Raymond C. Offenheiser, Oxfam America’s president, recounts his impressions of the ravaged Haitian capital after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the city leaving 230,000 people dead and more than one million others homeless.

I arrived in Port-au-Prince on the one-month anniversary of the ghastly earthquake that rocked Haiti to its core.  The airport was hectic, full of UN officials, aid workers and military personnel frantically working to move goods and people, struggling to coordinate and manage their own stress in face of the monumental task that confronted them.

Collasped buidlings everywhere

As we left the airport, the scale of the tragedy unfolded: block after block of collapsed buildings and 500,000 people living in ramshackle shelters. Some had tents. Some had the familiar blue sheeting, and others had nothing more than bed sheets. Disposable cups, plastic bags and every other kind of trash formed piles on the perimeter as overtaxed sanitation workers tried to manage the exploding scale of this human refuse.

Much of this story has been told, but I was privileged to witness a new beginning.  An effort by an entire nation to confront and accept an unspeakable level of grief.

Around town, small churches overflowed with men in suits and ties, women in white dresses and their best hats, and preachers exhorting their faithful to sing, chant, grieve and embrace.

Young voices lead the call

At the Oxfam office, I met with colleagues who told me of the many dimensions of the humanitarian response taking place. All the while, a small religious choir two doors down sang, and sang and sang. Their rhythm set the tone for my entire afternoon and evening, never stopping for more than a few seconds. Young voices led the call and a small organ provided a trace of a melody.

It was hauntingly beautiful and seemed to provide the necessary inspiration for our Oxfam team. Not only had they lost two colleagues, but many of them had lost family and friends as well. Still, they did not stop to mourn. They carried on as they had since the minute the quake hit.

At Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish the next morning, Father Fredrick told me that he was preparing to open the front door of his church for a 5 p.m. service when the quake struck. While he was able to flee, another colleague froze in her tracks and did not make it to the door. Like many heroes in Port-au-Prince, he immediately took over an empty lot across from the church and turned it into a gathering place for parishioners to find solace in the company of their neighbors.  In short order, they had organized a community group of 125 families, arranging shelter, water and hygiene services. Families posted their names and new addresses on their makeshift shelters and began to cope with their new reality.

At another small empty lot up the street, another 300 parishioners gathered around a woman who led them in prayer, reflection and singing.  Men, women and children swayed to the music with both hands over their heads. As I surveyed the crowd, I was drawn to the sight of a solitary man, probably in his 70s, who stood alone away from the group, hands over his head, swaying in his own private space.   What was his loss, I wondered. A wife of many years? Children? Grandchildren?

Around the city, I witnessed community-wide efforts to come together to cope. But how can an entire nation that was struggling before the quake recover from such devastating collective trauma?  Is it possible for a country to go through a public and collective process of grief management?

The healing has begun

A Haitian psychologist told me about her efforts to initiate some trauma counseling with students at the university that is now a pile of rubble. She told me that many students, laborers and friends she has worked with share the same experience of falling asleep thinking they are in a nightmare, hoping that when they wake up, things are back to what they were. She confessed that this is happening to her as well. She and her husband were still sleeping in the garden in front of their house.  Yet deep down, each of them knows it will not end. It must be endured.

She believes that the experience of processing this trauma will be different for each person, given where they are in their lives and what resources they have. But all of them will count on hope to keep them going.

On the last day of mourning, people took their grief to the streets in a show of renewal and life. Everywhere you turned, there were processions of hundreds of people marching, singing, and waving leafy green branches. Men in suits and ties, women in their finest, children in fluffy dresses of all colors. Renaissance on the streets of Port-au-Prince. The work goes on, but the healing has begun.

Oxfam has now reached more than 200,000 Haitians with relief, and hopes to reach 500,000 in the first six months of our humanitarian response.

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Late Thursday Radiohead announced that it would perform a charity show benefiting the survivors of the devastating January 12th earthquake in Haiti. The tickets were made available via a Ticketmaster auction which ended with a final minimum bid of $475 (meaning many secured their tickets for $450). Some went above and beyond as the proceeds were going to Oxfam America's Haiti Relief Fund and the high bid was $2,000 per ticket (for either 2 or 4 tickets), according to the band.

All in all more than $572,000 was raised in fans' donations and it was an unforgettable, intimate gig for all at the 1,300-capacity theater. Here's the setlist:

We’re sleeping in the open air

This is our most challenging emergency response in years, and we’re launching it from pup tents? I want to say, “You’re kidding, right?” But of course he is not joking …

January 21st, 2010 | by Elizabeth Stevens

The news from the Haiti earthquake is always staggering.

With the loss of life, the lack of medical care, the collapse of the center of government, the airport that can’t keep pace with the needs, the ruined roads, the non-existent communications system, and the desperate lack of fuel,  the pain and worry that survivors are experiencing is almost impossible to imagine.

Facts and figures tell a piece of the story, but I find Haiti’s reality sometimes hits home through the casual remarks of my colleagues.

Like when my buddy Coco McCabe writes me a message from Port-au-Prince. It starts out sounding kind of normal: “I’m sitting in a meeting, ” she writes, before veering off into a scene from a bad dream. “It was just suggested that we hold meetings outside in future because we are a lot of people and if there’s a big hit, we’ll suffer a lot of casualties.”  In my world, staff meetings and sudden death don’t exist side by side, but in hers today in Haiti, they clearly do.

“There seems to be plenty of food on the streets,” she continues. That is wonderful to hear, until she points out that there is no cash anywhere to buy it with. “Banks are mostly shut down, and people can’t get to their money.”

Louis Belanger of Oxfam Canada has been on the ground in Haiti for a week, and he has lots of good news in his daily podcast:

“We had a good day today …We delivered a lot of water. We were active in three main sites across Port-au-Prince. Two of them were in Petionville and one in Delmas. We delivered probably over 30,000 liters of water to over 3,000 people…

Today was a good example of how we work together…Oxfam Spain delivered the water bladder to store the water, the trucks were provided by Oxfam Quebec, and the engineer that installed the entire system was provided by Oxfam Great Britain. …we had a tough time to start this whole operation, but now it’s well underway.”

Then he, too, veers off into the surreal:

“We’re tired. We’re sleeping in the open air…”

This is our most challenging emergency response in years, and we’re launching it from pup tents? I want to say, “You’re kidding, right?”  But of course he is not joking, and so for the hundredth time today I wish I could do something or say something to bridge the gap between Haiti’s reality and ours, if only to let the staff on the ground know how  much we appreciate them and how loudly we’re cheering them on from the USA.

Slow going on the road to Port-au-Prince

We’re quiet as we roll onto the plain. We pass a cement wall that has toppled, intact, onto its side, looking suddenly like an extension of the road we are on. We see cracks in walls and occasional heaps of rubble. But what strikes me most about the approach to the capital is the number of people streaming along both sides of the road, going about their business.

January 20th, 2010 | by Coco McCabe

A collapsed building on the road to Port-au-Prince. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

Oxfam’s Coco McCabe is one of several Boston-based colleagues in Haiti to help with the relief effort, where they join over 200 Oxfam staff already on the ground. Here’s her latest update, dated January 19.

It’s been one week since a massive earthquake flattened a good portion of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital where about two million people live. Coming over the crest of Mourne Cabrit–Creole for mountain of the goats–we spy the city in the distance, lost in haze at the end of a broad plain. From that height, all looks still below. The road is well-paved, snaking up the side of the mountain, and easily wide enough for two cars.

It is impossible to imagine what we will find ahead, but a hint came soon enough: a landslide, set loose Yves Gattereau says, by the 7.0 temblor. It has knocked enormous white boulders onto the road. Gattereau is the director of the bi-national Oxfam program that works on watershed preservation between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This was his second visit to Port-au-Prince since the quake struck. His first mission had been a few days before to find his parents–safe, luckily, and asleep in their car.

We’re quiet as we roll onto the plain and into Croix Bouquet, a community a short distance outside Port-au-Prince. We pass a cement wall that has toppled, intact, onto its side, looking suddenly like an extension of the road we are on. We see cracks in walls and occasional heaps of rubble. But what strikes me most about the approach to the capital is the number of people streaming along both sides of the road, going about their business. Some carry large metal tubs of laundry on their heads. Others have set up kiosks to sell everything from small bottles of caramel-colored liquor to packages of crackers, circles of cheese, and sacks stuffed with roots.

But something else stands out, too: the face masks. The closer we get to Port-au-Prince, the more I see–blue ones, white ones, ones decorated with flowers. Two boys, goofing around, have theirs attached to their chins like beards. Are they to prevent people from breathing the dust from the collapsed buildings? I ask Gattereau.

No, he says grimly. They’re to keep out the stench of rotting bodies.

There’s no way of really knowing how many people lost their lives in this catastrophe.

“You can’t know,” says Gattereau. “There’s no way to figure it out. They didn’t know in the first place how many people were in Port-au-Prince.”

Soon, we find ourselves in a traffic jam, stopped dead in the baking afternoon sun. Horns blare around us. Tap-taps, packed with people pressed into the windows, inch by in the other direction. Two large UN vehicles rumble past. And pickups loaded with more people than seems scientifically possible sag on their chassis. But on our side, nothing moves for a while. And Gattereau wonders out loud: Where is everyone going?

“There’s nowhere to go,” he says. “They’re going to regret wasting all that fuel.”

Fuel has been worrying everybody. Will there be enough to keep the now-decimated city functioning? Enough to truck in sorely needed food and water? To run the equipment needed to clear massive piles of debris from streets and lots? To ferry out the people who want to escape all the sorrow and horror of the last week?

A moment later, Gattereau answers his own question. He knows where everyone’s going: to search for news, any news, of family members still unaccounted for.

Yves Gattereau photo by Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

As we start the climb into Delmas–a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince–the scale of the destruction leaves us stunned.  There are three of us in the truck. We don’t speak, except in staccato bursts.

“Pancakes,” says Gattereau looking at the layers of concrete–once the floors of banks and commercial operations, and dwellings–now lying on top of each other. “It’s a grave.”

And he worries about what will come next. Plenty of buildings are still standing, and to the untrained eye they look like they could be fine, save for the cracks–some massive. But Gattereau, who has some construction experience, knows better. He says because of the structural damage, many of them will need to be bulldozed. But that might not happen.

“Some people will just cover some of the cracks because there’s no authority who will say no, you have to tear it down,” he says.

I ask if he thinks the city will ever recover.

Gattereau’s eyes light up. Earlier in the day, as we bounced over the rough dirt road from the border, he had told me his feelings for this poor and struggling country that he has made his home since 1987.

“If you like it, you fall madly in love with it,” he had said. “Or you hate it. But there’s no middle.”

And there’s no middle to his conviction that Port-au-Prince will come back.

“It will,” he says. “And hopefully, it’s a good occasion to build it for a better place to live.”

Save lives now by donating to Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake Response Fund. Learn more about how Oxfam is responding.