Haitian President Rene Preval in April visits Corail-Cesselesse, a vast and well-outfitted encampment for about 6,000 people not far from the town of Croix-des-Bouquets. (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times / August 15, 2010)
Haitian President Rene Preval peers off and rubs his beard when he thinks about those 35 seconds when the earth convulsed.
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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."
Preval, 67, a quiet former agronomist with a gap-toothed smile and silver beard that some Haitians suspect has magical powers, has always been an enigmatic figure. He concluded his first term as president, in 2001, with a prophetic warning of the chaos to come -- "Swim to get out" -- and retreated to a tiny home in the northern mountains to help peasants grow bamboo.
When he ran again in 2006, he barely campaigned and said almost nothing. Political observers were perplexed by his candidacy, because he never seemed to really like being president. He certainly never showed the thirst for power of any of his rivals or predecessors, and his return to the National Palace felt so casual as if to be almost accidental.
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SOURCE: LA Times - Joe Mozingo
