Things are unbelievable in Haiti

Jan 16, 2010 Editorial

People never know how much worse others are until the plight of the unfortunate is highlighted. For many, the lot of others is something that is made for movies; it is surreal and can easily be forgotten when one closes one’s eyes.
To most Guyanese, Haiti was a strange place to Guyanese; a place where even the language is different. Guyanese can understand Voodoo because culturally, we too have our beliefs rooted in the supernatural. The population looks alarmingly like a sizeable section of the Guyanese population. In fact, their history is similar to ours—they were slaves who fought bitterly for their freedom.
However, we never took the time to understand the various unrests, the coups and even the poverty that grip the country despite the inflow of billions of dollars in developmental aid. We can empathise with the race to leave the island on anything that floats, ignoring the risks. We could understand the drowning as many try to reach the shores of Florida because Guyanese themselves are desperately trying to leave this country.
What we cannot understand is the size of the destruction that now prevails in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake that hit on Tuesday. We cannot visualise dead people numbering the population of Georgetown lying in one place. Some of us today cannot even recall the sight of 913 dead people lying in one spot at Jonestown. Such imagery defies the imagination of Guyanese.
Things are bad in Haiti. As fate would have it, Guyana is outside the earthquake and the hurricane belt. Had things been different, every building that stands in various forms in the city would have come crashing down because they are not earthquake proof.
Our homes simply rest on beams and uprights. Fortunately, most of our buildings are wooden therefore the task of freeing people would not have been as tedious as it is in Haiti at this moment.
Our death toll might not have been as high, too, because in no part of Guyana is the population as concentrated as Port au Prince, the Haitian capital. There were about two million people concentrated in the area that the earthquake struck. Some of them were living in shacks, others in buildings made of concrete but in such a manner that they were mere piles of blocks and slabs of concrete. These came crashing down and to this day there are people trapped under tonnes of concrete.
The most populated part of Guyana is Georgetown with 250,000 souls.
What Guyanese may also find amazing is that there did not appear to be any heavy earth-moving machines around. People were using their bare hands and sledge hammers to reach victims trapped and people are trapped because today, four days after the quake and its aftershocks, rescuers are hearing the voices of people beneath the rubble calling for help.
More people are going to die in graves not of their making unless some country moves in a hurry to land heavy earth-moving to lift the slabs of concrete that trap so many thousands of people.
In Guyana, bulldozers and Hymacs and frontend loaders are commonplace. This seems not to be the case in Haiti so rescue efforts are slow—tedious. Meanwhile, an economy that was fragile has been made even more fragile. Everything has ground to a halt but the people have to live; they need help.
Guyana is gearing to help. The government has pledged US$1 million; the national relief fund has already raised $3 million and a number of agencies have begun relief efforts.
Kaieteur News is also launching a relief effort. The public response must be overwhelming because the Haitians need help more than we ever would. They have to rebuild but before all that they must first bury their dead, a most overwhelming task that may very well be beyond their capabilities.

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