By Bill Nemitz
Portland Press Herald
January 17, 2010
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=309562&ac=PHnws
MAINE -- It was the kind of scene that played out over and over in front of Paul Kendrick last week.
One minute, he and an anxious Haitian woman were sharing an outlet for their laptops in a hotel lobby in Cap-Haitien, a city of 180,000 on the north coast of Haiti. The next, the woman stood rigidly next to Kendrick, listening intently to a voice on her cell phone.
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| Paul Kendrick of Freeport consoles a Haitian man last week in Cap-Haitien. The man told Kendrick that he had five relatives in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck and hes been unable to account for any of them. |
Then, without warning, she buckled over at the waist and began to wail.
"She learned on the phone that her close friend had been killed in one of the buildings in Port-au-Prince," recalled Kendrick, his voice as shaky as the signal on his borrowed cell phone. "She was like so many bent over, sobbing, shaking. And a few of us there just tried to provide her some comfort."
Kendrick paused to compose himself.
"That's what's going on," he finally said. "Here, there and everywhere."
A week ago today, Kendrick was just another American traveling to Haiti on a humanitarian mission. A longtime advocate for victims of sexual abuse by clergy here in Maine, he'd arranged to meet in Cap-Haitien with a group of boys who allege they were sexually abused at Project Pierre Touissaint, a school for homeless boys with ties to Fairfield University in Connecticut, Kendrick's alma mater.
Douglas Perlitz, another Fairfield alumnus who founded and directed the school and an affiliated residential program for the boys, currently awaits trial at a federal detention facility in Rhode Island. He was indicted last fall on a charge of leaving the United States to engage in sexual conduct with individuals under the age of 18.
"My mission there was twofold," Kendrick said. "One, meet with the victims and let them know people support them and care about them. And two, see what it's going to take to re-open the school."
All of which, one week later, seems like a distant dream.
Tuesday's earthquake, while flattening Haiti's crowded capital of Port-au-Prince, was little more than a prolonged rumble in Cap-Haitien. Kendrick was having dinner with a local journalist and former school official at the time. After rumors of an impending tsunami quickly subsided, the trio made their way to a crowded apartment one of the few with satellite television in the middle of the city.
"As we arrived, one guy yelled, 'Get Glenn Beck off! We want to hear about Port-au-Prince!'" he recalled. "It was surreal."
Watching the grainy images of death, destruction and unspeakable anguish on television, Kendrick found it hard to believe that something so devastating could be unfolding a mere 85 miles away. But in reality, Port-au-Prince might as well have been on another planet.
Reports quickly spread that the roads south, already gouged by days of heavy rainfall, were virtually impassable. Cell phone connections to Port-au-Prince were spotty at best and in most cases nonexistent.
And with each passing day, Kendrick said, the spigot seemed to close further on everything from cash (the banks closed) to fuel (most electricity is gasoline-generated) to, above all, information.
"I can't think of anybody I've met who doesn't have somebody they're worried about, someone they're trying to contact," Kendrick said. "The lack of contact has really heightened the anxiety and then they see what they see on TV, if they can get access to one, and it heightens even more."
And with the anxiety came a dark sense of foreboding even as life around Cap-Haitien retained a thin veneer of normalcy.
The Justinian Hospital, which over the past decade has benefited immeasurably from the Konbit Sante Cap-Haitien Health Partnership, a Portland-based charitable organization, remained quiet as late as Friday. Kendrick, whose four previous trips to Haiti included two with Konbit Sante, went there to have an infected finger checked.
"It wasn't by any means a hospital that was treating...
victims of the earthquake," he said. "It was just a normal day. It just seems odd to see that hospital functioning kind of normally when so many people need help. The problem, of course, is getting them here."
Nevertheless, Kendrick said, the mood throughout Cap-Haitien was that the humanitarian aftershocks from the earthquake are coming.
On Thursday, a dozen buses headed south in an odds-be-damned attempt to get to Port-au-Prince and bring back anyone with roots in Cap-Haitien.
Around the same time, the local economy began shutting down. Kendrick begged the desk clerk at his hotel for a $100 advance on his credit card, and as the clerk handed Kendrick the bills, he warned, "I won't be able to do this tomorrow. We can't get money either."
Then there's the gasoline used to run local generators and the kerosene that lights most of the ramshackle homes at night. All of it comes through Port-au-Prince, Kendrick said, meaning every tank, every reserve, soon will run dry.
"The feeling is that very quickly, the whole country is going to be impacted," he said. "You'll have a dark little country with little or no transportation to move food, water or anything. All those things will come to a standstill."
Kendrick, with the help of family back in Maine, somehow managed to get a seat on a Delta Airlines flight that departed Cap-Haitien Saturday morning for the island of Providenciale in the nearby Turks and Caicos islands.
He proceeded on to Atlanta and finally home to Maine.
Did he want to go?
"No," he replied.
What would he rather have done?
"Find a way to get down there."
But that, he knows, is out of the question at this early stage in the recovery effort. Instead, Kendrick can only return home from a country beset by a sense of helplessness, wishing he could have done more than just catch the grieving as he saw them fall.
"There's nothing much more you can say except, 'I'm sorry,'" Kendrick said. "And 'How can I help?'"
Columnist Bill Nemitz can be contacted at 791-6323 or at: bnemitz@mainetoday.com
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