Thoughts on Haiti

Former NPF fellow Antigone Barton reported  on Haiti's prisons a number of years ago. Now in Lusaka, Zambia as an ICFJ Knight Health Fellow, she filed this report for the Helpdesk as she thought about the health consequences in Haiti as people imprisoned for years entered the general population.

News from Haiti

 

I heard about the destruction of the prison in Haiti's earthquake with mixed emotions last week.

 

By then I had finally heard that the people I knew there had survived, including a Haitian American deportee, now living in his car with a bottle of water, and I had noticed it is hard to find comfort even in relief while tragedy is still unfolding.

I heard some of the 4500 men crammed into that prison built 1000, died. Most fled, according to the doctor who I’ve written about and visited the prison with, and who saw a decade of work trying to address the many health menaces there collapse last week.

 

He remains the only one I've heard to use the word "fled" although what else one does when the city around them collapses, cutting off the meager supply of food and water to a place that served as an incubator for infectious diseases, I don't know.

 

The news reports I have heard used the word "escaped." Some said "dangerous criminals escaped," or "high-security prisoners" (an inaccurate euphemism on several fronts for "dangerous criminals.") Some reports have gone on to say that the escape of these dangerous people adds further terror to the chaos and misery outside the prison walls.

 

I think of Joseph, a skeletal boy I met on my first visit. He had gone into the prison two years earlier, on suspicion, he said, of shoplifting. He sat on the floor of the infirmary, which, like the rest of the prison, didn't have enough beds, and he looked like he had been put there, as he was too weak even to gesture.

 

While he had been awaiting trial, he had caught drug resistant tuberculosis. He was dead by the time I returned a year later.

 

That next visit I met several more people who were dead of preventable curable illnesses by the time my plane took off a day later.

 

Now former prisoners, sick with the infectious diseases that were allowed to flourish there, are out, perhaps adding to the odds against other survivors.

 

So when the news reports talk about the dangerous prisoners who now roam the streets of the capital, adding to the mayhem there, I wish they would spell out the dangers more clearly, now that the prisoners' plight is out in the open.

 

(I wrote about HIV in the Caribbean in 2007 with support from ICFJ and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and NPF. Documentary of health conditions in the prison is House Call in Hell at: http://www.pulitzercenter.org/openitem.cfm?id=674)

Comments

[Kenneth Matthews]

Powerful writing and a great back story to the Haitian tragedy. I hope other journalists working abroad can develop skills and insights like Antigone's.