another email from Haiti

This is another email from David, a team-member of mine, currently in Haiti for the week to film & capture stories from survivors of the devastation and OM's work in helping them.

Yesterday was only partially productive because in the morning Carsten and I were able to go to another orphanage and get about four interviews. (two kids, a young woman, and a pastor). In the afternoon our driver was really sick and couldn't come pick us up. So the afternoon was literally just digitizing some of the footage we already had and just sitting around at the hotel (with no internet). However, I ended up spending 4-5 hours with Wilson and Judeth translating three of the interviews into English. I made it to bed at midnight.
Today....was extremely busy because we had to try and make up time from yesterday afternoon lost. It started at another orphanage where we interviewed a young man who survived a building collapsing on him, breaking his arm; a girl whose feet got burned; and also the woman who runs that orphanage and how OM has impacted the lives of the 150+ children there. We ended the day getting shots of the Parliament building destroyed as well as the Palace. At 5pm every day, the guard marches out to the flag in front of the palace and take it down. It was really emotional to see them take down their countries flag in front of a destroyed building with perfect precision and stance even playing a bugle that was pristine and rang true. No one moved during that 5 minutes. Cars stopped on the street, people stood at attention all around. Words couldn't find my throat, let alone my mouth.

But the picture that I will be including in this email is from our driver's house. Joseph, lost both his houses and his car that he used for his taxi service. He lost everything. We interviewed him in the rubble where his houses use to be. This area also had an overwhelming smell that I didn't connect with for a few minutes. I will spare the descriptive words I would use to describe the smell, because I don't want you to visualize like I did after finally connecting the dots realizing that there were still people buried under the rubble we were standing on.