CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN
2010 - Tent City
I called Mireille as soon as I was back in Port au Prince.
“Are you ready to make rounds with me?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I replied. “That’s my whole reason for being here.”
She picked me up the next morning at 8:30, in one of those big, white UN trucks.
“Our first stop will be to a tent camp in Delmas 33- Maïs Gâté. There are about 6,000 people documented but I’d guess the real number of people living there is a lot higher.”
It was slightly disorienting to watch traffic snarling grey and dusty city roads, after the relatively calm transit routes of Cyvadier and Jacmel, but the route from Karibe to Delmas was starting to feel familiar.
I don’t even know how to go about describing the tent camp. It was thousands of white tents covered with blue tarp. Thousands of people, the adults all trying to figure out a way into a better situation. Men hoping to chase down job leads. Women trying to make a few dollars selling charcoal or produce outside their tents. The better resourced amongst them had found ways to set up more substantial, though still makeshift, stalls selling groceries, liquor, haircuts- whatever you’d buy in normal life, before the devastation. Local volunteers had set up a school tent. An old tennis court had been repurposed as a soccer pitch. There was a semi-functional basketball court that saw game play almost twenty-four hours a day. There were several church tents.
Mireille and I walked around a little bit. She introduced me to the UN folks who were in charge of the camp and then walked me over to where the leaders of the residents’ committee were having their daily status meeting. I could tell right off the bat- that camp was organized. The UN seemed serious about getting people out of tents and back into homes, and the residents for sure seemed hell bent on getting out of there.
“I wanna be a part of this,” I told Mireille once we were back at the truck.
“Good to know,” she replied, “because I’m taking you over to our office, so I can introduce you to my counterpart, Torsten. He’s in charge of the construction part of the rebuild. If you sign on as a project manager, he’d be one of your supervisors.”
We drove over to the project’s headquarters- a two-story house located on a residential street off of Route de Delmas. When we pulled up, Torsten, a skeletal looking Norwegian with ten years of hardcore disaster relief experience under his belt, was standing in the yard waiting for us.
Mireille made the introductions. I could tell right off the bat that Torsten was a taciturn man with little time for bullshit, which was fine by me. I gave him my background- B.A. in Civil Engineering, Masters in Public Administration, a year of real estate project management in Panama, fluent in English, Kreyol, French and Spanish. Ready to hit the ground running by February. He gave me his card and told me to email him once I’d submitted my application online. We shook hands, then Mireille drove me back to Karibe. We sat in the truck, talking, for a few minutes.
“That was a day,” I said.
“Well, if you get into this every day will be long and intense,” Mireille replied.
“I can handle it,” I told her. “I’m going to start my application tonight. I’d like to get in in as soon as possible.”
“You’ll get hired if you want it,” Mireille reassured me. “And the application is pretty straight-forward. List me as a reference. I think there’s a space for that.”
“I’m going to go check it out now,” I said as I hopped out of the truck. “Hopeton and I are leaving on Saturday. Let’s make sure to get together before then.
“We will,” she said, as she drove off.
