"Why aren't people moving back inside?"

We've had the opportunity to drive/walk MANY non-Haitian people through our city during the last 5 weeks. As we pass houses, many that look undamaged, you'll still see tents or makeshift shelters out in front of almost house. (My house included.) There will be random rows of tents in the city streets. On every street. And people ask this question over and over, "Why are people still sleeping outside?"

The short answer I usually give them is, "They are scared to go back inside." And to me that makes sense. To Nick that makes sense. He and I have moved back inside a few weeks ago. Hugues and our boys have moved back inside. But still our female staff and children remain outside in tents. Rains will come very strong some nights. Things will get wet inside the tents and they may venture into the house as far as the dining room (right inside the house), but they always congregate right next to the door and they always keep it open in case a quick escape is necessary. A few of them might even spend a night or two inside after that, kind of testing the waters. But inevitably there will then be an aftershock and (rains or not) they will again become firm in their resolve that they are never sleeping in the house again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat....

It's hard to explain this to someone who wasn't here for the quake. A lot of people come in and see houses that appear intact (or nearly intact) and cannot understand the fear. It just doesn't make sense to people and logically many feel the need to explain to me how if I could just convince Haitians that they would be safe inside, so many of their problems would be gone-- disease risk wouldn't be as high, blah, blah, blah...

My friend Sarah used a great analogy to explain it to some people the other day. She said it like this-- imagine there was a gang shooting on your street. For a long time, you'd probably not want to spend a whole lot of time outside of your house. After time, you'd eventually begin venturing out. But then what would happen if you saw a gang member with a gun walking down the street? You'd probably head back in. Even if he didn't shoot you or anyone else, you'd probably be pretty hesitant as long as you thought there might be danger of it happening again.

Kind of the same thing with the earthquakes. We keep having these aftershocks. We've heard that there is a new report out that claims that we're going to have some relatively large quakes/aftershocks within the next 3 weeks. This news is actually causing ME to feel nervous and consider moving outside again... just for a bit.

I guess I don't know what the point of this post is except to say that it seems like there are a lot of people coming in right now that don't really fully comprehend what it was like to be here on January 12th. They have a lot of "solutions" for problems that they don't fully understand. Yes, there are some open and shut things that can be solutions for open and shut problems. But the majority of the problems here (and let's be honest, we've JUST hit the tip of the iceberg) are not open and shut. They are not something we can throw some money and rice at and expect them to go away. We need people who are in this with us for the long haul and will strive to see things from the perspective of the people who need help.