Update from Jayne Flem­ing, Human­i­tar­ian Project Project, Lawyers’ Earth­quake Response Net­work (LERN)

By 8:00 a.m. yes­ter­day there were 45 fam­i­lies at the door of the BAI. I was thrilled to see them. Yet I had no legal or med­ical sup­port teams for another five hours. Our doc­tors and lawyers were in flight.  I did, how­ever, have three great inter­preters. We got mov­ing right away.

We did 23 straight inter­views, rotat­ing inter­preters with each case. Each per­son had a heart-breaking story to relay. Many of the women had hor­ri­fy­ing pre-quake his­to­ries of gender-based vio­lence. The women out-numbered the men two to one. I soon real­ized about half of the women were widows.

We did the inter­views method­i­cally. By noon we had com­pleted about 15. It was now roast­ing out­side. There were 30 fam­i­lies, many with small chil­dren, who had been sit­ting in the sun for hours. I asked the com­mu­nity orga­niz­ers who had rounded up our fam­i­lies if we could get them all lunch. Based on the sto­ries that morn­ing, I knew most of them had not eaten that day and had had, at most, one meal the day before.
I pro­vided money for food and returned to interviewing.

We did another six inter­views. Wid­ows, grand­par­ents, the wounded. We spoke with a mother who had lost three daugh­ters in the quake. They were house­keep­ers at the Hotel Impe­r­ial, which had pan­caked. Their bod­ies were not recov­ered. She was wait­ing for some­one to dig them out so she could bury them.
We met a woman who had lost her hus­band. She told us his body was picked up by a garbage truck and taken away. We saw sev­eral women who needed med­ical eval­u­a­tions. One was a def­i­nite sui­cide risk. We also had a five year old boy who had watched his mother die in the earth­quake and then remained trapped under rub­ble for three days before being saved. I wanted him to see our child psychiatrist.

By 1:00 we had worked our way through half of the group, but more had arrived. The rows of fold­ing chairs assem­bled in the dri­ve­way were still full.

Our team arrived at 1:00 — four doc­tors and two lawyers. Of course they had been fly­ing all night and I was not sure what con­di­tion they might be in. We gath­ered together in a back room. I am not one to dis­play emo­tion at work. I con­fess I could not keep my voice from shak­ing as I described the morning.

Thank­fully they were ready to dive right in. We got two med­ical teams started on two of the most high-risk cases. Our legal team con­tin­ued to screen families.

We did not fin­ish until after dark. The last “fam­ily” I inter­viewed con­sisted of a 28-year old man and two chil­dren, ages 6 and 14. The chil­dren were not related, either to each other or the man. Both had lost their par­ents in the earth­quake. He was look­ing out for them because he had known their fam­i­lies. The chil­dren were shell-shocked, wide-eyed with fear.

By the end of the day we had iden­ti­fied 20–25 appli­cants for human­i­tar­ian parole. (We also iden­ti­fied 2 fam­i­lies in the tent camp on Weds).

This morn­ing we have 45 more fam­i­lies arriv­ing — 15 at 8:00, 15 at 10:00 and 15 at noon. By Sun­day, we will nar­row our pool down and move from inter­view mode to appli­ca­tion prep. By the time we leave we will have 50–60 of the most com­pelling appli­ca­tions possible.

The mem­bers of our team are spec­tac­u­lar. We had a long meet­ing last night and planned our legal strat­egy for get­ting the appli­ca­tions granted. Every­one is deter­mined, smart and tactical.

The most impor­tant thing I can con­vey about my expe­ri­ence is the unbe­liev­able courage and beauty of the Hait­ian peo­ple. They are gen­tle, hum­ble, intel­li­gent and resource­ful. All of the sto­ries that por­tray Haiti as some kind of sav­age, law­less ter­ri­tory are totally false.

I’ll write more soon.

Jayne