A witness to disaster

Bruce French talks about helping Haiti
By REILLY CAPPS
Writer

Published: Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:11 AM CDT

It doesn’t end, the suffering — not in Haiti, where the suffering is both so big that it’s uncountable — 200,000 to 270,000 dead — and also so small that it rolls by unnoticed … except by people like Bruce French, a local who’s spent more than a month there helping. Last week he watched a legless man sit in a shiny new wheelchair. But the man hadn’t yet learned to control it. And, on a traffic-filled, rubble-strewn road, the wheelchair gathered speed, and the man bounced off vehicles and crashed into a curb, and a guy who’d already lost both legs in the quake lost some teeth, too.

“Every day, thousands of volunteers from around the world come and go from Mais Gate Airport,” French wrote in an e-mail. “NO ONE leaves here untouched.”

French sees more than most. He’s an average guy who has become a witness to disaster. The bigger the disaster, the faster and farther French goes, on his own, and the longer he stays to try and do his small part to pick up and patch together the mutilated world.

Right after the horrific Asian tsunami of 2004, he rushed to Sri Lanka and spent five months there, then returned time and again to help.

And so French has become an expert on the ways the Earth can kill.

“In my perspective, this has been worse,” he said by phone from his refugee camp near Port au Prince. “A lot of the debris from the tsunami was either shoved kilometers into the jungle or pulled into the ocean as the waves retreated.”

In Haiti, everything fell straight down.

“In every direction there’s something destroyed,” French said. “Everywhere you look, human mass amongst collapsed concrete, tangled rebar and crushed vehicles. Millions of tons of rubble. … The destruction is more ‘Mad Max’ apocalyptic compared to, say, Hiroshima.”

There’s so much debris in Haiti that it literally lines the streets, he wrote. And people are afraid to clear out the debris of their homes because their relatives are buried beneath. They’re afraid to sleep indoors, so tens of thousands sleep in the street.

He hadn’t intended to get involved in another disaster. He happened to be in Panama when the earthquake hit Jan. 12, and didn’t even hear about it for a while. But when he got to a computer he found notes from friends from the Sri Lankan disaster effort telling him he ought to get to Haiti.

Bruce French normally works for rock stars, as a private chef for Pearl Jam and U2, and will probably leave Haiti in May so he can go be the private chef on tour for U2 or Rush. But in Sri Lanka, he became a kind of film star himself, as one of the subjects of a documentary called “The Third Wave.” Sean Penn got involved with the movie and entered it at Cannes.

And since Penn, an actor who rushes in to disasters, had already showed up to Haiti, French headed to where Penn had set up a relief operation.

Now he’s living in a camp in Pétionville, on what was once a golf course, on the outskirts of Port au Prince, he wrote, “lending my chi and post tsunami experience to coordination/camp management efforts” with Penn’s non-profit, “providing relief services.”

“My/our presence has brought some semblance of order, even tranquility to some challenging and deadly moments,” he wrote.

He sleeps in a tent under a tarp, on top of a hill that overlooks 50,000 displaced people, along with doctors and staff and a “gaggle of orphans, dissembled families and a stray kitten.”

French knows the good aid workers can do. He has returned to Sri Lanka — twice last year alone — and seen it come back from the dead. Some of the projects that he helped set up are still going: a couple bakeries, a coconut oil mill, a couple machine shops that make cement bricks. “Little things to get people back on their feet and some semblance of normality,” French said.

To him, amid all the disaster in Haiti, he finds vibrancy, a thriving culture, and hope. In the refugee camp there’s a thriving marketplace selling rice, charcoal, chicken, beans, soda and beer.

He’s amazed by that. Beer. In the middle of all the death.

French has given up so much. “I surely didn’t get my money’s worth out of my ski pass,” he said. “My personal bank account is in shambles,” he wrote. But he doesn’t much care. He’s more than willing to give.

It’s easy to get hyperbolic and hagiographic about him, and paint French as some kind of hero instead of a servant, but, well, you know. There are ethicists who say that men should be judged by what they do for the least of their brothers and sisters, and French finds the very least brothers and sisters on Earth, and he does very much.

Of course, there’s only so much anybody can do. The rains are coming, and when they come life will be even harder than it is now, for that market in the camp, the one that sells beer and gives him so much hope, sits in the path of the coming floods.

telluridenews