{"id":1458,"date":"2010-01-16T11:32:23","date_gmt":"2010-01-16T19:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp\/2010\/01\/haiti_-_a_note_from_a_friend\/"},"modified":"2010-01-16T11:32:23","modified_gmt":"2010-01-16T19:32:23","slug":"haiti_-_a_note_from_a_friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/2010\/01\/haiti_-_a_note_from_a_friend.html","title":{"rendered":"Haiti – a note from a friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note from Seattle writer Dean Patton<\/strike> Paton about his son, Jesse Hagopian, used with permission. (Donate to Mercy Corps here<\/a>. For information on text donations, go here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Photo, Dean with Jesse at Jesse’s wedding
<\/i>
\"deanjesse.jpg\"Some of you know this; some of you don’t: My son Jesse, his wife Sarah and their young son Miles went to Port au Prince, Haiti, last Saturday and were there when the earthquake devastated the country (Sarah was there to do HIV trainings, part of her work with the University of Washington). <\/p>\n

Half of their hotel, the Hotel Creole, collapsed; the half they were staying in remained standing, and they are physically okay. Somewhat miraculously, Sarah had come home from work uncharacteristically early, five minutes before the quake hit, so they were all together. <\/p>\n

In the hotel was a nurse, and because of this the Hotel Creole was turned into a kind of de facto hospital. For the past two days Jesse has been this man’s deputy, first going through the hotel to strip sheets off of the beds and tear them into strips; then breaking apart furniture to use as splints; finally doing what the nurse told him to do, resetting broken bones, splinting, applying tourniquets, trying to stop bleeding and cleaning wounds. We were all relieved to learn the hotel had a supply of rubber gloves for Jesse and the Nurse to use as they worked on the stream of patients. Yesterday, despite what seemed a complete blackout of telephone and Internet connections, Jesse managed to find some unexplainable iPhone pathway through Miami and was able to call several of us; he said everything was awful, there was no medicine, no gauze, no hydrogen peroxide, no ibuprofen.<\/p>\n

“Everywhere people are screaming, crying,” he said. “People come up to me and say, ‘Doctor, please help my child,” and I say, ‘I’m not a doctor, I don’t speak Creole, and we don’t have any medicine. I can’t help you, I’m sorry.” He told a story of a man who managed to get out of his house, but his son remained trapped. After a day, he managed to dig out his son and he brought the boy, with a head injury and a bone poking out of his leg, to the hotel because he had heard a nurse was there doing what could be done. Jesse wrapped the boy with the torn sheets, to staunch the bleeding and do what he could to straighten the leg and clean up the young boy’s skull, “But then,” Jesse said, “he died. We couldn’t save him.” <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\nJesse was obviously distraught, yet, despite all of this, he somehow
\nmanaged to forward some of us an email this morning about President
\nObama asking George W. Bush to help with the rescue effort and tag it
\nwith a brief rant — “An insult to Haitians,” he called Obama’s plan to
\ninvolve the man who orchestrated a coup against former Haitian
\npresident Aristide, adding, “What an outrage!” So it’s good Jesse has
\nmaintained his political perspective; it might help get his mind off
\nsome of the other horrors he’s experiencing.<\/p>\n

We don’t know when Jesse, Sarah and Miles will find a way out
\nof the country. We hope it’s tomorrow, but we just don’t know. The US
\nembassy is telling Americans to go to the airport with their own food
\nand water and wait. That’s disconcerting and seems iffy. Thursday
\nmorning, Jesse was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and you
\ncan listen to him or watch online, here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

On
\nWednesday night, when he called, I told Jesse that all of us in his
\nfamily had gathered to share a meal and watch CNN and MSNBC to gain
\nsome sense of what Haiti might be like at the moment, and he said it
\nmade him feel so good to know that people were thinking of him and
\nSarah and Miles. He says Miles is being an angel in the midst of the
\nchaos. <\/p>\n

So keep Jesse, Sarah, Miles — and all of the people of
\nHaiti — in your thoughts. Most of us can’t imagine what the Haitians
\nare going through, and from what Jesse reports we probably don’t really
\nwant to. I’m sending this note because I want people I know and care
\nabout, and sometimes work with, to know what’s happening. Plus, I want
\nyou to know what Jesse has been going through so that if you see him,
\nand some of you will soon, you’ll know he’s had an unfathomable
\nlife-changing experience.<\/p>\n

Dean<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note from Seattle writer Dean Patton Paton about his son, Jesse Hagopian, used with permission. (Donate to Mercy Corps here. For information on text donations, go here.) Photo, Dean with Jesse at Jesse’s weddingSome of you know this; some of you don’t: My son Jesse, his wife Sarah and their young son Miles went to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1458","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}