Haiti Earthquake: Day Six

Waking up was hard. I was tired, sore and a little in a fog... but there were people everywhere. Kevin was coming down with a cold and needed to go to the embassy to see about getting his daughter out of Haiti. We decided that while he did that, I would tap tap down to Bobby Duvall's soccer field and get the other motorcycle out of the container. I had to walk 6-8 blocks and wasn't more than two when I walked past the first dead body... neatly wrapped in black plastic with twine with the head and feet showing. I wondered why everyone else was cutting to the other side of the street and soon found out. I guess this is what the relatives are doing with their loved ones and someone will eventually pick them up. It left me with an empty feeling in my gut.

The tap taps were all so full, I decided to hop on a motorcycle taxi. It was an interesting ride watching the destruction along Route Freré as I went.

We passed a market that had completely collapsed killing many people inside. I learned later in the day that when you see a large back hoe, they are searching for the bodies of loved ones trapped inside.

As we got down to the bottom of Route Freré, we passed the US embassy. There was a line almost all the way around waiting to get in.

Armed personnel is the norm with each food shipment being transferred.

As we arrived at Bobby Duval's soccer field in Cite Soleil where we keep our water trucks at night, the damage was obvious, the wall around the soccer fields had fallen in many areas. Praise God that none of them were on our trucks.

After getting the motorcycle out of the container, my first task was to ride into Cite Soleil to assess the damage to Elder's school Tera Promise. We had not heard anything from him or about his school before I left and we were very concerned. Here is a picture of the school directly across the street from Tera Promise. We were just at Elders school last week and heard the voices of children coming from this school.

The entire school had collapsed. Here is a picture of the school next door that we had helped when I was down here for two months in 2007. This was a 3 story school.

Before:

After:

When I called Alyn this afternoon on a satellite phone the first thing that she said to me was "I heard about Elder and the kids at Terra Promise". I asked here what she meant. She said I hear the building collapsed and killed 200 children. I was just there. I asked here where she heard that and she told me that another mission had told her that. I told her I saw Terra Promise and it is still standing. She said she had been crying all morning. It is said the relief we have when we find the truth but it was probably one of the schools across the street where the children were killed.

Terra Promise Primary School, Cite Soleil, Haiti

We rode all over Cite Soleil and the damage is quite moderate by Port au Prince standards... I think the one level tin shacks did not have the same collapsing effect that the multi level concrete buildings had. We then heading into downtown Port au Prince towards the capital... the photos will speak for themselves.

The deeper we got to downtown Port au Prince, the worse it got. If felt like we were in the middle of Beruit or Iraq. The building looked like they had been bombed. The sheer magnitude of the destruction surrounding us is hard to comprehend.











Everywhere you look there is destruction. Whenever you see a crane or back hoe, they are recovering bodies.