Day Twenty: The Body
Photo: Grant Fuller
It was a sight I expected to see. Bodies, corpses, cadavers, whatever you wanna call them. From the horrific shots of dump trucks carting them off to the gruesome stories told by friends who came before me, I knew I’d see something unpleasant. But it took me almost three weeks in Haiti, until my next-to-last day here, to see one single dead person.
As I hustled down the street, trying to keep up with an old man I was following for a story, I came across a big crowd staring at a pile of rubble. A couple guys were throwing rocks at the mountain of destruction, like it was some kind of game. We stopped, and my interpreter asked what was going on. As the others told her, she looked up with her mouth agape.
“What?! What are they saying?” I anxiously demanded. “Oh, um…that’s a body up there,” she said. Oh. I scanned the rubble carefully, searching for something I didn’t really want to see. Like a morbid Where’s Waldo hunt, I couldn’t quite make out a person in all that mess. Finally, my interpreter directed my finger to a little spot of faded yellow amidst the twisted steel and crumbled concrete. “Look where they’re throwing the rocks,” she said. The rock-throwers were aiming for the body, trying to prove (by the way it bounced off of him) that it was indeed a dead man up there.
This used to be a TV station, someone informed us. My interpreter soon realized she knew the owners (Haiti’s a small place). Looking up, I thought about that guy. What was he doing the afternoon of January 12? Was he an editor? Producer? Cameraman? The body’s position, torso hanging off the edge of one of the floors, was unsettling. Yet for the Haitians gathered there, it was just another victim. Does a different crowd gather here and stare every day? I thought. Or is this really the first time anyone has noticed a body sticking out of this wreckage?
Earlier in my trip, a man had offered to take me around back to his fallen school. The bodies of his friends were still trapped beneath debris, and he thought I might like to see. No thank you, I said. But sometimes in Port-au-Prince, when you stumble upon a bunch of rubberneckers and rocks are flying into the rubble, you can’t help but catch a glimpse of that train wreck. And it’s only fitting, since now more than ever in Haiti, death is such a part of life.
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