After returning from Haiti, journalist Peter Slevin did not want to talk about the recent earthquake’s death toll.
“Let’s talk about the living: the people who are still there and what is happening to them,” he said. “It is the living who continue to face a very worrisome future in a country that ran short on hope and dreams a long time before this earthquake.”
Slevin, who has worked as a foreign correspondent and is now the Chicago Bureau Chief for The Washington Post, spoke to an audience of about 60 students, faculty and community members in Hardin Hall at the Rebecca Crown Center Tuesday night. Slevin was invited to speak by the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies.
Following the talk, “Haiti in Need: A Reporter’s Perspective on the Earthquake and its Aftermath,” Slevin said he intentionally focused on individual plights and anecdotes.
“I decided to paint a vivid portrait and keep the talk close to the ground, telling stories of real people in Haiti,” he said. “The most typical thing after a calamity like this is for it to become more and more impersonal the farther out you get. My feeling is this is an epic emergency that won’t end soon.”
Joshua Lederman said he found Slevin’s style of speaking effective.
“The little anecdotes sort of take it from something that we conceptualize in terms of pictures of dead bodies and death counts into being able to imagine what it would be like to be an actual family member or an actual patient,” the first-year Medill graduate student said.
While in Haiti, Slevin said he covered food and water shortages and the lack of shelter. At least 1.2 million people in Haiti are without housing, he said.
“For days Port-au-Prince seemed to be a city of corpses,” Slevin said. “There was no place to bury them, no place to have a decent burial or even a good-bye.”
When Slevin concluded, Heather Costello, an Oak Park physician who also worked for two weeks in Haiti, spoke about the devastation she witnessed.
Costello said before she arrived in Haiti, she had no idea of the catastrophe she would find there.
“I thought, ‘We embarrassed ourselves with Katrina; we did the tsunami; we know how to do this,'” she said. “I naively thought it was going to go so much better with the unprecedented compassion and donations from the rest of the world.”
But this wasn’t the case, she said.
Members of the audience became visibly emotional as Costello described horrific conditions, including a camp of more than 200 amputee patients set up in a park with no one to check on them. She also spoke of a four-year-old girl who had severe femur fractures which began to heal incorrectly for three weeks before she received care.Costello also warned of upcoming problems Haiti may experience due to close living conditions and poor sanitation.
“In months it will be an explosion of infectious disease that is unprecedented in the numbers,” she said. “It’s not just possible. It’s inevitable.”
Medill freshman Hannah Miller said she has a new perspective after hearing both Slevin and Costello speak about their experiences.
“I’m really interested in people who have been to Haiti because I’m thinking about going in the summer with my church,” she said. “I thought that the U.S. had played a bigger part in crowd control and getting food and water. I didn’t know that after four weeks there were people without food, latrines or normal shelter.”[email protected]
