As the quake hits the countryside…

“My name is Maxime Myrtil,” the young man penned delicately in my yellow notepad.

“24 years old.”

Halfway through his last year of high school, Maxime had been studying in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck. Fortunately, he told me, he escaped his crumbling school building unharmed and was able to make the uncertain trip back to the southern countryside where he grew up. Today, standing before me outside his mother’s home in the rural community of Ravine Sable, Maxime explained the dilemma that many internally displaced persons (IDPs) are facing throughout Haiti’s southern peninsula: will I stay, or will I go?

Or better yet: must we stay? Can we ever go?

These are the kind of questions my colleague, Lee Cohen, and I were looking for when we went to investigate households like Maxime’s. We’ve spent the past weeks in Cayes, immersed in the immediate problems of the city: overcrowded hospitals, shortages of medicine, bottlenecks of supplies in Port-au-Prince. But we knew it was time to start learning about the countless other pieces of this fractious puzzle – to learn where all the IDPs from Port-au-Prince were going, and how we might be able to help them. Although the earthquake didn’t hit Les Cayes directly, we needed to know how its tremors were being felt in the communities we’re used to working in regularly. Traveling about an hour from Cayes’ urban center, we sampled families in two towns where our partners, the community leaders, expressed concern for the swelling local population.

“Y’ap vini an vag,” school director, Rode Petit-Frère, told me. “They’re coming in waves.” And they say there are more on the way.

Thus we learned that Ravine Sable’s small households are increasing by up to and sometimes over 50%. The home of Mrs. Alexilomme Petit-Frère took in 11 family members displaced from Port-au-Prince. Down the road, Maxime’s mother’s family of 7 suddenly became an extended family of 16. From each of these family’s unique stories, similar trends began to emerge.

Most evident is how the earthquake is directly reversing Haiti’s characteristically rapid rate of urbanization. Maxime and his brother Bony both grew up and went to primary school in Ravine Sable, but moved to Port-au-Prince once their age and studies outpaced the capacity of the local school system. Throughout all the years they were away, their mother paid their school tuitions and supported their lives in the city. But now Maxime, who wants to graduate and study computer science, is back in his hometown with no electricity, no running water, no cell phone service, and most significantly, no other choice.

A second trend revealed parents who had left children in the care of aunts, uncles, and grandparents in Ravine Sable to seek higher earnings in the capital. Their city lives disrupted, the choice I heard these parents discuss was unambiguous: try to make it in Port-au-Prince, or return to their roots, empty handed. But returning to the countryside they’d once left behind only compounds the new post-quake problems: not only does Ravine Sable have more mouths to feed and more people to house, but there is no longer a stream of income flowing from jobs in the city. Two strikes, not one. And the complexity marches on.

What struck me most were not these larger trends but rather the particular impacts such macro-level shifts have on real people. Pointed pangs of reality pressing firmly upon on individual lives – Like unbearably large time lags between meals, and shortages of water. Mrs. Alexilomme’s 15 -year-old daughter told me they had not yet eaten since the previous day. They were waiting, hoping, for the adults to return from the Wednesday market in Gwo Marin. It was afternoon.

To maintain perspective while absorbing these stories, I have to remind myself that they are only a sample of what’s happening in the South – thankfully, not every house is jam-packed with IDPs. People like 20-year-old Clergé Étoile help me do this. His home in Port-au-Prince destroyed, friends and classmates dead, he nonetheless remains focused on getting back to school and to finish the academic year. When contemplating his next move, this 10th grader’s answer came down to one thing: education. “I don’t want to lose this school year,” he tells me. “So wherever I can complete my studies, be it in Port or near Ravine Sable, that’s where I’ll go.”

As of today, I have not yet processed all Lee and I learned earlier this week. But so far, two things are abundantly clear: the problems we’re encountering, both in Les Cayes and the countryside, are complex and inter-related. There will be no quick fix. And yet we learned too that there are many Haitians more powerful than these problems – Haitians with the strength to fight back complexity, move forward despite uncertainty, and not compromise the integrity of their existence in the face of self-doubt, loss, or fear.

As I thumb through my yellow notepad, I wish I were able to write more fully about the other stories I see. Scribbles of survival. Songs of strength. His name was Maxime Myrtil. But another in my notepad is as inspiring as the next.