Count to ten. Go on.
One…two…three…four…that’s how long it took to devastate the lives of three million people. That’s how swift the hand of death is, how quick the scythe—I speak of the earthquake that occurred in Haiti on Jan. 12.
You have all seen the news, heard all that CNN and the BBC had to say as they poked their microphones and cameras towards the grieving population of Haiti in order to ask them how they felt.
How do they feel?
How would you feel?
How would you feel if you were listening to your little brother crying out to you, buried below rubble and you couldn’t find a way to get him out? If you had to pull your mother from a fallen wall? If you watched the roof of the supermarket begin to crash down upon you as you put your Cheerios into the trolley?
“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic,” Stalin said and I never thought I could apply it to anything in my life until my family and I became victims of the earthquake in Port-au-Prince.
We cannot identify with each individual death, the way that people watching CNN cannot truly identify with the thousands that died.
I realized that to every person there, when the roofs and walls of their beloved city fell, every death has a life that it ruins—there is the greatest tragedy, lives being shattered, taken too soon.
Death does not discriminate; both rich and poor were equal that day.
My mother worked at the UN Headquarters at Hotel Christophe. She tells me that at first the building moved from the left, to the right and then began to shake violently. The walls began to crumble around her. People who were trying to run from the buildings were crushed; the whole Senior Management of the UN died that day.
When we were evacuated to Log base we saw people all around us, bandaged, bleeding, dead bodies covered with sheets lying on the streets.
The trauma of seeing all these places—the city that my family and the other families of Haiti knew reduced to piles of concrete was the most terrifying experience of my life.
Every time the earth shook it was a reminder, though death had not taken survivors like us, that did not mean it wouldn’t.
I have had a pretty simply life, bereft of fear, but that day the fear kept me from closing my eyes incase I opened them and found my mother dead.
Though it may be hard to relate to this exact tragedy, I am sure that there are terrible things that have happened to each of us in our lives. That is what tragedy is—individual.
But so is strength and that’s what people needed in Haiti from what I saw, someone to inspire strength in them again. So even with this new semester starting, this new world of UT may seem bleak to newcomers, but what I say to you is what I said to myself as I waited for news of my mother, “When it’s dark in your life, just wait for the daylight.”
Daylight always comes.
Philippa Hatendi can be reached at phatendi@ut.edu.