Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017

[0] From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

[1] This is the Daily.

[2] Today, nearly eight years after the earthquake in Haiti, the country remains the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

[3] A reporter's account of when death is harder to afford than life.

[4] It's Tuesday, December 19.

[5] It was 4 .53 p .m. on a Tuesday in January 2010, that the ground started to rattle in Haiti.

[6] capital, Port -au -Prince.

[7] It was the early tremors of one of the most devastating natural disasters the country had ever experienced.

[8] A 7 .0 magnitude earthquake that leveled the city's homes, destroyed its infrastructure, and killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians.

[9] I got asked to go to Haiti.

[10] I was terrified, absolutely terrified.

[11] And the only way I could find to get in was that there was an aid flight flying, shipments of medication and the lake down to Porter Prince.

[12] Catherine Porter was sent to Haiti to cover the aftermath.

[13] I was doing a story at the hospital, the general hospital, which is locally known as the place to go to die.

[14] And I watched a body be rolled up on a gurney to a refrigerated container, shipping container.

[15] And I watched the morgue worker open the shipping container, and there was a pyramid of bodies.

[16] And he dragged this body.

[17] by holding the both wrists up to the very top walking up the bodies and he deposited at the top and that glimpse haunted me so when I heard that there were these men who were similarly haunted by this and they had taken upon themselves to do something about it I wanted to see what they did to correct this the wrong and to bring humanity to a place where there was none the men work for the St. Luke Foundation for Haiti, and for the past 10 years, they've helped bury Haitians whose families have abandoned them in death.

[18] A few weeks ago, Catherine made her latest trip to Porta Prince to document the burials.

[19] So these bodies are abandoned.

[20] They end up at the Central Morp, and whenever they pile up so much, no one's come to collect them after a certain amount of time.

[21] A neighbors start complaining about the smell.

[22] They put out a call.

[23] and the St. Loop team comes and collects them.

[24] So once every four weeks or so, these men arrive, I went with them.

[25] And they get on what they call their blues moor.

[26] Their death smocks, which are like those white Ebola suits that you would seem without the headgear, just the jumpers.

[27] And some of them tie plastic bags around their boots because they're walking in out of the morgue, and it's pretty disgusting.

[28] And then they have this kind of like pre -game bonding ritual where they pull out menthol cigarettes.

[29] They stand on the road and they pass their menthol cigarettes and they pull at Mickey's of Rum and Scotch and they take swigs of the alcohol.

[30] And throughout this, they smoke and they drink and they say imparted sort of this ritual of like gearing them up and numbing them a little bit to what they're going into.

[31] You know, you're looking at 45, 50, 60 bodies.

[32] They're anonymous, neglected.

[33] They feel like they've been just heaped.

[34] It was pretty hard to watch.

[35] You don't wear the smock?

[36] No. Another body is being delivered right now.

[37] God, on a...

[38] Orange stretcher.

[39] People coming in and leaving at the same time.

[40] They put them in coffins, they put a paw over their bodies, and they sing hymns while they do collecting these bodies, and it's so moving.

[41] But also they're having moments down on the side where they're sort of being philosophical.

[42] So they would say to me, like, Catherine, do you see what we do?

[43] Can you believe we've done this for so long?

[44] You know, like, and I remember one of them said, you know, these people, they didn't have a chance.

[45] They lived in misery.

[46] They died in misery.

[47] Mize, which is creole for misery, but also means just profound poverty.

[48] People in Haiti, you know, they see death much more than we do.

[49] When they talk about death, they're not talking about their grandparents dying.

[50] You know, the average life expectancy is like 63.

[51] That's not even retirement age in North America, right?

[52] People die from malnutrition, people die from, you know, fevers.

[53] People die for untreated, basic, very treatable diseases.

[54] But because even to this day, you know, most health care is expensive and it's out of pocket and people can't afford it, they die from incredibly treatable diseases, pregnancy, bleeding out during delivery, huge maternal mortality.

[55] It has the highest rate of children, you know, under five dying by a long shot in the Americas.

[56] This is just a place where really the diagnosis is poverty.

[57] You can hear the smack of the coffins hit the ground.

[58] Another coffin coming up, overhead, and one going underneath.

[59] And to have a burial, to have a funeral in Haiti, is really expensive.

[60] I went to a bunch of funeral homes, and it's about the cheapest they say on the record, you know, like $2 ,100.

[61] Now, more than half Haitians make, you know, less than $2 a day.

[62] How do you come up with that money?

[63] And people feel very ashamed by not burying their loved ones.

[64] It is a big deal there, and funerals are a big, deal.

[65] There are herses.

[66] There are flowers.

[67] It's a group called a fanfare, which is like a small brass band that comes in place.

[68] There's an open casket.

[69] You know, these people spend a lot of money to bury their loved ones.

[70] It's very important to them.

[71] So to abandon a loved one is considered incredibly shameful.

[72] And people don't do it lightly.

[73] Haiti has been the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere for like since at least, I can say as far back as early 70s, probably before.

[74] And there's been.

[75] And there's been a poorest country in the Western Hemisphere for, like, since at least, I can say as far back as early 70s, probably before.

[76] There was huge hope after the earthquake that it would be a tragic springboard into a new Haiti that finally the system that has been broken for so long in which there's a few Haitians that are very rich and the vast majority are incredibly poor.

[77] And most people leave the country to try and make ends meet to come to Canada or go to the United States, send money back remittances, which is like one third of the economy.

[78] And it just hasn't happened.

[79] You know, there were billions of dollars of aid spent, a lot of it soaked up by, you know, the aid industry, some of it soaked up into corruption.

[80] Things have not gotten very much better for the majority of very poor Haitians.

[81] And so I have to say, you know, in all the times that I've been there, I find it more difficult now because there's no hope that things might get better.

[82] This is a group of men who come collect these bodies.

[83] Do you know much more about them who they are?

[84] They are mostly in their 30s.

[85] They're a group of Haitian men, and their leader and the kind of their father figure is this American Catholic, passionate priest from Connecticut who arrived in Haiti 30 years ago to build an orphanage.

[86] and he stayed In 2007, a seal on your heart as a seal on your arm for love is that strong In 2007, a mother lost two of her children and she begged Father Fershette and the team to go and collect their bodies from the morgue because she did not want them to be dumped in an open pit and they were digging through bodies looking for these piles of by looking for these children You know, when they found the children, they found these two girls, they were carrying them out, it was dark.

[87] There was no electricity.

[88] It was stinking.

[89] It's full of flies.

[90] He heard these bodies calling to them saying, you know, what about us?

[91] Are we nothing to you?

[92] Are we nothing to anybody?

[93] And he felt like it was a calling from God.

[94] It's kind of interesting.

[95] He seemed to have the same image that you did, a pile of bodies, and was haunted by it.

[96] He was haunted by it, yeah.

[97] I don't hear voices, but I do hear voices when I sleep of the dead speaking to me and letting me know that I should continue in my path.

[98] He met this one man named Raphael when he was treating people in the slums, and Raphael grew up in a really violent slum, saw some very horrific things as a child.

[99] He saw his first execution -style murder when he was 12.

[100] There's literally a street in this neighborhood that's called the cemetery because so many bodies would pile up on the street through gang violence and he's grown up through the ranks.

[101] He's now kind of the chief of the burial team.

[102] He's in charge of death and destruction, he says.

[103] When I go out in the street and I run into someone who has asked me for help, when I get home, if I didn't give them something, I usually have trouble sleeping.

[104] And did he grow up in poverty himself?

[105] Oh, yeah.

[106] He grew up in incredible poverty.

[107] And it took him a long time to reveal this to me, but we ended up walking to where he grew up.

[108] He grew up in a tin shack without running water, without electricity, where he slept on the dirt floor underneath his mother's bed.

[109] And he didn't eat regularly.

[110] He was hungry all the time.

[111] There was many children, and his mother was the only breadwinner, and she was what they call it, T. Marchand, which means, like, someone was walking around selling bananas in the market, you know.

[112] So he grew up incredibly poor.

[113] He was hungry, most of his childhood.

[114] He would put salt on his tongue in order to prompt his thirst so he could drink enough water to keep his belly full because he just didn't have food.

[115] So all this is what's known as misery.

[116] The literal translation is misery, but encapsulate in that is just what they're talking about as being so, so starving that you're dipping your tongue in salt to ensure that you drink enough water so, you know, your stomach doesn't ache all day.

[117] That's what Misei is.

[118] And these men, other than the Catholic priest, all of them come from desperate poverty.

[119] They were really poor growing up.

[120] Many of them were orphans growing up.

[121] And so they see themselves reflected in these bodies that they're picking up.

[122] They don't know their stories.

[123] They don't know who they are, but they recognize Muzzi.

[124] Domo is cutting the tape with his teeth.

[125] First cask that's been taped and put in to a big white truck that's waiting in.

[126] The most surprising thing is in the middle of this, people are walking by to get to their homes down this thin alley that's only three and a half feet wide.

[127] It's a normal day for them.

[128] They steal coffins with cello tape, which I had to do at one point in one of these three trips.

[129] You had to do it.

[130] I did.

[131] I was like, Maya was tasked with this job.

[132] So, you know, the men carry them down this alley in their cardboard coffins, and they load them in stacks in a big white van.

[133] They had this, like, grim procession.

[134] They rumble down Rue de Lintemont.

[135] They make their way through the downtown, which is truly a disaster.

[136] The Grand Rue of Port -au -Prince has not been rebuilt, and it still looks very rough.

[137] And they make their way slowly through Cittes Soleil, this huge slum where there's just heaps of garbage and can still see evidence of gangs and lots of children who are living in Misei.

[138] They make their way through until the tin chacks of Citi Salaire disappear.

[139] And they enter this strange new biome, which is like a desert where there's sort of cacti and kids ride.

[140] bear back on donkeys and this rising new city up on the mountains and far of them.

[141] Tietayan, we'll be right back.

[142] Okay, start.

[143] We do not know how many courageous men and women the forces of darkness killed and dropped here their bodies for dogs to eat.

[144] But we do know the dreams that they had food to build a society.

[145] society where everyone is someone, where everyone's a moon, and it's called Tittayan.

[146] It might be on a bunch of bodies, well.

[147] It's probably further down.

[148] Catherine, what is Tietayan?

[149] Tietan is today part of the largest growing city in Haiti, the sprawling community that only started to develop a few months after the earthquake.

[150] Generally, people there call it Kynan, which means, you know, is from the Bible.

[151] It's a biblical promised land.

[152] And as it's growing to the west in its path is a giant graveyard.

[153] An area that historically has been the dumping grounds for bodies.

[154] After the earthquake, giant troughs were dug and dump trucks of victims were brought there and dumped.

[155] It's a haunted landscape, and it haunts the Haitian, Psyche as a place that is dangerous, sorrowful, and full of horror.

[156] So how did you get there?

[157] So I got into the car with Raphael, who as I mentioned to you, is kind of the he calls himself the head of death and destruction for the St. Louth Foundation.

[158] And there's no signs.

[159] There's no way that you would ever know that we're heading to a cemetery.

[160] And in the distance, there are the grave diggers who are in sandals and jeans and t -shirts and have pickaxes, and I have been working all morning in the blazing heat to dig holes.

[161] When the priest is there, he puts on his white robe, he puts on his purple stall, which is the color for, you know, an important feast, as they call it, which I learned.

[162] And the men, as they carry these bodies, these caskets out, they sing.

[163] They sing Haitian hymns that are only hymns that you would hear in Haiti.

[164] You know, you're really in this incredibly huge expanse of abandoned land that is now surrounded by houses.

[165] And you can hear kind of construction going up.

[166] But for this one quiet moment, they're singing, they're putting the coffins in the ground.

[167] The father is sprinkling holy water and walking up and down the grave.

[168] It feels.

[169] It feels like an open -air when the sky had gone gray, I felt like I was in a giant cathedral.

[170] It is really, really moving.

[171] Since they've taken over this rule of this rule and taken upon themselves to do this role, they figure they have buried more than 30 ,000 people.

[172] Wow.

[173] Which, you know, if you do the math and you look at those giant.

[174] cemeteries that were war cemeteries in Europe, you know, in Belgium and France, none of them were 30 ,000.

[175] They're like 10 ,000, 8 ,000, they are huge.

[176] The thing that is the most haunting about this is that these are anonymous, like you know that each of these people had stories.

[177] They had loved ones and they had dreams, and yet when they're dead, they literally physically become anonymous.

[178] And so it became really important to me to find out who they were, what were their stories, to put a face on at least one of them.

[179] I spent a long time going through hospital archives, personal dossiers, tracking people down, through Facebook, through many, many different ways.

[180] And we had many false starts and a huge number of dead ends.

[181] But in the end, I got somewhere or started to get somewhere with one.

[182] And that's how I ended up meeting Junior Joseph, who was the father of a living.

[183] 10 -month -old boy named McKinley Joseph, who was one of those children in a casket with other children that I saw being buried that day.

[184] Yeah.

[185] No, todays, I'm going to talk specifically about this chart.

[186] I met Junior Joseph.

[187] He comes from a really, really rough, another slum called the Martizant.

[188] And so he came and met me for lunch.

[189] And he was just so.

[190] beaten down and so mournful.

[191] It was like interviewing him.

[192] You just felt the weight of the world.

[193] He kept saying, you know, I am dominated by this.

[194] I can't let this go.

[195] I couldn't keep him from dying and I could not bury him.

[196] And I couldn't get help.

[197] Domini means he's dominated, but it translates into overcome.

[198] Overcome?

[199] Overcome and obsessed.

[200] Domini means you're thinking about this constantly, you know?

[201] And so why is he haunted that he couldn't bury him or that he died?

[202] Who said he bought more, who you know, that you can't enter him or get to the moon?

[203] Both.

[204] The fact that he died, man, the fact that he died was overcome by the fact that he died.

[205] And in addition to that, that I couldn't bury him.

[206] They wrapped him in a towel.

[207] They got in the back of two motorcycle taxis just the way that many people get around in Haiti.

[208] And they brought him to the funeral home where all the abandoned bodies end up.

[209] And he, so this little boy, you know, was brought there in June, and they tried to raise the money throughout June and July, and they hadn't raised him money.

[210] And so by September, you know, it had gotten to the point that he'd been there for three months.

[211] and after three months they determined that it's never going to happen and so he became one of the 40 -some people and one of 14 children that was carried out that day by the St. Lukeman.

[212] Catherine McKinley's parents weren't able to be there for his burial but have they ever gotten to go to the site of his burial that was done by these men in St. Louis?

[213] Have they been able to visit his grave side.

[214] No, they haven't.

[215] Not to my knowledge.

[216] They were going to come on November, at least the father was going to come on November 2nd, which is the second of a two -day national holiday for the dead in Haiti called Fedgede.

[217] And he just didn't show up.

[218] I called him when I was on the way there, and he said that he was stopped by traffic.

[219] I don't know if I believe it.

[220] Maybe couldn't bear it.

[221] I think maybe he couldn't bear it.

[222] But I have to tell you, I did tell them both about, they had this image that he had been dumped in a giant pit, like, you know, like people had been for generations in Haiti, you know, the abandoned dead.

[223] And when I showed them the little video I had taken on my iPhone of the service that had happened and how he'd been put into this type of casket and lowered, they both felt like, particularly Junio Joseph said that it was just this relief to him.

[224] Like he felt like, you know, he couldn't have done this for his kid, but someone else did.

[225] What does all of this say to the men that say Luke's and to Haysian?

[226] about the health of this country, their country, that not only are so many people dying around them, but that the country can't even afford to care for or bury its deceased.

[227] So it's interesting.

[228] For so long, you know, the father who runs St. Luke's was focusing on the living because there are so many cases of people who just need medical care, you know, and they're going from one crisis to the other.

[229] And why would you care for your dead when you're living in a state of such chronic, you know, emergency?

[230] And then they came to see that in a way, the way you treat your dead is how you treat yourself or how you view yourself.

[231] The one thing that they all said many times was, if you treat you a dead like garbage, it means the living are walking garbage.

[232] So I felt like in the end that they're burying these strangers, not only for those souls or those strangers, but for the message it sends to other people that, you know, we deserve better.

[233] Here's what else you need to know today.

[234] Amtrak 501 answering Petralia North, over?

[235] Hey guys, what happened?

[236] We were coming around the corridor to take the bridge over I -5 there right north into Squally and we went on the ground.

[237] Okay, are you, is everybody okay?

[238] I'm still figuring that out.

[239] We got cars everywhere and down onto the highway.

[240] The very first train on a newly opened Amtrak route.

[241] between Seattle and Portland, jumped the tracks on Monday morning, killing three people and injuring more than 75.

[242] The train derailed on an overpass just south of Tacoma, slamming the rail cars onto a busy highway.

[243] This was a big day for Amtrak.

[244] I mean, every single passenger got a little commemorative lanyard that they could wear announcing today as the first day for this new service.

[245] So there were many rail enthusiasts who just wanted to be a part of that historic moment.

[246] Hours later, President Trump wrote on Twitter that the crash shows the need for increased infrastructure spending, though the new line the train was traveling on was a product of such investment.

[247] And this strategy recognizes that whether we like it or not, we are engaged in a new era of competition.

[248] We accept that vigorous military economic, and political contests are now playing out all around the world.

[249] In a speech on Monday that carried echoes of the Cold War, the president outlined a new national security strategy that treats China and Russia as the biggest rivals to the United States.

[250] We know that American success is not a foregone conclusion.

[251] It must be earned and it must be won.

[252] Our rivals are tough.

[253] They're tenacious and committed.

[254] to the long term, but so are we.

[255] The speech was somewhat at odds with the often warm relationship between President Trump and the leaders of the two countries, though he did not mention Russian interference in the 2016 election and instead referred to a positive interaction with Vladimir Putin over the weekend.

[256] Yesterday, I received a call from President Putin of Russia thanking our country for the intelligence that our CIA was able to provide them concerning a major terrorist attack planned in St. Petersburg where many people, perhaps in the thousands, could have been killed.

[257] They were able to apprehend these terrorists before the event with no loss of life and that's a great thing and the way it's supposed to work.

[258] That is the way it's supposed to work.

[259] That's it for the Daily.

[260] I'm Michael Barbarrow.

[261] See you more.