Perreaux says Haiti experience has marked him
[ FEBRUARY 1, 2010 - KEVIN WEEDMARK ]
When he was growing up in the tiny community of Bellegarde, Saskatchewan, not far from Redvers, there were certain journalists Les Perreaux admired.
He loved reading Bob Hughes’ column on page two of the Leader-Post, and he loved watching the reports from CBC foreign correspondents such as Ann Medina and Anna Maria Tremonti.
Now Perreaux is a journalist with the Globe and Mail and his latest foreign assignment—in Haiti—is reminding him why he wanted a career in the media.
“It definitely reminds you why you’re a journalist,” he says. “I’m based in Montréal and I cover Quebec politics. I cover the day-to-day politics and the language issues, and it often seems to be the same issues again and again. They’re important, but sometimes you wonder what the point is.
“I don’t think that I’m in the same class as those CBC foreign correspondents I admired growing up, but I honestly think in this case I helped people understand. I think everyone who was there covering it contributed to helping people understand.
“You see people organizing spontaneous fundraising drives back in Canada because they know the needs, and you know you’ve contributed to that by telling the story. I can’t tell you how much money was raised because the Globe and Mail was covering Haiti, but hopefully it helped.”
Perreaux has covered many international conflicts and natural disasters, but he said in an interview from Brazil last week—where he is vacationing following his stint covering the earthquake—that nothing compares with the destruction he saw in Haiti.
“I covered the earthquake in Pakistan five years ago, and it certainly was bad, but Kashmir is not downtown Port-au-Prince,” he said. “In Pakistan, some big towns really got devastated. But in Haiti there are eight million people and four million of those are in Port-au-Prince. When a city like that gets devastated, it’s really the entire country that’s devastated.”
Perreaux was on the ground in Haiti 24 hours after the earthquake hit.
“I got the call within an hour of the earthquake,” he said. “Our foreign editor, Steven Northfield, gave me a buzz. Within three hours I was on a plane to Toronto. The first thing the next morning I was in the Dominican Republic. It took 20 hours of travel to get from home to the border of Haiti. I did the last hour and a half by truck to get to Port-au-Prince. I was in Port-au-Prince within 24 hours of the quake.”
Getting to Port-au-Prince required some creativity. “It was tricky,” Perreaux said. “Different people tried different methods. Some people went to Miami to get a flight with military or on an aid flight. If you could charter a plane, better yet. But once the American military took control of the airport in Port-au-Prince, that suddenly wasn’t an option.”
Perreaux says he will never forget his first sight of Port-au-Prince. “That initial sunrise drive into Port-au-Prince was devastating,” he said. “Every block had numerous bodies on it, sometimes in the middle of the street. There was barely a building that wasn’t seriously damaged in some way.
“The bodies are a huge shock, but to see the presidential palace and the cathedral—to see how these massive structures, the seats of power of the church and the government were absolutely flattened was just devastating. You see the human drama. Everyone was in shock. The city was in shock. People were walking around like zombies. People were wide-eyed, wandering the streets in a shuffle. You have the human drama then you see the institutions that would normally help people out—you see them completely flattened—and it’s hard to see how these people are going to get any help.”
Slowly, however, the country struggled to its feet and the aid started to arrive. “It was a gradual process over two or three days,” he said. “You started seeing people selling things in the street again, or taking what they could and heading out of town. There was about a five day window there when it went from zombie mode to some kind of normalcy.”
When he first arrived in Port-au-Prince, Perreaux said the journalists far outnumbered the aid workers. “It took three or four days to see much sign that the world was responding to the disaster,” he said. “Among the first group were several dozen Cuban doctors and nurses. That was the first sign of an international presence. They were there the first night. The international groups that normally have a presence in Haiti were worried about their own missing and dead and weren’t able to function right after the earthquake.
“It took several days to sense there was a huge international effort to help Haiti. It was really hard to see the signs on the Sunday and Monday after the quake, but by Tuesday there were aid distribution centres being set up.”
He said the logistical and infrastructure shortcomings slowed the start of the aid pipeline.
“There was me with a credit card and a mandate from my employer to get there, and I’m just one person, so I was there, but for trying to bring aid in, the challenges would be huge.
“It was frustrating to see how slow the aid was arriving, but it’s hard to see how it could be faster. The airport in Port-au-Prince is not as organized as the Regina Airport. The Regina Airport has five times the pavement that Port-au-Prince has. The airport there has one runway.
“And the road between Santo Domingo (in the Dominican Republic) and Port-au-Prince can’t handle much. The border post literally looks like the entrance into a junkyard. There’s a little dirt trail that has sunk into the ocean in places. It looks like if you were going to an auto wrecker to get a set of rims or something. It took us eight hours to get 240 km.”
Perreaux said there is one memory of Haiti that will haunt him for a long time. “At a clinic run by the Cubans there was a girl who was brought in four or five days after the quake,” he says. “It’s not clear why it took that long to get there—if she had been waiting at a regional clinic or what—but this girl had two seriously broken legs and a broken arm. She was eight. The way she was crying and screaming, it’s going to echo in my head for a long, long time. They finally found some painkiller to give her, but I won’t forget that sound for a long time.”
He said he was also very disturbed to see the bodies of young children who had been killed. “In the early days you saw them all over in the streets,” he said. “If you’ve covered enough conflicts or disasters, you’ve seen more than your share of bodies, but to see so many kids, that was tough.”
In the face of such pain and suffering, Perreaux did what he could to help.
“It’s overhwhelming to see the need all around you, but I did what I could,” he said. “Communication with the outside world was tough, and I had a satellite phone, so I let people use it to call loved ones overseas and let them know they were alright. I gave people rides, I did whatever I could.
“It was frustrating because you could do so little. The scale of the disaster is off the charts. You feel like there’s nothing you can do without an aircraft carrier full of supplies. You always feel you could do more. Should you use the precious gallon of gas your driver has to get people to the hospital?”
Conditions in Port-au-Prince made it difficult for Perreaux to do his job. “It was difficult to hire a guy with a car to take you across town,” he said. “With no electricity, the gas stations weren’t running. One of my colleagues, he’s worked covering this area off and on for years, and it took him four days to find out where the president was. With no cell phone coverage it was difficult.
“There was never any question I could file my stories. We have two systems—a satellite phone, in a pinch you could read in your story from there, and also a satellite uplink for data, which gets you onto the internet. That was one of the main ways we operated. Some of the hotels have satellite internet, but you couldn’t rely on it. I discovered that a laptop and a satellite uplink can run off a car battery for several days. Everyone had their own way of doing things. The New York Times guys flew right in with a generator that they checked as baggage.
Perreaux said he learned a lot about Haiti during the assignment. “I had a lot of preconceived notions about Haiti, and I blame myself and my industry for that—the place only gets covered during disasters and uprisings, so I had an image of a really violent place. We were very nervous going in. We heard so many bad things—we heard that the roads are dangerous, banditry is a common thing.
“When we got to Port-au-Prince, we went to this old hotel—it’s made out of wood, which is why it withstood the quake. Wood flexes and outperforms concrete in an earthquake. There were a lot of old Haiti hands there—journalists and business owners, people who had been around for a while. I chatted with a few of them and I asked about security, and one guy just got mad. He said ‘just go for a walk.’ I spent all day walking around downtown Port-Au- Prince. I used to feel safe walking the streets of big Pakistani cities but I don’t anymore. But I felt safe in Port-au-Prince. People were more than hospitable. You look around and people are injured everywhere and doctors are doing amputations under tarps.
“The part that amazed me is how welcoming and open Haitians were in spite of everything that was happening all around them and what they’ve been through. “When you go to earthquakes you expect to see horrible injuries, but what I found surprising is I actually got a sense that the Haitian people were really pulling together. I don’t know if they have a term for it, but they have a system of self-policing with a community spirit aspect to it—I saw it again and again. “Several nights, women were singing all through the night, and it was like that all over town. They would be singing church songs all through the night. I assume it was comforting for them, but part of it was to encourage people who were still trapped in the debris. People were getting together to sing these songs to offer some comfort to people who were still trapped.
“Another thing I saw was people taking off after looters to stop them. There was more looting a few days after the quake, but it was surprisingly rare.” Perreaux’s career has taken him many places but he doesn’t think he will ever forget his time in Haiti.
“In terms of memorable experiences it would certainly be up there,” he said “It was really horrible—it’s something that is going to stay with me. “Haiti has marked me more than Afghanistan, but I still think Afghanistan is the bigger story in terms of its position in Canadian history books. Afghanistan will be remembered.”
What’s the most important thing he has taken away from his experience in Haiti?
“I leaned that Haitians are just amazing people,” he says. “I’m amazed at how they just keep going in the face of a disaster like that. You saw the smiles on people’s faces coming back a few days after the quake.
“I don’t think we would react the same way in those horrible circumstances. Of the whole population in Port-au-Prince, five per cent were killed, and 10 per cent were injured, so pretty much everyone in Haiti has lost someone or is close to someone who is severely handicapped for the rest of their lives, but by the end of the week people were sharing smiles and jokes. “I really wonder if the same thing happened in Montreal or Winnipeg, if we would react the same way.”