Polis - The city of Scout

What I fear is typical of cases of epidemic diseases of mass, such as leptospirosis, gastroenteritis, infections due to water or food contaminated. They are all vials of vaccine - says Hilario Gomez - rabies, tetanus, typhoid, pneumococcus, hepatitis A. Our government has made available one million doses.

The young Gomez does not hide his pride, while our minivan trudging toward the border. But his enthusiasm is a Defillo Bernard, chief of cardiology at the University of Santo Domingo, takes care to turn off at once: "What I fear is typical of cases of epidemic diseases of mass, such as leptospirosis, gastroenteritis, infections caused by contaminated water or food. " We head back to the crossing-Jimaní Malpaso, the front door of Haiti , or as we shall see, the thin diaphragm that separates a poor country, but the comparison as lucky as the Dominican Republic , from a poor country, where the evil appears to have decided to reside permanently.

Wounded thrown into trucks

It is not necessary to delve into the hell of Haiti to be aware of two days Jimaní are thousands of people converged on the run from Port-au-Prince and its surroundings. "But do not call them refugees - says an official of the UN troops who tries very hard to untangle a huge but very old trucks dall'ingorgo which is crippling the road along Lake Enriquillo - these are here to look for water, bread, goods, electric generators, medicines, everything I can find to take him there. " He's right, even if in part, in describing this kind of rough draft of the Gaza Strip, where every time you open the Rafah crossing and thousands swarm into Egypt to stock up on everything.

A snapshot of Jimaní But there's an unforgiving tragedy of Haiti: this side of the truck with the wounded piled on crates unloaded in the hands of the Red Cross after the Dominican government has allowed the opening of a humanitarian corridor, beyond the souk inevitably created in these cases, a huge open air market where Haitians stockpile of chicken, eggs, bananas, pineapples, rice, but also clothing and shoes, because thousands have fled their homes as they were and still roam the city without any shelter.

Here the summary of the first mass vaccination against tetanus, beyond the scapicollarsi of those scoops as it can of all that can take away before returning in a Babel of dialects, creoles that are intertwined with the harsh Castilian Dominican soldiers who monitor the border for fear that those who enter and then try to disappear and stay here, where the gods of the earthquakes were more benevolent and drinking water is not more precious than gold.

The best comes from the bottom

But now that we've left behind and we enter the Dominican Republic in Haiti quickly everything becomes much clearer. Starting from the fact that the fourth day after the earthquake machine international aid is likely to run dry and stuck despite its good intentions, and the best that you can get comes from below, from the initiative - but let's say by ' heroism - of the individual. As the seven or eight Italian medical volunteers Francesca Rava Foundation, arrived here Friday in the only hospital on the island that has never stopped working, the children of St. Damien.

Their newsletter is a copy in his tragedy: "In just one day - says Father Rick, director of Casa Hermanos orphanage Nuestros Pequenhos - we saw seven hundred and fifty people, of whom one hundred twenty-five children , practiced amputations twenty-five urgent and at least thirty more will be needed in next few hours. But the problem is now essentially one: water. "

Hospitals to collapse

It's true. The thirty volunteers and staff twenty Haitians do not say a kind of modesty shared, but they are thirsty. The water is over and the one that arrives gets chaotic streets, anarchist, he disappears in the blink of an eye, as they realized the helicopter's "Comfort U.S.," the U.S. Navy hospital ship, which has deposited on the ground a load of plastic bottles instantaneously causing one of the hundreds of brawls between desperate to carve a container from 33 centiliters of hot liquid. "Port-au-Prince - says Dr. Greg Elder of Medecins san Frontieres - is a city usually overcrowded and poor infrastructure. Before the earthquake the city, with 3.5 million inhabitants, half of which lives in slums, had 21 public health facilities, including four hospitals, but the public health system, already deficient before the disaster, was not in the least to negotiate an ' emergency of this magnitude. "

You breathe the smell of death

But there's a detail that no television, no image among the thousands icastiche dramatically in their severity may return: the smell of death that gets into your nostrils since I approximates a Christ-Roi, Nazon, in Delmas, a Canape-Vert, the outposts of that slap that lasted 42 seconds of nature that destroyed a town and put two million people in the lurch. The smell, the stench of decomposing, the sewer exploded, aromatic hydrocarbons, the same - in a tragic olfactory memory that is awakened - that we breathe in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina wiped out five years ago.

A smell, a deadly breath exhaled from the hundreds of dead bodies piled in the streets, that impels people to open spaces, the presidential fleet - the one with the white dome tilted ominously on the residence of the president who is now homeless as its citizens and nothing can be done but to submit to the scepter to the Americans, arrived in strength and numbers and now masters of the airspace at the expense of the UN mission, which would have jurisdiction over aid. "One of our planeload of medicines was run over the capital for nearly two hours to be told that he could not land because the track was off limits for the arrival of Hillary Clinton," says Gianni Dal Mas, who prepares for days convoys of relief.

The pity is impossible

The escape from death, the smell of the most terrible calamities that we can imagine at times clashes with pity not for the dead. Tens of thousands have so far been herded into makeshift graves on the outskirts of the city, transported by truck and unloaded into the pit, with a little 'over lime. But some people are willing to sell what little they have for a Christian burial. "We are making a collection to get the money necessary - says a young woman in tears -. We can not tolerate not having a place to pray on our brother. "

A funeral in Port-au-Prince now costs $ 1,200. Twice, three times a week ago and the box costs $ 300 more. But all prices s'impennano in circumstances like this and a brutal war economy will replace the daily routine. A bus ticket can cost as much as a clock, a bottle of cooking oil, the salary of an employee, the domestic price of a generator car.

Still Tonton Macoutes?

But escape the horrors of the earthquake is even more true. And that's why among those three hundred thousand souls that move slow like zombies but then when you shoot fast like cobras approximates a truck that distributes aid, which vagolano like ghosts but have a watchful eye, tormented, seeking any opportunity to leave behind the memory of an unspeakable tragedy makes its way too dark soul that has always encysts memory of Haiti.

That name, "Tonton Macoutes", so full of blood and violence, no one ever pronounce it, but those bands of young people who are spinning the machete above his head and over to plunder what little remains occupy portions of road intersections, steps required to call a toll as ready to step robbers closely resemble the fierce soldiery of many dictators of Haiti. It is this threat, together with the shortage of water, to keep the hearts of all bereaved, rescuers and victims, as dusk falls over the city without light.

Author: Giorgio Ferrari (Future)