Reporter Scott Goldberg blogs on-assignment in earthquake ravaged Haiti

Thursday, February 11

We're headed back to Santo Domingo after a powerful few days in Haiti, and everything we were told before this trip was true. The country is devastated, and the people are desperate. Indeed, it's impossible to visit Haiti without being deeply touched by what you see, hear and smell.

The most enduring image, for me, isn't the overwhelming wreckage Jeff and I saw yesterday - though it's certainly stunning to see the major government buildings reduced to piles of concrete and rebar (imagine standing on the National Mall in D.C. and seeing every structure that identifies us as a country smashed into I 35W-bridge style rubble).

For me, the faces are burned in my mind. The faces of people like 26-year-old Fanius Surssoi, who lost his parents and three siblings in the earthquake. He is now living in a dirty settlement alongside 10,000 other people. But he's very much alone.

Fanius walked up to me and asked me if I spoke Spanish, which I do, and once he discovered he could talk to me, he followed our crew around for the better part of two days. He didn't ask for food or water. He wanted a job.

Right now, there aren't any jobs in Haiti, and people like Fanius are scrambling to find ways to earn a little cash so they can buy something to eat and drink. Aid agencies intend to hire earthquake survivors.  When they have enough money, the plan is to put people to work tearing down wrecked homes and building new ones. That will pump money into Haiti's economy. But the rebuilding hasn't started yet. A month after the earthquake, Haiti still is in a state of emergency.

When I said goodbye to Fanius yesterday, he asked me what my parents' names are. Then he showed me a picture of his mother. Then he walked away, carrying that picture and a copy of his resume, with tears in his eyes.

We leave Haiti wishing we could've brought a million jobs and a million new homes with us.

We hope, at very least, our stories will keep Haiti and its people in the headlines.

Our first "Extra" airs on KARE 11 News Wednesday, Feb. 17 at 10 p.m. 

Wednesday, February 10

 

 

Tuesday, February 9

We left Fond Parisien early this morning on what was supposed to be a one-and-a-half hour drive to Port Au Prince.  It took three hours.

The roads were in bad shape (probably not related to the earthquake), and they were clogged with traffic. Haitian police manned several checkpoints, and they even pulled us over when our driver tried to bypass a long line of stopped cars by moving into the left (wrong) lane.

We watched in amazement as they wrote him a ticket. And we can report now, with some confidence, that rumors of the Haitian police force's demise have been at least a little exaggerated.

Eventually, we made our way to the Delmas district of Port au Prince, where the American Refugee Committee is running a settlement inhabited by as many as 10,000 people. If it's possible to have your heart warmed and broken at the same time, it happened there.

 

 

Half of the settlement's residents are children - smiling children - who are running around and playing and flying kites they made from sticks and plastic bags. Kids are kids, and life goes on.

But the other half of the settlement is made up of their parents and older siblings who are desperate for water, food, jobs and better shelter. A lot of the "homes" we saw today don't have roofs. The walls, made mostly of material taken from houses that were damaged in the earthquake, sit on dirt slopes that will turn to mud when the rainy season arrives.

Just beyond the border of the settlement, we toured a neighborhood where bodies are still buried in collapsed houses. The smell is still there. When we met a group of men searching for documents in the piles of concrete (because they desperately want to find papers like birth certificates that can help them get their lives back) they told us the smell came from the decomposing body of a trapped baby girl.

It was, in the most literal sense of the word, an incredible day.

You can see some of the images Jeff and I saw by visiting my twitter stream, www.twitter.com/scottgoldberg, I'm updating it whenever I can.

Monday, February 8

Tonight we're setting up camp in Fond Parisien, just inside Haiti. Our tents are down the road from a settlement where we spent an intense afternoon meeting some of the 300 earthquake survivors who live there.

The American Refugee Committee runs that settlement, and for now, it's a model tent community. The latrines are separated from the spaces where families live and eat - and from the areas where children play. In larger settlements, the layouts aren't always so tidy. We expect to see more chaotic living arrangements tomorrow, when we drive into Port Au Prince.

That's not to say we haven't already been overwhelmed by what we've seen. Parents who lost children, children who lost parents, children who lost their siblings. It's true: You don't meet anyone here who hasn't lost someone.

And even in the relative calm (heavy emphasis on "relative") of Fond Parisien, there's the looming concerns of:

• What's next?
• What about the rainy season (starts in two months)? 
• What about hurricane season (starts in June)?
• What about the estimated 14,000 Haitians who fled to the Dominican Republic side of the border and will likely return to Haiti, potentially swelling the population of a settlement like the one we saw today into something that's not manageable?

As the larger media spotlight turns away from Haiti, I can't help but think we are visiting a country whose problems have just begun.

(Watch for Scott Goldberg's television news reports in the Extra on KARE 11 News at 10 p.m. in February)

Sunday, February 7

KARE11 chief photographer Jeff Wiltgen and I landed in Santo Domingo this evening, and we're headed to Haiti early Monday morning. We'll be in the earthquake zone for a few days this week, then you'll see our "Extras" later this month on KARE 11 News at 10 p.m.

We're not sure what to expect. Monte Achenbach, a senior program director for the Minneapolis based American Refugee Committee, told me there's no way you can go to Haiti and not be moved by what you see. On the surface, that seems kind of obvious. But when a veteran of situations like these tells you how shaken he was by his experience in this particular disaster zone, you really have to brace yourself for what you're about to encounter.

 

I covered the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka. As awful as that was, the communities hit by that killer wave were able to rebuild. There still was some infrastructure left standing, and governments were intact. That's not the case in Haiti. Monte told me the future in this devastated country is very hard to imagine.

We'll be traveling with ARC and visiting their crews in Fond Parisien, on the Haiti/Dominican Republic border, and in the Delmas district of Port Au Prince, where ARC is running a settlement inhabited by 5,000 survivors.

We'll focus on what's next. Now that the bodies - for the most part - have been cleaned up, how will survivors move forward? Where will they live? How do they stay healthy without permanent shelter? How can a totally wrecked economy begin to function again?

When technology permits, we'll send updates to kare11.com. You also can follow us on twitter(www.twitter.com/scottgoldberg).

Our journey starts early Monday morning with a five-hour drive from Santo Domingo to the border.

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