The tents at the hospital are gone. People no longer line the halls of the clinic or lie under tarps in the courtyard. They’ve moved back into the cement-roofed hospital where cracks in the walls quietly remind them of the events of last January. The new threat of heavy rains and high winds this hurricane season has pushed people past their previous fears of another earthquake. And life has presumably gone back to normal.
The missionaries on the Wesleyan Mission Station have stopped receiving calls about relief drop-offs at the airport, and they are no longer hosting last-minute relief teams. The pace has slowed to the same steady pulse this place had when I first arrived here in April of 2009, and if I didn’t know better, I might not realize that there had ever been an earthquake at all.
But the remaining tent cities in Port Au Prince, some of which have expanded since I left in April of this year, and the lingering piles of rubble and collapsed buildings betray my attempts to see normalcy. A conversation earlier this morning revealed to me that the pain of loss, though less acute than the agony of January, persists as a dull ache in the hearts of many here. And though equilibrium seems to have been restored, recovery from the earthquake is far from over.
by: Justine Iskat
