Watching & Waiting
A daughter’s story about her father and the Haiti earthquake aftermath
By Anne Mathey
My cell phone buzzed with its familiar electronic chime as the display lit up “Mom.” I was driving to work, in a hurry and starving. I looked longingly at the Arby’s drive-through bag in my passenger seat and reluctantly answered the phone.
“Have you been watching TV?” It could have been a question followed by a squeal of “Oh my God, ‘American Idol’ is so good!” But the tone was wrong. There were tears behind the question.
“There’s been an earthquake in Haiti.” It took a moment for my mind to process. Dad! He went so frequently and living several states away, it was hard for me to remember his comings and goings. That’s right; he was supposed to meet Mom in Florida for a vacation when he arrived back from his humanitarian trip.
Surprisingly her voice never quivered as she explained she hadn’t heard from him yet. She thought he and his team were leaving Port-au-Prince earlier in the morning, so maybe they weren’t near the quake at all. I assured her he’d be fine, and soon he would be haranguing us with vivid stories of what he’s seen and done. Just like every trip.
My father, Ralph Mathey, is the founder of a non-profit organization dedicated to education in Haiti. H.E.A.R. (Haitian Education, Assistance and Relief) The Cry sends children to school and older students to English classes, college or even medical school. Often they provide funds for people in small rural towns to fix their homes, buy medicine or just buy food.
I went with him once, in 1999, and now my mind swirled with images of what I’d seen and done. How could Haiti, impoverished anyway, survive such a tragedy?
I remembered mostly the children I encountered on my trip. They were innocent of the rest of the world. Before our trips to their small villages, several had never seen a white person before. We brought them toys. One boy was given a small model of the space shuttle. He began digging in the mud with it. I gently lifted his hand and made a rocket noise with my mouth, pushing the shuttle into the air. He stared at me blankly. With no TV, no real contact at all with the rest of the Western World, the familiar shape meant nothing to him. On one hand, he was like so many little boys around the world — happy to go out and play and get dirty, wondering what was for dinner tonight. Except for this little boy, all there was to play with was dirt, and dinner might never come.
I pulled my car into a parking lot as I continued to reassure my mother. She was to call me right away with any more information. In the meantime, I called a hard-working friend I knew would still be at his desk at a quarter ‘til five. I asked him to look on cnn.com and tell me what he could find out about the quake.
“Um...I don’t see anything...oh wait. Breaking News, 7.0-magnitude earthquake ten miles away from Port-au-Prince, the capitol of Haiti.” He went on with a few more vague details. My mind wandered. Seven point magnitude! That had to be a big one. My mind pictured the ramshackle city of Port-au-Prince. A bustling metropolis on one hand, it was home to nearly a million people. But it wasn’t a city like I had ever witnessed before. The buildings were, at best, made of concrete cinder blocks. Most were slapped together with scraps of corrugated metal. It was a shantytown mess of a capitol city. The poverty was evident everywhere.
As I pulled into my parking space at work, I noticed all the lights off. What now, I groaned inwardly. The power was out. Our whole East Village street was dark. All I wanted to do was watch CNN and hear more about the quake.
I entered the building and told my co-workers the news. No, the Wi-Fi wasn’t working; neither of the laptops could get Internet. I laughed bitterly as I lamented the few minutes — at most an hour — I would have to wait for access to America’s 24-hour news sources. There wasn’t a cohesive news service, and there was barely a telephone system in Haiti. My lack of information paled in comparison.The coolers whirred as the lights came up.
“How did an earthquake in Haiti knock out power in Des Moines?” One of my co-workers said. It was a joke, of course. I laughed. Even to me it sounded forced.
CNN was running with the story. They repeated a 7.0 earthquake had hit Port-au-Prince, with several aftershocks averaging 5.0. The news station had a geologist on explaining the workings of the earthquake, and the possibility of a tsunami hitting the coast. The talking heads annoyed me. Show us some video. Haiti’s 600 miles from Florida for God’s sake. Get some people there.
At first, it didn’t sound too bad. The quake was centered several miles from Port-au-Prince. Perhaps the shock had dissipated before hitting the city, I tried to convince myself. It didn’t work. I could see the devastation before the news cameras even arrived there. The city would have been pulverized into dust.
It was nearly an hour before my mom called again. “Dad’s fine. He’s not in the city. He left a day early to travel to the small village on his itinerary.”
Dad’s fine.
The words didn’t strike me as heavily as one would have thought, given the situation. Of course Dad’s fine. He’s my dad. He’s the guy who grabbed the pan and ran it out the front door when, as kids, we somehow managed to light the cookies on fire. He’s the guy who knows the answers to all my questions.
Of course he’s fine.
Someone in his party had a satellite phone that could text to e-mail addresses. The group was going to split up — some of their Haitian counterparts would travel to Port-au-Prince to look for friends and family. The American party would stay and continue its work. They were helping the villagers build a community center.
My interest in the news coverage began to wane as the talking heads continued their repetitive rambling. What can I say? America is a visually stimulated society. As the news channel got correspondents on the ground and cameras rolling, the tragedy became much more real.
After several hours of watching the destruction and panic, my mom called again. There was a new e-mail, and she had forwarded it to me.
My dad wrote, “We are really trying to decide what to do. Should we try to go to PAP and get out of the country or should we stay here. The problem is things are probably at their best now. Within a couple of days food and water will be all gone in the city and things could get worse.”
I was glad to hear they weren’t running to the rescue to Port-au-Prince. The city is dangerous by any standards, but add desperation and panic, and it’s even dicier. The police force in Haiti is slim to none. I assumed there would be rioting and looting. There aren’t a lot of electronic stores in Haiti. Heck, there aren’t a lot of shoe stores in Haiti, but wherever you are, there always seems to be something to loot. In Haiti, it would be food, water and other survival needs.
At that point, my father said there were several hundred Americans at the PAP airport, but no commercial flights going in or out. It was questionable if they could return through the Dominican Republic, which is Haiti’s neighbor to the east. They probably didn’t have enough gasoline for the truck to get there. And none would be coming out of PAP, so no tankers could arrive in the port.
My dad would wait a day and consider his options.
Here at home we continued to wait for his next communiqué. We continued to watch the news coverage of a nation in turmoil. And we continued to hope all is not as bad as it seems.
Four days after the quake (with aftershocks still trembling the country), my family hears my father is going to try to make it to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. The military is evacuating Americans, beginning with the elderly and handicapped. My father, 61 and walking with a cane due to a weak hip, says he’ll try his best to look as elderly and as handicapped as possible. At least he still has his sense of humor.
He arrived as dusk fell on Port-au-Prince. The city, in shambles, was unfortunately falling into a mutiny of looting and crime. There was little food or water; survivors had to scrap, beg and steal what they could. In the slums outside the city, a gang burned tires in the middle of the road. They jumped on and in front of cars, trying to stop them. My father’s caravan could do little but keep moving. With several thousand dollars of Haitian money that never made it to their destinations (the group never completed their tour of small-town schools), stopping would place them in incredible danger.
Speaking to me briefly over the phone from Florida a day later, he said the sights were heartbreaking. He saw a woman’s decapitated body lying by the side of the road. A few yards down, an object in the street was hard to make out in the dusky light. Shockingly identifiable up close, it was the woman’s grotesque severed head.
In the wee hours of Sunday morning, the United States’ military loaded my father and 70 other Americans onto a wide-body Air Force plane, the kind the paratroopers are deployed from. No one was told where exactly they were being evacuated to, so it was a confusing and unpleasant trip for all involved. Finally landing in Ft. Lauderdale, the group had to wait in a holding room before they were told where to go next. They were finally cut loose with little instruction on how to return to their homes.
My mother, a short flight away in Arkansas, had planned to meet my father in Florida on Sunday. He flight, scheduled to layover in Dallas, returned to Arkansas due to fog. Mother Nature, it seemed, was still fighting to keep them apart.
Sunday evening, I received a phone call from an unknown number. A kind stranger had let my frantic father use his cell phone. Where was my mother? Why wasn’t she there to greet him? Finally, using luck and the airport paging system, my parents found each other again.
They are in Florida now and plan to vacation for several days. They are happy to be alive, together and able to love each other once again. CV
Caption: Haiti 1: Ralph Mathey is the founder of H.E.A.R., a non-profit organization dedicated to education in Haiti. Photo courtesy of Anne Mathey
Caption: Haiti 5: The magnitude 7.0 earthquake was the most powerful to hit Haiti in a century. Photo courtesy of Anne Mathey
Caption: Haiti 4: More than $355 million in donations will help Haitians return to a normal way of living. Photo courtesy of Anne Mathey
Sidebar:
Tax-deductible donations to H.E.A.R. can be sent to 11160 Kenwood Road, Ste. 200 Cincinnati, Ohio 45242.
Send earthquake specific donations to the Red Cross at www.redcross.org.
