PÉTIONVILLE, HAITI—Jeanne Pocius marches across the sanctuary of St. Jacques le Juste, whose far corner is now home to a Baldwin grand piano, its black finish coated in dust as soft as talcum powder.
She raises the heavy lid and sets the wooden arm in place to hold it up, revealing soundboard and strings strewn with little chunks of concrete. At the keyboard, the part called a fall that normally folds down to protect the keys has instead been vertically jammed onto them. As Pocius runs her fingers along the keyboard, scarcely a note is sounded.
“One or two keys, that’s it,” she says. “The other keys, it’s like pressing on a rock. There’s so much debris.” The piano had been played by generations of students at the music school at École Sainte Trinité in Port-au-Prince, where Pocius, a Connecticut-raised trumpeter, has been a teacher since 2008.
Now she’s a central figure in the loose web of musicians from Toronto and around the world who are trying to replace hundreds of instruments damaged or destroyed in the earthquake.
Just about everything at Ste. Trinité was flattened — the famed Anglican cathedral, a UNESCO world heritage site, as well as the primary, music and technical schools that grew up around it. Pocius’s own escape was narrow; her ensuing efforts, heroic.
Far less fortunate were more than 250 of the schools’ 1,500 students, the ones now buried in a mass grave at Ste. Trinité, barely 50 metres away from the makeshift classrooms to which small children have since returned.
It was another piano , the concert grand sitting on the stage of the music school’s fourth-floor auditorium, that Pocius will never forget. She’d been sitting at the piano bench, about to start a jazz class with a handful of students, when she got up to distribute some music and notes on improvisation. After taking a few steps, she began to hear a soft rumble akin to a timpani roll. Then the floor started bucking and heaving. “It was like the ocean in a hurricane,” she says.
A massive piece of concrete fell from the ceiling, crushing the piano she’d just vacated. “Seconds, a matter of seconds, and I would not be here.” As Pocius says this, she’s walking across the remaining rubble of what had been the main school building at Ste. Trinité. “We were about in this area,” she says. “This is where the stage was.”
She means this almost literally. As the quake continued, the whole auditorium descended to earth as the lower floors that housed the electrical, mechanical and business schools collapsed underneath it. The auditorium’s contoured ceiling, resembling a giant corrugated roof, crashed to the floor almost intact, which helped cocoon Pocius and most of her students in relative safety.
“We went over here,” she says, moving across the rubble again, “to this side of the auditorium, where there was a big steel door.” They waited out the aftershocks, then finally made their way outside. “I kept telling myself, everything will be okay when I get to the cathedral,” says Pocius.
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