20371: Lemieux: Montreal Gazette: (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Haiti's proud people show decency amid horror
Despite being robbed and threatened, gazette reporter wants
to go back

SUE MONTGOMERY
The Gazette
Sunday, March 14, 2004
CREDIT: AP


Reporter Sue Montgomery found conditions in
Port-au-Prince's general hospital less than ideal. This
little girl, age about 10, had a brace on her left leg,
broken in a car accident in October. An X-ray showed a
tibia snapped in two, separated by about five centimetres.
Her mother had no money for pain medication. Montgomery
gave her the equivalent of about $2 Canadian for the drugs.
The little girl beamed and clapped her hands.

CREDIT: SUE MONTGOMERY, THE GAZETTE


Gazette reporter Sue Montgomery returned this week after an
18-day assignment in Haiti. During that time, she was
threatened at gunpoint, robbed and then jostled by a
desperate crowd at Port-au-Prince airport.

But despite the ugliness, she was struck by the basic
decency and resilience of the Haitian people. She thinks
they'll pull through, and she wants to go back someday.

Her report follows:

I've been back from Haiti for a few days now and have been
trying to digest 18 emotional days of chaos, violence and
terror in a country full of stubbornly dignified people,
still proud to say they were the first slaves to
successfully rise up against their French colonial rulers.

To say their country at this moment is a humanitarian,
environmental and political disaster zone would be an
understatement. Since my return, people have asked me how
it will ever be fixed; where does one even begin? The
challenges are formidable, to be sure. But I'm convinced
the answer lies in the undeniable strength I witnessed in
the Haitian psyche, ingrained 200 years ago when they
conquered 40,000 of Napoleon's troops.

They are the faces that run through my mind like a
continuing reel of film - people with absolutely nothing,
yet still too proud to hold out a withered hand to a
foreigner for a bit of food or money. Strong women who
refuse to accept as normal 30 rapes a week in the capital,
Port-au-Prince - and those are the ones they hear about. A
well-organized and growing movement is staring down the
patriachical, authoritative society, demanding a say in
rebuilding it from the bottom up.

Children, like 13-year-old Vincent Julien, who dreams of
studying in Montreal to become a priest. (It seems everyone
I met there was either from Montreal, studied in Montreal,
had relatives in Montreal, or wanted to move to Montreal).
The articulate youngster told me his father, a doctor, had
been killed in 1999 at the age of 32 during a demonstration
in the capital.

His mother is dying of lung cancer and can no longer care
for her six children. He is just one of the countless
children who grow up far before their time, some seeing a
gun before a teddy bear. Yet they still have dreams of
succeeding. There were situations that broke my
journalist's objectivity and tough exterior and reduced me
to a sobbing mess.

In particular, the unbearably heartwrenching moment when a
7-year-old girl in an orphanage slipped her tiny hand in
mine, and with her huge black eyes looking up at me, asked,
"Est-ce que vous allez m'adopter?"

Though softer, her pleading eyes were really no different
than those of the masked men who held us at gunpoint for a
good 10 minutes, demanding money, weapons and our cameras.

That memory will not be erased anytime soon, but I've come
to understand their desperation and am not so sure I
wouldn't have behaved exactly the same way if in their
position.

On the Sunday morning President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
left, I woke up to the incessant sound of gunfire, people
screaming in terror and helicopters flying so close to my
window, I thought they'd come right into my room.

>From my window, I witnessed people swarming out of their
shacks onto the streets, machetes in hand, chasing their
fellow citizens to their death. Others tied their victims'
hands behind their backs, shooting them in the head with
one, deadly bullet.

My Haitian friend, Madeline Pierre Duption, stood at my
side staring out at the incomprehensible massacre. As tears
rolled down her cheeks, she shook her head slowly and said
in barely a whisper, "What has happened to my country? What
is happening to my people?"

There was no making sense of the slaughter. All I could do
was hug her in silence. In the midst of this emotional
roller-coaster were surreal scenes right out of a bad
movie, like the development organization that caused a riot
as they threw pop tarts and salsa from trucks into starving
crowds gathered in front of the presidential palace.

And what was that one-armed guy thinking when, in the midst
of attacking us at gunpoint, reached his clenched fist
toward me and said, "One Love!"

There are snapshots in my mind of the myriad things for
sale along the pot-holed, dusty streets that tell the tale
of people desperate for money.

A neatly organized pile of blenders, but all missing the
container part; T-shirts, obviously well-worn, carrying
logos from various Canadian cities or sports teams; old
shoes, each tied to its partner, looped in an impressive
line over a tree branch.

Although the visual library started to grow in my mind the
day I arrived in Haiti, reviewing it started in earnest
with my exit from the chaotic country on Tuesday - a
departure that almost didn't happen. And quite honestly, if
it hadn't, I wouldn't have been disappointed.

I was torn about leaving Haiti after covering the turbulent
events there over the past three weeks. I felt it was all I
could do just to keep up with the breaking news - the
crumbling government, the advance of the rebels, the sudden
departure of Aristide and the horrible, inhuman violence
that ensued.

Working 16- to 18-hour days just to keep up with the rapid
developments didn't leave any time to write about the
heroes in the country, the Haitians who still believe they
can turn things around, and those who are making a
difference in their daily lives. Then there are those who,
throughout the massacres, rapes and lootings, still manage
to smile, laugh and be kind.

I felt terribly guilty for leaving them all behind, as I
returned to my comfortable life where things like
electricity, clean drinking water, food and shelter are all
taken for granted.

To get to the airport on Tuesday, we had to take a back
road because the main one was once again blocked by burning
barricades and armed Haitians outraged that U.S. marines
had killed one and injured several others that day.

Outside the departure area, thousands of screaming and
pushing Haitians and foreigners, their luggage held above
their heads, were trying to get into the airport through
one single door.

My "fixer," Amos, grabbed my arm and pulled, as I held my
computer bag on my head.

Meanwhile, my driver was pushing me from behind, as I
screamed to them both I didn't want to be pulled into such
a mob.

"Stop being so Canadian, Sue!" Amos yelled at me.

"You have to be Haitian now if you want to catch your
plane!"

Suddenly, word came from behind that another door into the
airport had opened, so Amos began pushing me in another
direction, while the driver started pulling.

Squished into a sea of sweating, yelling people, I held one
arm up with my Canadian passport clutched in my hand. But I
was being jostled by the crowd and my glasses and purse
fell to the ground.

I felt a hand on my arm, it pulled and I somehow was sucked
through that thin opening into the airport.

I turned to the overdressed, sweating marine next to me and
asked, "Are you having fun yet?"

My luggage was still out there in the throng, and after
considering just leaving it, I saw Amos, hoisting it in the
air, trying to get it to me. Like many things in Haiti,
it's still a mystery how that bag, so far back in the
crowd, suddenly seemed to walk over the path of black
heads, and popped through the narrow opening of the door,
landing at my feet.

As my flight took off over a blanket of cement and metal
shacks, then ascended even higher over the bare mountains
of Haiti - stripped naked of all forest in the unending
quest for fire - I was overcome with an intense feeling of
gratitude mixed with sadness.

I had experienced life here at it's most basic and most
raw. I'd seen both the beauty and evil in humanity, like I
had never witnessed in Canada.

I knew it had changed me profoundly and that Haiti, as
someone had told me was bound to happen, had got under my
skin. I will be back.

smontgomery@thegazette.canwest.com

© Copyright  2004 Montreal Gazette


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