Haiti: A long haul out

It will be a week since Haiti broke tomorrow.  It’s been a very grizzly one. Possibly the worst I can remember in the ten year’s I have worked at Oxfam. I think our press work has generally been pretty good; release out in 2 hours, leading the news headlines on a good chunk of the week, warehouses emptying of water stocks and pushing stories of delivery and raising a lot of money.

But never before have I had to write press releases about staff dying.

I think this is the most emotionally affected I have been since my first visit to N Kenya in 2000 when I saw lots of people shot after the effects of cattle raids. Nobody cared about that, Kenya stops after Eldoret and I have had callouses on the heart since then.

However the cameras are all over Haiti showing the corpses, explaining the stench and outlining the sheer horror of what people must be going through.  But it was the news of one death on Friday, Yolette Ettiene’s mum, that really hit me.

She is Oxfam’s Country Director and has been there for 13 years.  She was on Channel 4 tonight, talking about how her house had collapsed to Jon Snow. Through her thick accent she said that her house had collapse in the earthquake and her Mum had died in the building.

She went to check the staff were OK.

She then buried her mum in the garden.

And now she is getting on with it, raging about the lack of petrol.  Snow couldn’t really respond and criticise – as he had done about the delays, the leadership issues, the coordination problems that plague the crisis to a white UNOCHA spokesman – it was a powerful story of how this crisis has hit everyone and hard.

The media have got their quickly and much of the reporting has been excellent though some of it has been overly critical and unfair. That happens and is part of the process of set-up. There has also been a lot of commentators from the aid business, many of them have been excellent but few of them Haitian.  As Collier said on Newsnight, Haiti was a failed state before this crisis, it is not about rebuilding but about transformation. Outsiders can recommend, but its the Haitians that have to decide.