Fracture

The river was rushing mightily from the mountains.  Four straight days of heavy rain have taken a normally shallow stream and turned it into a weapon of destruction.  Banks being beaten mercilessly.  Plants and trees slowly remitting to their harsh undoing.  The brown river did not discriminate with its wrath. 

During my time here in the spring I was told of a yearly flood that ripped through the town of Repo and the lower levels of Delice.  This could very well be the 2012 version as the river seemed like it would continue to rise until I was crying out for Noah.  Little did I know that the river had bigger targets on its mind than the meager “kay” that inhabited the low-lying flood plains.

We arrived to Haiti on a typical Sunday morning.  A relatively uncomplicated trip that gave us about 3 hours’ use of a La Quinta hotel room #ThreeHourTour and then sweating through customs with four bags of medical equipment.  We were picked up and taken to Arcahaie with ease.  Others were not so lucky.  Dr. Angie and her husband arrived to Port-au-Prince two days later in the afternoon.  The hours passed with no notice from them or Peter, the driver that was to pick them up.  Rachel and I waited and finally they rolled in at nearly midnight.  “The bridge was out” and they had to take a detour.  The entire traffic system was thrown out of whack.  Buses and tap taps without clear routes.  The poorly designed back road now carried the traffic of the main highway.  Needless to say, traffic was not moving.  The story I received from Angie and Steve was that in their second hour of sitting in the detour traffic jam that a set of motos came cruising along the side of the road.  They had to ditch their luggage, but were able to finally get back to the compound.

I visited the bridge, just a short walk from our compound, and saw for myself why it was closed.  An entire section of the support was lying in the river.  However, you could still walk across it and they were letting motos drive across it.  Tap taps waited on either side of the bridge ready to take passengers to their destination.   But you can’t leave a lame gazelle in the path of a lion and expect it to still be there in the morning.

The days were as dark as the nights and the rain continued its assault.   Guirlene, Rachel and I had just returned from visiting a patient and were trying to settle in to ride out the storm.  There isn’t much else you can do in the midst of a hurricane aside from seek shelter and read under your headlamp, but Guirlene was determined to finish her daily duties for the missio.  And then it happened.  She was hustling quickly from building to building wearing her loose flip flops and hopping over puddles collecting on the rain-soaked tile.  Her footing was bound to fail.  Dr. Angie and Guirlene shuffle into the downstairs bedroom supporting Guirlene’s right arm.  She had a FOOSH.  We doped her up with the few narcotic pain medications that we had saved and braced her arm. 

The rain did not slow down to celebrate its new victim.  It had loftier goals in mind and Guirlene’s wrist was a small piece of collateral damage.  The river gushed over the dam towards the sea.  Nobody was on the road when the bridge started to shake.  The rushing water beneath obscured the sound of the bridge’s impending death, but the supports were failing.  It was a rapid demise.  A large chunk of the center of the bridge suddenly wasn’t there as it was gobbled up by the rapids below.  The northwest was now completely separated from Port-au-Prince.