* by Mac McKinney On Highway 2, with huge cracks in the road from the Jan 12 earthquake and heading west toward Léogà ne, the city nearest the epicenter. The small village of Fayette is closest to where the earthquake's epicenter actually manifested, which colleague Georgianne Nienaber visited back in March.
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Click here for Part 1 of this series.
Click here for Part 2
Click here for Part 3
Click here for Part 4
Click here for Part 5
Click here for Part 6
Click here for Part 7
Click Here for Part 8
Click here for Part 9
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Moving out from Camp Mon P'tit Village, where I left you at the end of Part 9, Andre, Georgianne and I were now back on Highway 2, heading west again, our ultimate goal now for Georgianne to return to the small village of Macassin in the southwest mountain ranges of Haiti as Highway 2 and its subsidiary highways wind up their slopes, one such road, Highway 204, running due south toward Jacmel from Léogà ne. Macassin is right off the road en route.
Georgianne wrote, back in March, of the devastation wrought and callousness endured at this small village:
"It has been totally bypassed by humanitarian aid except for 1200 blue tarps that shredded in the last windstorm. The surviving tents are leaking like sieves and the rains have not hit with full force yet. Macassin is only a small example of the scope of this disaster, which is truly biblical." (source)
So now we were on our way back to Macassin, a follow-up for her, the first time for me, and an opportunity, especially, to get beyond the coastal plains to experience the mountains of Haiti for the first time, as well as to see the extent of earthquake damage even here in the mountains:
* by Mac McKinney Driving along Highway 2, sugarcane grass in the foreground, the Bay of Port-au-Prince and mountains across the bay far in the distance.
* by Mac McKinney Driving through a town along the way to Léogà ne
* by Mac McKinney Passing through Carr Dufort. Bicycles and motorbikes are prime means of transportation in Haiti.
* by Mac McKinney Now we are ascending Highway 204 and begin to see evidence of rock slides from the earthquake.
* by Mac McKinney Close to Macassin village now, we stopped so I could take some shots of the plains below, sprinkled with intermittent patches of forest and a blue-tarped refugee camp barely discernible near the center of the photo.
* by Mac McKinney
A solitary tree disrupts the view of the plains below.
* by Mac McKinney
Looking due north
* by Mac McKinney
Looking farther south, with more of the Caribbean visible
* by Mac McKinney
Looking straight down into what is a ravine
* by Mac McKinney
Walking back to the other side of the road, now I am staring at the handiwork of man and Nature, both hewn rock from quarrying and boulders from rock-slides laying about. You can barely make out the crushed red cab of what looks like a dump truck likely caught in the earthquake or one of the aftershocks.
