Haiti earthquake diary: You can't go home again.

It's Saturday, Jan. 16. I’ve been here three and a half days and it’s the first chance I have to get across town to my old neighborhood.

We travel different roads than the ones I’ve been on so far. Everywhere I look I’m seeing some new destruction. As we approach Pacot, my old neighborhood, I find myself clutching the seat belt. I try to relax. The damage has been done, nothing I do will reverse time, so I have to accept that it is what it is. Namaste. It’s not that easy. The temperature is cool but beads of sweat have formed around my brow, and I feel perspiration drip down the inside of my shirt.

I find Françoise (my French friend, whose daughter and my son grew up together, like brother and sister) running out the door to help clean up a clinic. She’s heard that I am here so she’s not surprised, nor does she stop what she’s doing to do more than give me the proverbial two-cheek greeting. She’s on a mission. I’m glad to see she’s on a mission, as opposed to the vast majority of people who are still walking around as if they are lost.

I drive by Martine’s house, my Canadian soulmate. She and her husband and her son have already left for Saint Marc, a coastal port town about 70 miles north of the capital, where she works. I don’t think she will be coming back anytime soon. Martine took Françoise’s daughter with her, too. Haiti was traumatic enough – a disaster of this magnitude could easily put the most stable kid over the edge.

The gate in front of Martine's house is intact, as is the wall around it. Haitians with means have lived behind imposing walls for years, building them higher with each political outbreak of violence and/or change of government. I hope that the walls that have fallen have a wider impact than just their physical crumbling, that their disappearance removes the division between the haves and have nots. Especially since there are now exponentially more have nots than before.

I don’t want to drive by my old house but feel compelled to. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity? It’s just up the hill. I feel my chest get tight as we go over the small bridge that covers a dried ravine, a ravine that is a pit-stop of garbage for the pigs.

During the 1991-94 international embargo against Haiti, when the military regime that ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide was in charge, when there was no gas, no electricity, no schools, and little to do, I used to walk down to that bridge with Kadja, my son, and make up stories about the pigs.

We’d look for goats and cows, too. I looked for anything, at the time, to amuse him. He so enjoyed the cows that he used to stand on his tippy-toes from the window of my bedroom and shout out, when they mooed: “pletil, bef” – What are you saying, cow? The only animal we tried to avoid was the dog because the only thing worse than being poor and homeless and hungry in Haiti is to be a poor, homeless, and hungry dog.

I can see, as I drive up the incline to my old house, that my bedroom is gone. I lived on the elevated first floor of a two-story house. My master bedroom, which was built on top of the overhang that served as a garage, is in a pile of dust on the driveway. The owner of the house, Nancy, lived above me, and her house is now where mine should have been.

I stand there not quite comprehending. Nancy’s plants, plants that she took such pride in, are still in their pots on the driveway, and a few are visible through what remains of the open metal grate that served as windows, but many are just bits of green peeking through dust and debris.

I can’t spend too long taking in the details. It’s too painful. I loved this house. Loved the person I became while living here. Loved the memories of raising my son here. It was the cornerstone for me, the safe place in the midst of years of chaos and turmoil that I could come home to and feel whole.

I can’t begin to imagine what Nancy is feeling like without her home. I’m crying by the time I get back into the car. Nothing is going to make me feel better today. But on the drive back, I discover that I'm wrong.

--- For all stories, blogs, and updates on Haiti after the earthquake, go to The Monitor's Haiti page.