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Toronto Star Article

There was an endless cacophony of honking cars and trucks as Betsy Wall, 56 and her daughter, Alexis Barkman, 27, drove up rue Toussaint, on to rue Mackandal, and past the security guard at the gate of the family’s guesthouse. Then they made their hellos to staff before heading off for a nap in their rooms. They had been up since 4:30 a.m. and had just arrived from Canada.
The executive director of the Waterloo-based Foundation for International Development Assistance (FIDA), an organization that promotes agricultural development in rural Haiti, Wall had last visited Haiti six weeks earlier. FIDA was founded by her parents in 1980 to encourage Haitian farmers to grow their own produce. Barkman works with her mother.
In Canada, the divorced Wall lives with her daughter in Cambridge.
Wall’s mother established the guesthouse in 1984 when she and her husband moved to Haiti. Wall’s father worked with local farmers to create agricultural cooperatives. Wall first traveled to Haiti with her dad when she was 17 and became a frequent visitor.
The Wall guesthouse was close to the airport, and many North American and European relief and aid workers would stay for the low price of $39 a night, including two meals, and the camaraderie.
The establishment actually consists of three separate buildings, one of which was completely destroyed in the earthquake (another remains unsafe, while the third, a one-floor villa, is habitable). Two Canadians who had taken the same flight as Wall and Barkman — Elmira-area nurse Yvonne Martin and Quebec humanitarian aid worker Camil Perron — died in it shortly after they arrived. (An American and two Haitian guesthouse staff also perished.)
Wall and Barkman’s three-week agenda included getting an update from her Haitian staff, meeting an Ontario physician who does rural clinics and holding a week-long “adventures in understanding poverty” tour for people who wanted to do development work in Haiti.
Wall was asleep when, at 4.53 p.m., she woke thinking a truck had hit the building, and then heard “screaming, screaming from the pool and from the orphanage across the street ..... wailing in the streets.” She gripped the doorway for support while her daughter tried to keep her balance on the bed.
Out the veranda window, “walls were just crushing in,” says Wall. “Grey dust was everywhere.
“The middle house had collapsed,” recalls Barkman. “It was like `poof,’ gone in one breath in about 30 seconds. It fell straight down like a pancake.” After rushing down the stairs, they ran into a southern Ontario medical team that had sat about nine rows behind Wall and her daughter. The group of seven had just lost Martin.
Night fell and stars filled the sky. “Suddenly it was so quiet — no sirens, no honking,” says Wall.
Wall then focused on making sure her Canadian guests would be evacuated and dealing with the quake victims in the guesthouse. She also promised Camil Perron’s widow, Suzanne, that she would look after his effects.
She also met with the staff of her Haiti operation. “The first plan of action,” she says, “was to deliver relief to about 10,000 families affected, essentially food, water, hygiene and social assistance working through our cooperative membership, Oxfam Quebec, MCC the Mennonite Central Committee.”
After a few days, Wall met her daughter, who went to a mountain inn after the quake, at the Canadian embassy. The two were ready to return to Canada.
On her return to Cambridge, she wrapped Camil Perron’s watch, the face still covered in earthquake dust, carefully in grey velvet. She added a cream coloured rose in a vial of water. And she set them in a black box and sent it to Suzanne Perron by Purolator.