Leaving Haiti's Port-au-Prince

Leaving Haiti's Port-au-Prince

They step down into the dust and glare: bus after bus load of tired and dazed passengers who have fled the destruction of Port au Prince, and washed up in the hot, noisy town of St-Marc, 150 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince.

Rosebelline Nelson and her four children have left certain misery behind in the ruined city but face an uncertain future. They are staying with family, for now.

“I lost everything in the catastrophe,” Nelson says. “My house, some of my relatives- gone.”

The Nelson family is part of a great and growing exodus of Haitians to smaller towns and country villages.

In St-Marc, people have opened their homes to the newcomers. Just about every family has taken some in. But people are worried the influx will put a severe strain on local resources

St-Marc resident Kempton Dorsainvill  is taking care of a cousin who was hurt in the earthquake,  but he’s concerned about how the town will cope.

“These people, they are creating a lot of problems for small cities,” he says.  “We don’t have much opportunity for those people that is coming from  the city everyday. It’s really making it tough for us.”

There are few jobs here, and like nearly everywhere in this impoverished country, money and food are scarce. Local officials say they expect the town’s population of 180 thousand to double in the weeks to come as refugees pour in from Port au Prince. They need help handling those numbers.

St Marc Mayor Baunars Charles says there are limits to what his administration can do. “Our town is small. We are not capable of dealing with such a large number of people,” he says. “We will need a lot of doctors and medicines because our hospital is very small.”

The overflow from St Marc’s 200-bed hospital has come to an open air basketball court converted to a shelter and triage center. On a visit there,  the sounds of a  woman crying in pain mingled with prayers.

The people here have  injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to badly broken bones. For many, they are getting the first basic medical attention they’ve received sing the earthquake.

Volunteers from the international, interdenominational Christian aid group Youth With a mission provide shelter and food, aspirin and antiseptics.

But many here need surgery and intensive care. Among them is a 10 year old orphan named Ernson Desir-- a boy who has literally come back from the land of the dead.

Ernson, sat in a wheelchair playing with a digital camera while volunteer Audrey Martin told his story.

“The walls of his orphanage collapsed, and he was found unconscious,” she says.

“The doctors couldn’t find a pulse so they placed him in the morgue. An hour later they were bringing someone else to the morgue and they heard a tapping. It was Ernson,  and he had come to while he was in there. So now they call him the future president because he was a boy who was dead and came back to life.”

Ernson survived but he still needs surgery.

Survival is the goal too for Rosebelline Nelson. As her family’s remaining worldly possessions are loaded up on a wheelbarrow, she has no immediate plans beyond getting her kids settled.

“I don’t know,” Nelson says. “I’ll stay here in St. Marc as long as I can, until things get better in Port-au-Prince.”

Then they walked off down the dusty street, choked with motor scooters and trucks… one Haitian family, like so many others, taking its first steps down the road to a new life.