María Suárez Toro, FIRE

While I lay in a tent in FIRE´s camp in Haiti I remem­ber one of the first pop­u­lar songs that changed social con­scious­ness  regard­ing vio­lence against women, at a time when the sub­ject was a well-known secret and there was no polit­i­cal, social and cul­tural acknowl­edge­ment of vio­lence against women as a vio­la­tion of the human rights of women.

“My name is Luka” came out the hit parade around the end of the eight­ies of the last cen­tury. In a soft voice, almost whis­per­ing, Luka tells us that she is the neigh­bor who lives upstairs and if you hear her moan­ing and aching, you may not know exactly what is hap­pen­ing, but you can imagine.

She changed many of us because she gave a voice to what was hap­pen­ing behind closed doors (in the pri­vacy of homes), a voice that told the story with such deep-felt mean­ing that every­one one had to listen.

This is my third night in the camp in Port au Prince where we are devel­op­ing the Fem­i­nist Sol­i­dar­ity Camp for com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Sol­i­dar­ity with the Hait­ian peo­ple in the after­math of the 12^th of Jan­u­ary earth­quake, mourn­ing with them regard­ing the more than 300,000 peo­ple who lost their lives and cov­er­age of what was hap­pen­ing with women in Haiti has brought us here.

It is well-known that at this moment in Haiti’s his­tory, vio­lence against women is on a sim­i­lar scale to the rest of the world: one in every three women. It is well-known too, that in times of nat­ural dis­as­ters, there tends to be an increase in vio­lence against women and girls.

Nobody knows for cer­tain the extent to which this is hap­pen­ing in Haiti today because there are many sto­ries but no offi­cial state­ments with names and places and no offi­cial data col­lected. Some reports tell of a woman who was res­cued from the wreck­age by a man who then raped her. Oth­ers tell about a teenager who was hid­ing in some rub­ble because she was alone and that some men came to loot the place and when they found her, they raped and killed her. An account tells of a woman car­ry­ing her bag of rice dis­trib­uted by human­i­tar­ian agen­cies who was stopped by two men on a street — not only did they steal her bag but they also killed her.

Sto­ries are being told every­where. These are the cries in the silence. How­ever in our neigh­bor­ing camp there are other cries of silence. I hear them once again tonight. Then their voice fades into the mur­mur of respond­ing muf­fled voices that ask for silence.

It is Feb­ru­ary, one o’clock in the morn­ing and I’m sleep­ing in our tent at the edge of a large set­tle­ment of more than 1,000 peo­ple who, on 12^th January,  lost their homes in the city in the earthquake.

A female voice moans in the dark of night. Imme­di­ately the mur­mur of cries of other peo­ple join in and their sounds rises and spreads like the rip­ples of the tremors. It con­tin­ues and expands until it dis­ap­pears while silence returns.

As with “Luka”, I do not know if the mur­mur of oth­ers want to silence her so that all can sleep, or if it sup­ports her so that she can live and sleep in peace.

The cries in the silence are calls of dis­tress. With the dawn of a new day, women’s pains are tem­porar­ily abated. Bit as njght falls again, it brings a new lament in a dif­fer­ent part of the set­tle­ment. Once again some woman’s protest starts, the mur­mur erupts once more, then is fol­lowed by silence and another day dawns with my same con­cern every day: how will we know what is going on with regards to vio­lence in the camas and whow to go about doing some­thing about it.

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