PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) -- It's not immediately clear where the crowd gathered in prayer ends and where the refugee encampment begins, as one group of listless, traumatised people bleeds into another.
With a symbol of state strength, Haiti's once magnificent National Palace, lying in ruins behind them, thousands left homeless by the devastating quake pin their hopes of salvation on God rather than on the works of man.
The reading is Psalm 102, and the reader has a high, clear voice, sometimes distorted by feedback through the massive rock concert-size speakers. "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee," she declares. "Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily."
Worshippers in the crowd follow the text with their fingers in battered copies of the Bible salvaged from their demolished homes. In a break in the text their wavering voices sing along with a Misericordia prayer.
"For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth," the Psalm continues. "My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread."
"For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping," runs the reading. "Because of thine indignation and thy wrath: for thou hast lifted me up, and cast me down."
Many Haitians were cast down on January 12, when a 7.0-magnitude quake tore into the capital and surrounding region, burying at least 112,000 people in the ruins of their shops and homes and leaving a million homeless.
Now the survivors are looking for sense among the senseless waste. A queue of them waits by the side of the stage as the reading continues.
One by one they take the microphone and loudly confess their sins and those of their people, begging the forgiveness of a God they can only suppose to have been so angered by Haitians that his wrath felled them in their thousands.
"My days are like a shadow that declineth; and I am withered like grass," the reader continues, her voice tireless. "But thou, O Lord, shall endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations."
"He will regard the prayer of the destitute, and not despise their prayer. This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord."
Not everyone in the crowd has come to pray, some are just bored by life in the tents and makeshift bivouacs carpeting the surrounding ceremonial square. others are here to do what business they can to survive.
A haggard-looking woman hawks a neat pile of freshly cleaned and pressed face towels. One optimist has erected a stall selling souvenir key rings with the Haitian flags and arm bands celebrating US President Barack Obama.
Elsewhere, family life continues. One woman huddles in a tiny patch of shade, breast-feeding an infant. Small boys wash in a bucket of soapy water while nearby their playmates fly kites made of wire and plastic waste.
Stands sell short sticks of sugar cane and small oily pastries.
Two young men unload French-language textbooks from a sack to sell on the kerbside. The cover boasts that readers will become fluent after a few easy lessons, but the salesmen themselves struggle to express themselves.
"What do I think of what happened? I don't think anything about it."
Across the road, marshalled by police with pump-action shotguns, a large but orderly and calm crowd presses around the door of a newly reopened bank, hoping to access cash, hoping that relatives abroad have sent donations.
"The cause of the quake was natural, but in what other country would it have had such an effect?" asks 33-year-old security guard Mercelus Luckner, fearful that he is unemployed after finding his firm's offices in ruins.
"Haitians have made many mistakes. They offended God. God is punishing us," he reasons, holding on to a vague hope that one of the foreign aid workers arriving in the city will pluck him from the crowd and offer him a job.
The Psalm ends: "Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure:"
January 25, 2010
caribbeannetnews
