This serial concerns the motivations and the consequences of 104 men and women embedded within an irregular medical column dispatched to Port Au Prince in the days immediately following the terrible 2010 earthquake. Holed up in a crumbling hotel a young girl is having revelations from some higher power on a new and radically inclusive religion. As our heroes struggle to hold together the nation's only functioning hospital we see how deep the rabbit hole goes to quarantine and punish the only successful slave uprising in history.
Part One: The Volunteers ($1.00)
Part Two: The Fix Up ($2.00)
Part Three: Jacobin Medical ($3.00)
Part Four: Nap Boule ($4.00)
Prologue
The two travelers set out at dusk from the airstrip carrying nothing except an iridium glow torch and a small bag of medical supplies.
The night was a glorious salvation from the tropical hot, hot heat. One is a low level healer; sometime type of Shaman from Brooklyn called an "ehemteh", which wasn't really like a doctor at all. His whiteness catches the shimmer of the full moon. His name is Sebastian; this is his thirteenth day on the island, in the witching hour of his life’s held beliefs. The second traveler is named Jonathan, a Haitian born through and through, no family left alive at all, no more than 16 years old he leads the rebel shaman though the sea of rubble and refuse, of mangled bodies, of death’s dying dust in search of an oracle. A young woman holed up in the Hotel Olofsen, receiving visions that the healer believes might divine some insight as to recent comings and goings, plots and a hopefully a divine intervention.
Following broken roads, and fallen street signs trekking ever on the incline Sebastian feverishly pursues the oracle, Jonathan feverishly pursues a glimmering hope he ties up in Sebastian’s plot, also perhaps a twenty dollar bill, and the moon lights the way rooting for no one.
Occasionally the pair would come across a young man or woman sitting along the road staring out into the nothing left of the city. They would ask Jonathan where he was taking the blan healer clad in blue and black. Jonathan would point toward the mountains, tell them in Creole help was coming. At times they’d give him a short horror story and he’d write down their address in hopes the aid trucks began bussing food rations into the cities interior. Sebastian would look on, or smoke a cigarette and watch the smoke entranced.
On and on they climbed that night, when the roads ceased to be, over rubble piles over bodies, past the stench of the recently dead.
Sometime around dawn they’d reach the gates of the hotel, and by god the oracle hopefully had some answers because the ground was shaking and this little rescue mission wasn’t going at all as planned and from the heights of Port au Prince, from the Hotel Olofsen this lonely pair of hope slingers needed to see a miracle or two if they were to persevere.
But there is no oracle in the Hotel Olofsen waiting, and Jonathan’s greatest hope is still mostly in a high denomination green dollar bill. And like everything else top to bottom in Haiti, the place is a powder keg and historically all outsiders are the spark.