Albany reporter witnesses massive devastation from storms

It took me a full week to realize how bad it was.

It took me that long to hear the stories and see the destruction before I understood the heartache that some people in Haiti were dealing with after losing nearly everything during this year’s hurricane season.

Haiti, considered the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, was struck by four severe storms in August and September. The storms left parts of the country flooded and people stranded without food and clean water. The United Nations reported that some 1 million people were affected and 800 people were killed.

About six weeks after the worst flooding, I flew into the capital city of Port-au-Prince with 13 other people from across the United States. (I was the only one from the mid-valley.) Together, along with Haitian co-workers, we made up a medical team working under the nonprofit organizations Haiti Foundation of Hope, based in Vancouver, Wash., and Medical Teams International, based in Portland.

It wasn’t my first time in Haiti — I’ve been traveling there since I was a child — but I had never seen Haiti like this.

We drove north on National Highway 1, parts of which had been damaged in the storms or were still underwater. After hours on bumpy roads, we turned from our second detour back onto the highway, entering the city of Gonaives, which is along the coast. It was the place hit the hardest by the storms, and the destruction was still obvious.

At the edge of the city a lake had formed, turning homes into islands and creating a fishing hole for boys and men.

As we drove further into the city the most stunning sights were the endless piles of mud and debris that ran alongside the roads.

From the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser, I clicked picture after picture. There were overturned vehicles, furniture on roofs, crumbled houses, impassable side roads, and people trying to clean it all up.

After a while — I don’t know how long — I stopped taking photos. I just sat and stared out the window. I didn’t know what to expect going to Haiti this time, but it wasn’t this.

We weren’t the only ones in the country trying to offer a helping hand. We passed a UNICEF camp and a Red Cross water-filtering station.

We didn’t stay in Gonaives. Our destination was away from the coast and in the mountains, in the rural community of Terre Blanche.

Along the way, we passed by what remained of a Catholic church. The roof and three walls had been washed away in the flooding, but the door frame and a cross above it still stood.

No longer on the highway, the road we were on followed a river. The waters had gone down, but you could see the large area that had been washed away during the storms. What you couldn’t see were the homes, gardens and livestock that were lost along with the land.

In Terre Blanche we moved into the second floor of a medical clinic, which became our home for the week.

In the same compound there are a school and church, neither of which was damaged in the flood. They were the buildings people ran to when the water came down the mountains and where they stayed for days until the flood receded.

By the time we arrived, people had returned to their broken homes or to live with family and friends. The school courtyard had dried up, and students were beginning to return to class.

The clinic’s Haitian staff had already come back to work, and we worked alongside them for a week.

Patients came with typical aches and pains but also with more severe problems. We treated a little boy for typhoid, bandaged up a girl who had been badly burned in a fire, and stitched up a woman who split her lip when she fell and hit a rock. We treated countless people for malaria and other illnesses.

We thought we might not see as many patients as a typical medical team in Terre Blanche because travel had become difficult and finding food was a priority for people. But by the end of the week, we had seen more than 1,100 patients and saw two healthy babies born. We also gave away rice to everyone who came through the door.

It seemed that every person who came to the clinic had somehow been affected by the flooding.

Patients told doctors they had trouble sleeping because they were worried about the possibility of more flooding and how to take care of their families. One old man told us he hadn’t had any food since the storms. Others told similar stories of losing their belongings and homes.

In the evenings, to escape the tropical heat and catch our breath from a full day, the team sat on the clinic roof, watching lightning storms in the mountains and hoping for a breeze.

We shared stories from the day and I was reminded of how fortunate I was despite the tumbling economy back home.

During one evening, I sat in the kitchen talking with a friend, a young woman who helped cook our meals while we were there. Through my limited Creole and her limited English, she told me about an English/Creole translation book she had been given and which she was enjoying so much. In the next moment I realized that her prized book was gone just like everything else, including her home.

That was the first story that really unsettled me. But it wasn’t until the end of the week, when one of the other clinic workers let us visit his nearby home, that I had to fight back tears.

The worker’s small house had been partly ruined during the flooding, and he had made temporary repairs using sheets of tin and large sticks. His garden was gone. His goats were gone. And he had a wife and six children to care for.

And his was just one of so many stories that sounded the same.

From the damaged home, we hiked up a hill above the clinic. Children from the village grabbed our hands and walked with us, laughing at the high school senior on the team who was running to the top. The breeze was refreshing, dusk was coming and the mountains were the greenest I’d ever seen them.

The scenery was beautiful and we were having a good time, and yet all I could think about was visiting the worker’s home and wondering how a person moves forward with nothing.

We didn’t talk about it much, but I imagine my teammates had similar thoughts. That night we took up a collection to help people in the community.

It wasn’t much. But it was something. And in the face of discouragement, sometimes the little somethings can mean the most.

It took me a week, but I finally understood the problem caused by the storms. It was enormous and complex. And yet, it was as simple as finding food for today.