![]() ![]() There were men who searched in vain for odd jobs by day and told never-ending Bouki and Ti Malis stories and riddles as the sun went down and rain began to fall on the banana leaves. ![]() There were teenage girls who sang along hilariously with the love ballads of Marco Antonio SolĂs, despite not speaking Spanish. I want you to understand that there was poverty and oppression and injustice in Port-au-Prince, but there was also banality. Outside Haiti, people only hear the worst - tales that are cherry-picked, tales that are exaggerated, tales that are lies. I want you to know that, before the earthquake, things in Haiti were normal. Somewhere, outside, I heard people screaming, praying and singing. I was trapped, neither lying down nor sitting, with my left arm crushed between the planks of the shattered doorway and my legs pinned under the collapsed roof. And then I was surprised not to be dead after all. I was surprised to die in this way, but not afraid. ![]() I braced myself in a doorway between the hallway and the kitchen, trying to hold on to the frame, and then a cloud of darkness and cement dust swallowed everything as the house collapsed. I had never felt such a loss of control, not only of my body but also of my surroundings, as though the world that contained me were being crumpled. As a child of the San Francisco area, I was underwhelmed at first. I was sitting barefoot on my bed, catching up on ethnographic field notes, when the earthquake hit. ![]()
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