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

It’s day 4. I feel tired. I woke at 4:00, but forced myself to stay in my tent until 5:30. It is now just after 6:00. All of the oth­ers are still sleeping.

The lat­est chal­lenge is that the water tank is empty. I took a sponge bath with bot­tled water and “no rinse bath wash”, which came with one of my REI kits. I did not have the courage to try the “no rinse sham­poo”. My hair is wild enough already.

These roost­ers are hilar­i­ous. I have now seen them in action a few morn­ings. They not only wake every­one up at 4:00 a.m. on the but­ton, but they per­sist until 6:00. It is like they have a built-in snooze but­ton. If no one gets up after the first wake up call, they go off about every ten min­utes to remind peo­ple the day has begun. Each reminder becomes more urgent.

Let me tell you a lit­tle about yes­ter­day. We saw 45 fam­i­lies. Many have 3–4 indi­vid­u­als, so the court­yard was full all day. The per­cent­age of gravely seri­ous cases rose yes­ter­day. We saw at least a dozen cases involv­ing a com­bi­na­tion of past polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion (homes torched, women raped, hus­bands killed dur­ing the coup), and present harm (deaths in quake, inhu­mane liv­ing con­di­tions, major med­ical issues). One woman put it most vividly. She had suf­fered through two polit­i­cal con­flicts and was raped dur­ing both. She said the earth­quake felt like a third rape. She could not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the causes of loss and suf­fer­ing. It all merged. We referred more than half a dozen rape cases like this to our psy­chi­a­trists (Daryn, Suzan and Dina).

We had two cases involv­ing young moth­ers who had lost their entire fam­i­lies (par­ents, hus­bands and chil­dren). They are ter­ri­fied, empty. We referred them to Daryn and Suzan and Dina.

We referred eight cases for chil­dren (now orphans) to our child psy­chi­a­trist (Vic­tor). At about 3:00 one of our inter­preters alerted me that two orphans had arrived together — the boy was 14, the girl was 6. They were not related, but the boy had “adopted” the girl and was car­ing for her. We referred them to Vic­tor. They went home with one of the adult com­mu­nity lead­ers, but today we have to find out what nets exist for pro­tec­tive care. We had a young woman arrive with a five year old girl in her arms. She found the girl on a pile of rub­ble and has been car­ing for her since then. The two are insep­a­ra­ble, bonded. The woman is deeply pro­tec­tive of the child. She brought her to us because the child has a frac­tured femur. Our first job today is to find a clinic that can help her. We saw two amputees, sev­eral stu­dents who had their schools col­lapse, a pas­tor who had his church col­lapse, and a grand­mother who has lost every­one in her fam­ily except one grandchild.

The scale of human tragedy is impos­si­ble to com­pre­hend. We have seen about 120 peo­ple. We can mul­ti­ply those cases by 500 and we would be under­es­ti­mat­ing the mag­ni­tude of loss and despair.

The com­mon thread run­ning through every case is extreme poverty and inex­cus­able human­i­tar­ian neglect. I have inter­viewed over 60 peo­ple myself. Not a sin­gle one has received food aid for two months. Neigh­bors are help­ing neigh­bors. Fam­i­lies are help­ing fam­i­lies. The chil­dren eat first. The adults are stick-figures. One woman told me she drinks cof­fee fla­vored water and sucks on salt crys­tals to ease the hunger. Every per­son I have inter­viewed said they are lucky if they eat once a day.

Not a sin­gle per­son we have inter­viewed has a tent. All of our fam­i­lies are liv­ing in the street under makeshift “shel­ters” con­structed of tat­tered shreds of cloth and sticks.

90% of those I have seen have had no med­ical atten­tion. We have four med­ical emer­gen­cies that need imme­di­ate atten­tion. Find­ing a clinic with space is on our list today.

The level of neglect and global indif­fer­ence should enrage the mem­bers of our team. We are sav­ing the fury for later, con­serv­ing our emo­tional energy for compassion.

We had a “de-briefing” last night.  We have more than 50 cases that we will include in our human­i­tar­ian parole pool. We have promised to help every fam­ily we have seen, even if they don’t fall into that pool. At a min­i­mum we will sup­ply each fam­ily with a tent and tarp before the rains come in April. We will need 150 tents.

This morn­ing we have 45 more fam­i­lies com­ing. Tomor­row and Mon­day we will have focused inter­views with our parole candidates.

Every­one is work­ing very hard. We are in har­mony as a team. We have one uni­fied focus — to help.

The New York Times reporter Deb­o­rah Son­tag dropped by yes­ter­day. She hung out with us for a cou­ple of hours. I hope she will help spread the word about the need to uti­lize human­i­tar­ian parole to help peo­ple who are suffering.