Purpose Read online

  We arrived down there homeless, with nothing. We could have waited for some sort of vehicle to arrive, but I didn’t want to delay. I wanted to help—however I could, immediately. So we started to walk into the city. We knew that the hotel La Villa Créole was still standing and that we would be able to stay there. We figured that it would be the headquarters from which we would organize our Yéle teams and begin to feed the hungry. Our small group set out, leaving the officials, the airplanes, and the last we’d see of anything resembling civilization behind.

  A thick fog of dust hung over the city, clinging to the humid, tropical air. It dried our eyes and scratched our throats as we walked onto the streets of Port-au-Prince. Nothing looked familiar, as reality hit my consciousness. I understood that all I’d known of Haiti was history in just one moment. Nothing drove this home more personally than my own sudden invisibility.

  For the past fifteen years, Haiti was the one place in the world where I could never ever walk anonymously. That day Haiti was gone and Wyclef Jean was a ghost. I was a man, any man, on a ruined street, staring into an abyss. I knew why the prime minister’s wife was unable to make any sense. There were not words to explain what I saw. Shadows lay on all sides; civilization was reduced to piles of darkness. Through the dust, the shapes of men and women emerged. They wandered past us as if we did not exist, and neither did they.

  I saw a man with a broken arm dangling from the socket. I saw a woman hobbling along, the cartilage of both kneecaps exposed. A mother with a baby in her arms ran past us screaming, the dead infant’s broken neck bobbing up and down along her forearm. The darkness and dust mutated the sounds around us. We heard disembodied voices crying out but couldn’t see where they came from. We walked on, losing all sense of direction.

  I heard the sound of an engine ahead of us. There are colorful buses in Haiti called tap-taps that we use as public transportation, and one of them emerged slowly from the smoke. It was a converted pickup truck with benches in the back and a few injured sitting there. I thought it was a mirage. As we drove through the city, I began to see, as if the way you do when your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. We were surrounded by dead bodies in the streets.

  “Why are these bodies everywhere? We got to start getting these bodies to the graveyard,” I said. “Where is the hospital?”

  “It’s gone,” the driver said, as if in a trance. “There’s one clinic. I can take you there.”

  We picked up more injured along the way until the tap-tap was full. But we had to make room for another. As we drove, I saw a girl trapped in the rubble, calling out to us.

  “Stop the bus!”

  “I can’t find my mom,” she sobbed as my wife and I freed her from the concrete on top of her. “I can’t find my dad. My sister … They’re dead. They were inside.”

  She couldn’t move her legs. I thought she was paralyzed but I didn’t want to tell her so.

  “Hold on, sister, it’s going to be okay,” I said. “We’re going to the hospital. They will take care of you.”

  As we drove past the remains of one hospital, then another, I felt my self-control slipping away. I felt angry, I felt helpless, and I wanted to scream. Who would help these people? They could not be left to die like this.

  The nearest clinic that hadn’t been destroyed was located on the outskirts of town. It was built to handle about fifty people a day; outside the building was a crowd of two thousand or more. The living and the dead lay beside each other. A man stood there patiently, holding the remains of his left hand in his right hand. There were no doctors or nurses in sight. There were only the hurt, side by side, in a mass surrounding the small building.

  I cannot explain what came over me, but I had reached my breaking point. I lost all sense of logic and became consumed with purpose. Like Jimmy O, the girl we had found must live if Haiti were to survive. I was convinced of this. If she were saved, everything would be okay. We had found her because she was destined to live. She had unfulfilled purpose here.

  I took the girl in my arms and carefully worked my way through the crowd, all the way into the clinic. I was the invisible man in a land where I’d once been known to all. I was ordinary now; she was special.

  The interior of the small clinic looked like photos I’d seen of field hospitals in Vietnam. Bodies covered in dirt and blood were everywhere, some partially bandaged, others being stitched where they stood, a few deceased but not yet removed. I found my way to a doctor.

  “You’ve got to see this girl,” I said to him.

  “We will get to her,” he replied. He was weary.

  “No, you don’t understand me, man!” I yelled. “You’ve got to see this fucking girl now!”

  The doctor stopped tending to his patient and looked into my wild eyes.

  “You’ve got to calm down,” he said. “Give her to me. I will look at her.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said to the girl, whose name I never knew. I handed her over as carefully as if she were my own daughter.

  I left one of my Yéle faithful with her in the hospital, because now that she was safe, I had to move on. I had to find Jimmy O.

  When the tap-tap pulled up to La Villa Créole in Petionville we found that the most beautiful hotel in the country had, by the force of need, become a field clinic. The hotel is at the top of a hill along a winding road, with a beautiful view of Port-au-Prince. From the hotel driveway, I’d always thought the maze of buildings below to be as much a marvel as the Grand Canyon and layered with an equally rich history. But on this day the familiar view was shrouded, and what I could see looked like crumpled cardboard boxes. Behind me, bodies were everywhere, resting on whatever they could find to insulate them from the rocky earth. They had torn their clothes into bandages to stop the bleeding as they sat in silence, patiently waiting for medical aid. Doctors, nurses, and volunteers, most of them trained on the spot, made their way through the masses, doing what they could to clean wounds and ease pain.

  The lobby was now the emergency room; the larger suites in which I’d stayed in the past were now the operating rooms. My wife, my cousin, and I stood inside the entrance among the injured, as one of our group sought out whomever was in charge. We wanted them to know we were here and that Yéle was ready to rally our surviving staff and to pool our resources. We wanted to use the hotel as our headquarters until we could organize one of our own. We had put word out to our people to gather at the hotel, but we wanted them to know that even if all of our staff had died, we were alive, and we would work as long as we could be useful.

  As all of these thoughts spun through my head, I felt a tug at the hem of my shirt.

  “Clef … is that you?”

  I looked down at the young man on the stretcher next to me, one of the lucky few with something to rest on. The thin sheet over him trembled as his body shivered violently. A dead man lay beside him, his jaw open and his eyelids closed.

  “Clef … you’re not going to let me die here,” he said. His eyes were blood red. “Don’t let me die …”

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said to him. “You’ve got to stay calm. Close your eyes and listen to my voice. I am here with you.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “You must think of peace, my brother. Everything is going to be okay.”

  “Stay with me, man … Please stay with me … I can’t see anything. My heart … it is beating so fast. I’m going to die. I am going to die.” His breath came quicker now.

  “Stay calm. Be peaceful, my friend. You are not alone,” I said. “The doctor is coming. It will be okay.”

  I knew he would not live much longer so I searched for something more to say. Words did not come, so I remained silent. I put one hand on his heart and I held his other hand in mine. I closed my eyes and tried to send him peace. When I opened them again, he was gone. I pray that I helped him ascend to the other side.

  WE SPENT THE NEXT few hours assisting the doctors at La Villa Créole, waiting for our Yél
e team to gather there. We weren’t sure who was dead and who was alive, so every hour brought us both good and bad news. We had spent the past few years developing our organization, preparing ourselves for tragedy, and stockpiling emergency rations. But we were hit by surprise the same way everyone else was; all of our supplies were buried when our warehouse was destroyed. Every other relief agency was in the same boat. We had nothing to give, but it didn’t matter because every which way we looked there was much to do. We were all equal that day. There were people dying all around us and it was our duty to bring them to the nearest hospital, to find them water, to dig them out of the rubble.

  But first I needed to know something.

  “Yo,” I said, interrupting one of my Yéle staff. “Where is Jimmy O?”

  Silence.

  “Jimmy O is dead, Clef.”

  “If he is dead, tell me, how did he die?” I asked.

  “His car was crushed by a building.”

  “Did you see this?”

  “I did not, but it is true.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “One of our cars was behind him. He was pulled over by the police. When the earthquake hit, the building next to his car fell over. It killed the police and it killed Jimmy O. We drove away …”

  “Where is his car?”

  “You can’t get him out, Clef. He is trapped in the car. He is dead. He is buried.”

  “Where is his car?” I said.

  “In the city.”

  “Take me there.”

  We wound through the maze of Port-au-Prince, to an intersection where two buildings had fallen across the road. There was only one path through. At one corner the tail end of a car could be seen. One of our Yéle family had spray-painted JIMMY o on it. He was under a thousand pounds of rock. Digging by hand would take days. But I didn’t care.

  I stood there with my Yéle family around me. “We need a Caterpillar,” I said.

  “Clef, take a look around,” someone said. “This is impossible. There were only one or two in the entire city to begin with. They are probably buried, too.”

  “Nothing is impossible,” I said. “We must bury Jimmy O. He is gone. He was one of us.”

  One of us had salvaged a few electric drills that we used to build houses. I took one and began to break rocks, one at a time. After many hours, we were able to pull Jimmy’s body from the wreckage of his car.

  I could no longer retreat into my fantasy: here in front of me was Jimmy O and he was dead. I did not know what any of our actions meant anymore, but I knew we must honor him if we were to move on. In my mind, burying this one soldier would restore order. It would put things right.

  We took his body to the closest graveyard, which had become a marketplace: with so many bodies and limited space, the grave-digger was charging families a premium to bury their dead. The city had fallen, but human greed lived on. This man was hustling those who had nothing left but their own loss. The gates to the cemetery had been closed and locked, because if they weren’t the people would have flooded the place and created even more chaos.

  The only reason I was able to get inside is that I was with a kid named Izolan, who is one of my closest allies in Haiti. In Haiti, Izolan is known by everyone; he is their 50 Cent or Lil Wayne, combined with the mentality of Che Guevara. Through this entire time, he was like an apostle to me, like Peter was to Christ: he was the man taking care of business. Izolan went up to the gate and they opened it for him. Then as we were walking in, we saw FaFa, who was one of my capos in Yéle. I couldn’t believe my eyes, because FaFa had just lost his daughter in the earthquake. Yet there he was, devoted to our mission to help, devoted to his fellow man.

  I smiled at FaFa and he smiled at me, and we hugged, creating a moment of peace in the storm. “What are you doing here, man?” I asked. “You just lost your little girl.”

  “She is gone and I can’t change this,” he said. “But I can change how many more will be gone if I sit around and do nothing.”

  FaFa had a massive presence, kind of like André the Giant, not that huge physically but in spirit. He was a tall, good-looking kid with a big bushy afro. He had chiseled cheeks, he was beautiful; if he had grown up in New York he would have been a model. It was his eyes that made him ten feet tall: they were more intense than anyone else’s I’d ever seen, and when he was angry or upset, one look from him would send a man crawling into a hole. He was the type of kid who would walk up to you in a gunfight, crack your gun in half, and beat you up without blinking. FaFa was my right-hand man in Yéle and in Haiti, and I kept him close by me whenever I traveled through the more dangerous parts of the country because I could rely on him in every way. I was also the only one who could talk to him when he got out of control, which he did a lot. I got plenty of calls in New York when FaFa got out of control.

  I met FaFa in one of the worst slums in all of Haiti, back in 2005, around the time I met Jimmy O. FaFa wasn’t into music or anything like that; he was a militant type to the bone. He was very hotheaded, but he had a lot of love in his heart. If he had been discovered by any country’s army earlier in life he could have been trained to be the perfect soldier. I met him through a Yéle project in his area, after which he approached me to ask how he could help us out. He was willing to do anything—pick up boxes, carry supplies, hand out rice—whatever it took to be part of the team. He wanted to see his slum rise from the depths of poverty and become a real community.

  Yéle gave him that opportunity and in return he began to refer to himself as a Wyclef diehard. This had less to do with me than with what I stood for. Fafa was leading by example, showing the kids out there in the slums that they could live another way and follow another road. My name became a symbol, and I was proud of that. He was proof that aid organizations weren’t just providing handouts; some of us were offering the path to a new future.

  I was FaFa’s lifeline and that was deep to me. I made sure he always had a job with us and he never shied away from the hardcore work. He became one of the leaders of our distribution team, the ones who make sure that rice gets delivered intact to the starving. He carried our flag through the toughest territory and always came through. There were times when other nongovernmental aid organizations couldn’t get into the most gang-ridden slums to feed the hungry. Whenever they got close, the volunteers would get shot up and their supplies would be stolen by slumlords who kept everything for themselves. FaFa was the type of man who made it his business to make sure that didn’t happen to Yéle. He spearheaded talks with the gang leaders to insure that no harm would come to anyone working for Yéle. This kid had nothing then: FaFa’s home was a small lean-to shack with a roof made of scrap metal. His bed was a mattress he had fashioned out of tinfoil.

  I remember seeing him after I’d been away from Haiti for a while and he came up to me with a big smile on his face.

  “Look at my arm,” he said.

  On one forearm he’d gotten WYCLEF tattooed. On the other, JEAN.

  I was touched, really touched. FaFa was a tough guy, though, so I made a joke out of it.

  “Hey man,” I said. “I’m glad you got a tattoo of me, because I’m not going to get a tattoo of you.”

  We both had a laugh, but when I looked in his eyes he knew how I really felt. I treat all of my leaders in Yéle like they are my kids. I take them in because they are part of my extended family. Opening your doors fully is the only way to take a bad situation and make it good.

  FaFa worked for Yéle tirelessly until the day he died. And the way he died is the kind of injustice that all Haitians have known firsthand at some point in their lives. Haitians know that life is not fair and that death can come to anyone at any time, no matter how good they are.

  Like every other kid who wants to improve his community, Fafa wanted to see the rest of the world to learn how he could return and help his country. He and I talked about him getting out to see America.

  I made that happen with a visa to be in America for the n
ight I performed at the MTV New Year’s Eve party in 2008. FaFa stayed with me for a few days afterward, too, and anyone who saw that performance knows that on air I invited everyone back to my house. I didn’t give out the address, but let me tell you, everyone who knows where I live in Saddle River, New Jersey, showed up. We had seven hundred people in my backyard until the sun came up! FaFa was there and he couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen him so excited and I wasn’t far behind.

  “Anything is possible, you know.”

  “Why is that, FaFa?”

  “Because here I am standing in a mansion. In Haiti, they make you think you could never set foot in a mansion; you could never be good enough to do that. Well here I am. I am in a mansion. Look how simple it is for me to stand in the middle of a mansion.”

  “This is true, my brother. Here you are. And what do you think of it?”

  “I think one day I’m gonna have my own mansion. If it’s possible that I’m standing here at all, it’s possible that I can have one of my own. The only thing people with mansions have over me is the opportunity to travel. If I get that opportunity, I’m going to go to school. I’m going to be a big businessman and I’m going to help my daughter and my mom.”

  “You can do it all, my brother. I know you can.”

  Back in that graveyard, FaFa, Izolan, Jerry, and I watched as people tossed bodies into graves. The undertaker recognized us and came over to greet us. We had five or six bodies in a wheelbarrow. We paid the undertaker, who told us they’d each get their own grave, and then we left them there to get more bodies.

  At the gate, we were pulled aside by one of the undertaker’s workers. “Clef, don’t trust him,” he said. “By the time you get back, they will all be in one hole.”

  I turned right back around and walked up to the guy. “I gave you money to put each person in their own hole and you’re going to do that.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It will happen.”