“After the Earthquake: Oral Histories on Life, Death & Survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti” by Peter Orner

An essay by Peter Orner (fiction) appears in Guernica:

After the Earthquake: Oral Histories on Life, Death & Survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

by Peter Orner

Five years ago Dr. Evan Lyon, a physician who has worked in Haiti since 1996, and I began to conduct interviews with residents of the city of Port-au-Prince. We set out with considerable help from Laura Scott, Jean Pierre Marseille, Katie Kane, Doug Ford, and Edward Loiseau. The project started with a simple notion: What’s life like on the streets of Haiti’s largest city since the cataclysmic earthquake of January 12, 2010? There are number of good books about Haiti, but too many of them, it seemed to us, interpreted life in “the poorest country in the western hemisphere” through the lens of an outsider. We wanted to create a book that, so much as possible, might give a reader an unmitigated view of the struggle to survive–and endure–in, yes, one of the poorest but also, one of the most vibrant cities in our hemisphere.