No news is good news for Haiti
Friday, February 05, 2010
By DARRELL LAURANT
Published: January 17, 2010
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Although he was more than 1,300 miles away from Tuesday’s Haitian earthquake, Vladimir David was still feeling the emotional aftershock on Wednesday.
“I have brothers and sisters there, and the uncle who raised me,” said the Haitian native and Lynchburg resident. “Some of them I’ve been able to reach, and some of them I haven’t.”
He believed his closest family members were outside the range of the main 7.0 quake, which originated just 10 miles west of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. But he also heard about a young female relative injured when section of a wall fell on her leg.
Based on photographs and video taken of the scene, it looked pretty much as if the buildings and houses of Port-au-Prince had been a table setting, and someone had violently jerked the tablecloth out from under them.
It’s a difficult thing to comprehend, based on the normal pattern of natural disasters. When you’re homeless, you go to a shelter — but what if there aren’t any? When you’re injured, you go to a hospital, unless those buildings were flattened, as well.
“A lot of the people I talked with were outside on their cell phones,” David said. “Even if their houses were still standing, there were cracks in the walls, and they were afraid to go back inside.”
Vladimir Jean-Jacques David has lived in Lynchburg, he said, for “six or seven years.” He discovered it while visiting his father in Hampton, and was attracted to “the peacefulness, the mountains. I grew up in the mountains in Haiti. I tell people here that I’m a hillbilly.”
He worked for Star Tek in Lynchburg, he said, before he was laid off last December. In the aftermath of the quake, he was trying to see a silver lining in that.
“I thought, ‘since I have time on my hands,’” he said, “maybe I could help with the relief effort.”
So he visited Gleaning for the World Wednesday and planned to make connections with some of the Haitian students at Liberty University.
“I’m willing to do pretty much whatever it takes,” he said. “If people want to donate items and can’t get them to the collection points, I can help with that.”
He gave me his phone number, (434) 426-0660.
The Rev. Pat Robertson, bless his heart, said on his television show that the earthquake occurred because Haiti had made a pact with the Devil in 1804 to serve him if he could help them get rid of their French overlords.
“That’s a fact,” Rev. Pat told his viewers.
Of course, it would seem that any divine retribution in 2010 against those plotting with Satan in 1804 would be a bit after the fact. And given Haiti’s subsequent history of poverty, hurricanes and political instability, they might have been better off to keep the French.
David is often reminded of these myths about his native land. Brought up Catholic, he said he’s been invited to a number of other churches in Lynchburg, “because I think they see me as some sort of lost soul who follows voodoo.”
Haiti’s sad post-colonial history, David said, actually began with a European blockade and boycott of the island after that early 19th-century revolt.
“The country never really got past that,” he said. “It used to be one of the more prosperous countries in the Caribbean.”
And now ... this.
“We’re used to hardship as a nation,” David said, “but we’ve never seen it this bad.”
The good news about Tuesday, he added, was that the quake failed to trigger a tsunami.
In Haiti, the term “good news” tends to be relative.
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