The destruction

The drive from the airport, come to think of it, any drive, is filled with a patchwork of internally displaced person (IDP) camps, piles of rubble, condemned and collapsed homes. Even a photograph of the scenery could not do justice to the reality of life in Haiti. An album might begin to offer a fair record of the completeness of the destruction; film might begin to show something of the disaster. Yet, truly to begin to understand Haiti, one has to make the journey to the country to experience first-hand what 1000 posts of a blog fail to do justice to.
It strikes me that this contribution to the WEP may mark a high watermark in my sensitivity to all that I see around me. One of my fellow volunteers is a professional photographer charged with keeping a photo record of the work we are doing. He refused the opportunity to photograph a flattened car still lying in state at the burial site that was dug for it nine months ago.
You see destruction in Technicolor that you can have only encountered in the comfort of a cinema. This was not the first time I had seen the flattened carcass of a Chevrolet, having experienced the thrill-ride beamed into countless cinemas across the world in the guise of a scene from a Hollywood blockbuster.
For a moment, on encountering it for the first time in Haiti, I allowed myself to imagine a masked avenger chasing his long-time adversary to what would become the point of the final stand-off. Pursued to the top of a high rise, our villain eventually plunges to his death onto a car below, shattered glass gives way to the screech of car alarm until the battle for life I lost by it and its newest passenger. With the dastardly criminal dead and buried, all that is left is the Chevy – abandoned.
Yet this scene in front of me was not thought up in the mind of a scriptwriter shot at great cost onto 8mm celluloid. It was a scene that must have been repeated time and again across the country when buildings collapsed crushing all in their wake on January 12th 2010 when the earthquake struck. Nearly nine months following the premiere, that particular film and its aftermath is still being screened across the country. It won’t win an Oscar, but perhaps it should merit more international attention.