Waiting in the airport baggage area for the first team of volunteers to return from their week on mercy mission in Haiti, you watch the escalator for the Rescue 24 uniforms to scroll down into view.
A local television news crew hovers, waiting for the same arrivals.
Uniformed businessmen in blue blazers and gray slacks or charcoal suits call their rides while walking importantly toward the door, dragging their laptop prams behind them. Moms back from visiting grandma squeal, kneel and embrace their kids while hubby hovers near honey for a peck on the cheek.
And I’m wondering what I can possibly ask the volunteers to tell me about their trip, so I can try to relate it to you, that won’t sound impossibly lame.
“How was it over there?”
“What did you do?”
A teenage girl plops hard next to me and calls her mom, telling her the flight is delayed. The luggage carousel starts up, but it doesn’t say “Philadelphia” above it so it’s not the one I’m waiting for yet.
“What left the biggest impression?”
“Did you save anyone?”
The loudspeaker squawks as the teenager talks and the businessman walks but I don’t listen. I never understand what they’re saying over that thing anyway.
“Were you safe or has the desperation for food and water put volunteers at risk?”
“Did you see any dead people?”
I’ve been following the world’s response to the Haitian disaster since an earthquake leveled the country Jan. 12. The scope of damage is beyond my ability to comprehend it.
Headlines say 110,000 already have been buried. That estimate is an easy lie to satisfy our hunger for numbers because if we can quantify it, we have some control. Insanity starts to make sense.
No one has a chance of really knowing how many have died or how many are buried when they haul bodies away in trucks to dump them like stumps from fallen trees after a hurricane in North Carolina.
It might take a day for a backhoe driver with a spotter to clear the rubble from a single house because they have to approach the task as if there are bodies inside. When a body is spotted – or struck – it is recovered, noted and bagged. But that process is far too slow when decaying bodies in the streets by the thousands provide the breeding ground for cholera that would make the death toll from the earthquake seem like that of a three-car wreck.
“What did you hear?”
“Did you smell death in the air?”
Bodies have to be removed, to be disposed of, covered with dirt and lime as if they cockroaches falling out of a cupboard in government housing after pest control sprayed for bugs.
Suddenly they are here, our proud volunteers; clean, weary, quiet. The TV crew pulls one aside to stand in the light and answer the questions I’d already rejected. I go to another and ask:
“Did you make a difference?”