A Dark Night

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3am.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have been trained to recognize fear in a person’s eyes. I can see danger ahead from miles away and discern patterns of violence in distant places. This is what keeping an eye out for the needs of others will develop in you. Each one of us has the power of observation.

When you work with people in crisis, sometimes you see too much. Human rights advocates call this “bearing witness.” Sometimes what you see leads to sensory overload and is simply too much to bear.

What happens when what you observe weighs too heavily on your mind?

What do you do when exposure to sickness, death, and violence overwhelms you? Like so many helpers, I have lived through a few dark nights.

Burning the Dead

By the time I arrived in the capital of Haiti, Port au Prince, they were already burning the dead. My driver handed me a face mask. “Put this on,” he said. “It will keep you from inhaling the smoke – and the smell.”

Are there any words to describe the smell of burning flesh?

The earth swallowed the lives of its people. The 7.0 Richter scale earthquake was no match for Haiti’s feeble infrastructure. Everything around the epicenter, the capital city, home to millions of people, had collapsed.

I looked out the window. Men carrying torches set fire to unclaimed bodies by the side of the road. Hundreds of men, women, and children were set ablaze like wood to be burned.

The bodies had been left by the road, discarded. In the chaos following the quake, many people could not find their loved ones, dead or alive. The corpses had become a public health risk, as their smell and the inevitable arrival of wild creatures wanting to eat them had become too much of a terrifying spectacle for those who survived.

Elsewhere, cranes had been called in to collect the bodies and bury them in mass graves. When they stopped counting, officials estimated 300,000 people died that day.

As my eyes tried to adjust to the horror of burning flesh around me, I couldn’t help but think; that body is someone’s mother, someone’s child, someone’s friend.

Surely someone would like to know where they were, if they were okay or not. Now, they were completely unidentifiable. These bodies would be represented by names on a long list of the people declared missing, then assumed gone, and eventually pronounced dead.

That night, when I arrived at my base, the songs of those who survived filled the night sky. Hundreds of survivors singing songs through the night – songs of lament for those who had passed and songs of praise for those whose lives were spared.

In between the singing, there was audible sobbing, as countless tears were shed. The collective cry of a people filled the night sky. It was 2010, and Haiti was once again in crisis. 

Bearing Witness

As a humanitarian, you are trained to focus your energy on what you can do to save lives. In an emergency, there is no time to count the lives that have been lost. The focus is on saving as many lives as possible. A core task of emergency response is conducting a needs assessment; this involves gathering detailed information about how people have been affected by a crisis and how to assist them in order of priority.

Most assessments focus on gaps in access to basic needs such as food and shelter, so that agencies can determine how much aid is needed. In addition to basic survival needs, some assessments include damage to homes and infrastructure.

As a protection specialist, my assessments focused on determining whether people were safe from harm, if they feared for their lives, and were deprived of liberty, freedom of movement, and other basic human needs. This included identifying social vulnerabilities of particular groups of people, such as female-headed households, unaccompanied children, and elderly people without family.

The challenge of conducting these assessments is that the needs are always greater than the response. Often times, there is insufficient funding to provide for all the people who need help, and political will to address the source of the crisis is also lacking. Humanitarians have to prioritize who to help, which involves making tough choices and tradeoffs.

Aid workers design programs within their budget realities with the resources they have been given. This often leads to the feeling that what you are doing is not enough. During the tsunami response in southern Thailand, I called my boss to tell her, “I don’t think we’re doing enough.” She told me to focus on what we were doing and start from there.