NOTE #3 LOOKING FOR GAELLE

Gaelle had held out the longest of all. Five days. She was still alive when all hope had long since vanished and people were only searching for the dead. Back then, when an earthquake levelled Port-au-Prince in Haiti and claimed over 300,000 lives. On the fifth day, a Spanish fire brigade team found the girl buried under the rubble of a small hotel where she had worked as a receptionist. She was still conscious, but seriously injured. The Spanish men tried to keep her awake while they carefully removed the rubble that was trapping her. Gaelle had almost made it when fate suddenly took a different turn and forced the Spanish team to flee from an armed gang of escaped prisoners. All subsequent attempts to return to the girl failed due to the apocalyptic chaos of those days. After their return home, the Spanish firefighters were celebrated as heroes, but Gaelle's fate and the uncertainty of whether she had survived left a deep scar on them. A scar that never healed.

I was living in Spain at the time and followed the rescue operations of the international aid workers with bated breath. I knew nothing about Gaelle's fate at the time. I was deeply moved by the photo of a little boy whom the team had rescued from the rubble of his house. The image of Redji went around the world as a symbol of hope and later won the Pulitzer Prize. It inspired me to return to Haiti with the Spanish firefighting team a year after the earthquake to see what had become of the boy and the country. Because Haiti had been quickly forgotten.

So I travelled with a small camera crew and three Spanish firefighters to a country that was still in ruins and where cholera was rampant. We stayed right next to one of the countless tent camps. Hundreds of thousands of people had been left homeless and, a year after the earthquake, were still living under precarious plastic tarpaulins. Even in our half-ruined house, there was no electricity or running water. Instead, new asphalt roads had been built in the wealthy neighbourhood, which had been spared by the earthquake because it was high above the sea, far away from the epicentre. I didn't want to stay in a hotel there, but rather down below with the people who had lost everything. None of us could sleep on the first night, and I realised how deep the trauma of the Spanish people was. The journey back to Port-au-Prince had reopened old wounds, and I desperately searched for words to help them heal.

After a long search, we found Redji, but Gaelle's fate remained a mystery until the end of our trip. For days, we combed through the entire epicentre, which was still in ruins. It was only on the last day that we found the exact location where the small hotel had been, and there he was, a middle-aged man who spoke perfect Spanish. It almost seemed as if he had been waiting for us for a whole year. Waiting to finish telling the story. Gaelle's story. He had known her well and it was he who had single-handedly freed her from the rubble. Eight days after the earthquake. She was already dead. I stopped filming. I tried to make myself invisible so as not to disturb the Spaniards in their grief. The firefighters' tears were meant only for Gaelle.

Haiti gave me a friend for life back then: Pako, the head of that firefighting team, who has accompanied me on almost all of my filmmaking adventures since then. The search for Gaelle welded us together inseparably. Two things have stayed with me from Haiti: the image of the red roses at the place where my Spanish friends were finally able to mourn a Haitian girl whose name was all they knew, and the memory of the many cheerful children in the tent camps who loved to see themselves laughing in the viewfinder of my camera. They were a symbol that life goes on despite everything. But not for everyone.