Haitian quake shook leader to his core
'As a person I was paralyzed,' says President Rene Preval, recalling the suffering he saw. He's quiet for a politician, even humble; but his silence since the disaster enrages many.
Reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti — Haitian President Rene Preval peers off and rubs his beard when he thinks about those 35 seconds when the earth convulsed.Preval was feeding his 8-month-old granddaughter dinner in the courtyard of the presidential mansion. They were thrown to the ground as the house collapsed. Unable to reach anyone on the phone, Preval jumped on the back of a motorcycle taxi and directed the driver toward downtown. Wending through the rubble in the dark, he couldn't comprehend the scope of death and ruin.
"Pain made me speechless," he says during a two-hour interview in an office behind the half-collapsed National Palace. "As a person I was paralyzed." In the days and weeks following the Jan. 12 earthquake, Haitians desperately wanted to hear from their leader. Soon they were furious at his silence.
"I was much criticized for not having spoken.... To say what? To the thousands of parents whose children were dead. To the hundreds of schoolchildren I was hearing scream, 'Come help me!' " He pauses and sighs. "I couldn't find the words to say to those people."
<SNIP>
View entire article here: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-haiti-preval-20100815,0,246233,full.story
--
Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/californiadisasters/
Read our blog at http://eclecticarcania.blogspot.com/
Visit me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/derkimster
__._,_.___
No comments:
Post a Comment