Haiti's New Normal: You Get Up, You Sit Back Down

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (July 12) -- Along the fault line that caused this disaster in Haiti, there are now more than 1,300 camps. They are filled with 700,000 tarps and 100,000 tents. They are tied up alongside 8,000 cubic yards of rubble and 190,000 destroyed houses. There are 1.5 million people, including half a million children, in the streets.

But ask folks what they've been doing lately and there is only one answer: "Nou leve chak jou, epi nou chita." We get up every day, and we sit back down.

Life is like that, they say, six months after the Jan. 12 earthquake. What can we do?

Days start early. By 5:30 a.m., the sun has risen. By 6 a.m. tents and shacks are unbearably hot. There may be breakfast. Or there may not be.

People who are lucky enough to have a job or go to school head out into the streets to wait for tap-taps, the colorful and dilapidated shared taxis. The traffic begins to honk and crawl, heaving smog like a dragon, to settle against the sea.

By 6:30 a.m., the city is fully awake. Compas music plays from every radio. Women line up their mangoes. Everyone gets ready to sell something -- then everyone waits.

In Haiti, there is often the promise of commerce and no real commerce. The promise of money and no real money. But for most, there is neither. In the camps, people seek out a little bit of shade and go back to sleep.

Most of all, in Haiti, there has been the promise of change, and no change.

It could be 6:30 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon or 8 o'clock at night. It could be June or January or December. It could be 2010 or 2009 or 2012. What earthquake? It changed everything and nothing at all.

"What do I do when I'm not sitting? Please. I wait for my death," Lori says, with a snarl.

"I do a little laundry," Jeanette says. "I wait."

"I take my bread and put it here. And when no one buys it, I give it to the kids," Wislene says. "And I pray."

Just after the earthquake, when buildings and crushed cars still covered the roads, life was made simple -- if you were alive, you were lucky.

People spent the first weeks huddled together with their families, feeling the texture of the warm air like never before. The sun was bright and everyone thought, "I am alive and the sun is bright."

Each day was filled with ordinary tasks that suddenly became difficult and important. Water. Food. Family. There was intention. Everyone had hope and urgency and gratitude and purpose, not just for themselves, but also, for their country.

Then gas arrived and cars started moving. That familiar smog settled in. The radios laughed. Six months passed. Life moved on, as it must, and along the way, it's shown everyone -- in equal measure -- how a near-death experience can eventually feel distant.

Unfortunately, for Haiti and for Haitians, this might be what healing looks like. To be panicked, to be in constant mourning, to be confrontational ... these are also not solutions.

"What about your son?" I ask. "What does he do all day?"

"Him? He plays with the Chinese guys," says one father, speaking about the Filipino U.N. soldiers who sometimes guard the camp.

"And when you're not sitting? What do you do?"

"I don't know. I sometimes try to go find this boss I know and ask him if he can give me anything. He's a mechanic. But you know, you can't go to the same guy two days in a row."

The world has spent hundreds of millions in Haiti since the earthquake. It is sometimes said that change is a process, not an event. But sometimes it's hard to believe that change should be so expensive and so slow.

In the streets, there are obvious changes. Many of the buildings that were once a jagged cacophony of destruction were leveled or whittled away by men with sledgehammers until big blocks became smaller blocks and now, everywhere, rubble.

It sits in the streets, dragged out one bucketful at a time onto every corner and into every dead end. The rubble is a reminder of what lies within -- that memory, of something that once seemed bigger, now whittled away.