Professor L. sent me a slightly frantic email yesterday afternoon apologizing for submitting her syllabus so late (classes started a week ago). The reason she was late, as it turns out, is that she and several of her students were in Port-au-Prince on January 12th, in meetings that morning at the United Nations headquarters.
She stopped by my office a couple hours later and with a haunted look started telling me about their trip, and how they stepped out the door into the street and felt the ground begin to shake, and how they turned around to watch this multi-story building collapse down into itself, almost everyone inside, including the people they had just met with, crushed to death.
It took her and her students almost week to get a flight out of Haiti to the Dominican Republic, and eventually from there back to New York. She thinks recovery will be a long time coming, if ever coming at all.
Erica and I were walking up Broadway one day last week, talking about this and that, and she turned to me suddenly and asked, "Have you ever been in a natural disaster?"
I have not, and I am grateful to not be carrying that particular kind of haunting around with me.
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