[Music]
it must have been about 5:00 in the
afternoon and my phone started ringing
it was a news desk at the AL jazer
headquarters in the United States
frantically trying to get a hold of me
because as it turned out just a few
minutes ago there had been a massive
earthquake in Haiti I was the only
reporter who was anywhere near the
incident so they would telling me to
just get to the airport as quickly as I
could we got the first flight that we
could get to the Dominican Republic
which is right next door to Haiti and
spent the next several hours trying to
Charter a small aircraft to fly us over
the border to
Haiti the runway to the airport was
apparently very badly damaged and there
were no planes landing
we found one guy who agreed to take us
we paid him bunch of money and just
basically got on this four- seater
aircraft tiny little plane he was
radioing down to the ground to see if he
could get anyone at all on the radio to
say if it was safe to land or not he
couldn't contact
anyone when we landed we were the only
people there we were some of the first
journalists to actually arrive on the
scene with a little camera and few
thousand and you know no idea what to do
next the airport was completely
destroyed there was a massive crack
through the entire building the uh
control tower had collapsed the runway
itself the paving was all
cracked we found this Haitian guy who'd
been hanging around at the airport
offering his Services as a fixer and
Driver we hide him on the spot and got
him to drive us into the
city Haiti especially Puerto Prince is
the worst possible place where you could
have an earthquake because it's an
overcrowded City it's full of very
cheaply constructed buildings people
living on top of one another the
buildings just collapsed in the space of
30 seconds there were over 200,000
people killed there were just rows and
rows and rows of
bodies and it was the worst thing I'd
ever
seen the entire city was out on the
street the bodies that people had
managed to drag from the Fallen masonry
had been laid out by the side of the
road there were people sleeping by the
side of the road this was the biggest
story in the world at that moment we
were the only team covering that story
at that point those first 3 days we
really just didn't sleep at
all there was a lot of anger in those
first few days at the slow pace of the
response there was a real problem with
the bottleneck of humanitarian equipment
and supplies at the airport there were
Planes full of doctors that were being
turned away unable to land at the
airport and that made people extremely
angry there were still people trapped
under the rubble but but a lot of the
responders were not able to work at
night because of security considerations
there is a a stereotype of Haiti being a
dangerous country Haiti being a place
where you will be at risk after dark on
the streets this was a country that had
been hit by devastating disaster this
was a time when from what Haitians
taught us the country had never been
more united from what we saw on the
ground there was very little basis for a
concern about security
when I arrived in Haiti I thought I
would be there for maybe a week at the
most but I never left I was there for
the next 18 months the situation for
many months after the earthquake was
really awful there were 1 and A2 million
people living in tents around the
outskirts of Porter prince in terrible
conditions very unsanitary
conditions I think it was October the
20th in the evening when I first got a
note from my news desk that was saying
there had been an outbreak of a mystery
disease in a town about 2 hours north of
Porto Prince a town called St Mark 19
people had been taken ill and died in a
hospital in Haiti's rural Heartland when
we arrived at the hospital there were
people being carried in on beds people
being carried in on doors there were
just streams of very sick dying patients
arriving at this tiny Clinic it was by
far the worst thing we'd seen since the
early days of the earthquake you know
people were throwing up there was
diarrhea on the floor it was just
horrific the hospital was so packed that
there were people being locked out they
just didn't have the capacity to treat
the numbers of patients arriving there
were people who were pretty much Dead on
Arrival if they didn't have access to
Fresh drinking water within about four
or 5 hours they were
dying it took several days before it was
confirmed as chera it was Haiti's worst
nightmare it was just out of control and
it was spreading and it was spreading
very very
fast the main fear that everybody had
was that if this disease hit the capital
that there would be huge numbers of
deaths within that first week we were
back in the capital know within the
first half an hour people were taking us
from house to house showing us sick
relatives who were lying in bed
suffering from the same symptoms the
first few cases of chera were basically
taking place in front of us we seeing
people bringing out their dead relatives
laying them on the street for body
collectors to come and pick up and take
away to mass
Graves it was a full-blown epidemic that
had spread to the
capital we were driving around the city
listening to the local radio and there
were people calling in reporting that
there was some kind of sewage spill that
had taken place at a un base just
outside their town called M balet they
were complaining that it had something
to do with the outbreak of the
disease we drove along the side of the
river that ran through the town until we
got to this very small fenced off un
base that was actually the staging
ground for the nepes contingent we
knocked on the gate to ask if we could
go in they didn't let us in the front
gate blocks off the base you can't see
inside but if you go around the side
there's a kind of chain fence and
there's a small path between the edge of
the base and the river that runs right
next to the basee and that's a public
path I remember the first thing that we
saw was about two dozen un nepes
peacekeepers frantically clearing up
this putrid smelling mess that was
leaking out of one of the buildings on
the Bas they were digging around this
boggy patch of brown liquid that was
smelt like sewage and they were really
upset that we were there and they were
telling us not to film we could see this
horrible smelling liquid dripping from
the base basically across the path into
the river what we were seeing right
there was The Smoking
Gun eventually one of the guys started
talking to me a little bit and I was
saying what is this building can you
tell me what this is is this a toilet
and he kind of looked back at the
building and looked back to and just
kind of looked really guilty and
eventually he said yeah it's a toilet I
remember doing this very quick search on
my phone for chera outbreaks in Nepal
the the first article that came up was
talking about this major chera outbreak
that had happened that summer in the
pool these guys that we'd seen clearing
up this mess had freshly arrived from
Nepal a couple of weeks ago the first
time that people had started to appear
in these clinics suffering from the
illness was I think about a week after
that so we started thinking about the
timeline here you get cha from drinking
contaminated water and in Haiti the
sanitation infrastructure just isn't
there people get most of their water
from the local River so this was the
river that had been contaminated the
arti Bonny River feeds an entire region
it spreads throughout the the rural
Heartland of Haiti supplying all of
these towns and villages with their
water people just drink from the river
for weeks after the outbreak happened
Haitians were still drinking from that
River I mean that is the only source of
water that many Haitians
have the first thing we did was to call
the UN and tell them what we'd seen and
to ask them to comment on it they
wouldn't we edited our footage in the
car made it into a short news report and
just sent it off to our headquarters and
got the story out and it was the first
time there had been any international
coverage of a un connection to colera by
the time we left they basically almost
finished cleaning up this spill so if we
hadn't have been there and seen it it
might never have been known in the end
the pressure kept building and it didn't
go away they had to send out a team of
of their own investigators to make an
independent report about whether or not
the UN did have a connection to the
outbreaker or not when the report came
out it made headlines around the world
because the investigators said that not
only was there some basis in these
reports about a un link to the outbreak
they identified the area where the
outbreak started as being the area next
to the base a few months after that
report came out the families got
together and tried to get Justice For
You know the loss of their relatives
they filed a lawsuit against the United
Nations asking for the UN to acknowledge
responsibility and to pay compensation
the UN basically stonewalled them for
over a year we had to go all the way to
un headquarters in New York before we
were able to get any official to speak
to us on record on the way the UN
finally came out with its response to
the lawsuits their response was to
dismiss it out of hand and basically
claim immunity so my interview with this
Deputy spokesperson was really just this
kind of bizarre game of trying to ask
the guy whether or not he thought the UN
was liable and him basically reading the
statement off a piece of paper and
refusing to engage any more than that we
went out of that interview down the
corridors towards the secretary
General's office and tried to find
officials on the way more senior
officials who could answer our questions
in the end we were banned from the UN
headquarters we were told to leave the
premises not to come
back if the UN headquarters in New York
had spilled sewage into the Hudson River
and if more than
8,300 New Yorkers had got sick and died
as a consequence of that I think it
would be very difficult for the UN to
avoid acknowledging responsibility for
that but somehow they managed to do that
with Haiti
[Music]
is
[Music]