we were told he was too injured to come to the clinic, so we called an ambulance. The ambulance took too long and the third victim died on the street. We were informed of that half an hour after the fact.
My heart was racing when the patients came in. There was blood everywhere. I had never been that close to something like that, but I came into the mission knowing that I might see blood, hear gunshots, or that it might even happen to one of us. Desperation and violence go hand in hand, and that’s what could best describe the state Haiti was in at that moment.
Since the earthquake, Haiti has received an influx of relief workers from around the world in record numbers. We heard stories that aid workers were being kidnapped and shot at just to get their provisions stolen.
Violence in the tent cities has also soared. Tent cities are communities that formed after the earthquake where a group of people, usually hundreds or thousands, live in a common campground. These tents are made of blankets, sheets, garbage bags, sticks, ropes, and pretty much anything and everything you can tie to a tree. Because there are so many people living so close together with no privacy or security, women have been getting raped incessantly. There’s not much people can do to stop this because there is no reliable authority in or out of the tent cities to take care of it; and even if there were, they have more important things to worry about.
There was a palpable tension in the air that was fueled by the convoys of the United Nations roaming up and down the streets, carrying soldiers with their imposing weapons looking down at the people with their brand new sunglasses and million dollar smiles. Sometimes you would feel protected by them, other times you wanted to look away, as to not have yet another M-16 in your face while walking the streets. You were always on the look out, expecting something to happen, but the days went by, the weeks went by, the people from the group were all safe, and I came back home.
I had to cut my trip short by a week because I had to come back to Puerto Rico and take care of some paperwork. I am leaving with the Peace Corps to Cameroon in June (more about that in a later post), and I had to apply for my visa, send other documents, all with a deadline. The day I get back from Haiti I go out to dinner with a friend to Condado. My friend had been in Haiti with me so we were talking about the trip, how much we miss being there, our future plans with mission trips, and so on. After dinner we walk down the street and get robbed…at gunpoint. Oh, the irony! All this time I was worried about not getting a gun pointed at my face while in Haiti, and here I am, back home, the day I get back from Haiti, and get exactly that. Even if tension, desperation, psychological trauma, and lack of food and shelter justify violence in Haiti, what’s going on in Puerto Rico?
*This is part of an on-going series regarding my missionary trip to Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. I invite you to read the previous posts on this trip.
Related posts:
Recent Comments