Interviews in Canape Vert

Certain areas in Canape Verte are completely devastated. House after house flattened up the entire hillside, some sliding into the houses beneath them. Knowing this was a particularly affected neighborhood, I decided yesterday to go check it out and see if my translator and I couldn't talk to some of the folks still living there. Here and there people had rebuilt shelters on the site of their destroyed house. Several sites were being cleaned up, the crushed homes being broken down into rocks and dust and carried away, leaving the surface of the earth empty and open. In one interview, we interviewed a woman while sitting on a porch overlooking the remains of the house as a young man broke apart cement and sorted through the rubble. They are cleaning it for me, she said. That house had almost killed her. She had been trapped, unconscious, for three days in the ruins of her kitchen. All her children are alive though, and she is grateful to be alive too. She thinks about the earthquake constantly, she said. She doesn't feel well. She slowly turned away from us turning the course of the interview until she wasn't facing us at all. I put away the recorder. We walked on.

Marie-Ange's shack is perched tenuously on the hillside, a small shelter amid a field of rubble and twisted rebar. She pushed aside the blue curtain when we approached and stood on the threshold while we explained what had brought us there. We were standing, she said, on the site of her old house, the house where she had been conceived and lived until January 12 2010, when the house above her house fell off its foundations and came crashing into her house, causing it to collapse. She took us out back and lo and behold there was the neighbors house lurching nonsensically, violently, downhill. The roof curved forward over the floors beneath it and reached nearly to the ground. It still stinks sometimes, she said. She and her family had been in the house at the time, but luckily they had made it to the front room when the above house fell, since that was the only part of the old house that didn't fall. Marie-Ange was five months pregnant with her first child on January 12th. That day she started to bleed, and on January 14th she had a miscarriage since they were unable to find a doctor. She spent a month and a half in the nearby camp, ill from the failed pregnancy, before returning the site of her house. In the meantime the rubble had been cleared from the site for her by a young men of the local soccer team. For the past ten years she had sponsored them, making food for them and washing their uniforms, and they wanted to do something kind for her. After the earthquake the survivors of the neighborhood had organized themselves and established a committee that sought out aid distributions and divided it peacefully among themselves. The foreigners are the only ones doing anything for us, she said. Well, God too. I asked her if her relationship with God had changed since the earthquake. "He's farther away now," she said.

I asked her what makes her happy these days, how she finds comfort when she is sad. She said all she really wants is another child. Her friends have children, her younger sister has children, all she really wants is to be able to have a child.The miscarriage was complicated though, and she doesn't know if it will be possible. She knows it is a gift from God, and isn't for her to decide, but she is waiting everyday with hope.

Everything has changed. It's a whole new world, she said.