In a flash, a year has passed.
On Jan. 12, 2010, at 4:53 p.m. local time, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti. The quake, centered 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, killed about 230,000 people, injured an estimated 300,000 and left some 1 million others homeless.
The quake also wiped out or severely damaged about 280,000 homes and businesses – shattering much in an already fragile country.
So, in the year since, how far has Haiti come?
I traveled to Haiti in November. I knew from my previous interviews with Orange County residents who volunteered, worked and visited Haiti over the past year, that despite some progress the devastation remained ever present.
Then I saw it.
In the heart of Port-au-Prince, the collapsed National Palace remained untouched. Even more telling, a tent city of quake victims had sprung up alongside the palace, looking like a miniature city unto itself.
Amid the squalor of hundreds of makeshift tents, enterprising Haitians had gone to work, opening businesses in tarp-covered storefronts: Vendors roasted chicken on open grills; hair stylists trimmed hair. Even a bar was up and running, offering music and open-air seating under a gray Haitian sky.
Haitians have a will to survive. They’ve made do with fate. But that’s no excuse for the fact that hundreds of thousands remain homeless. And there’s no excuse for rubble still clogging the streets, for impassible roads; for hunger.
Charities like the International Red Cross continue to provide water, some sanitation, and tarps. But what about the most basic of all human needs – shelter?
In November, spokesman Matthew Cochrane told me that the Red Cross’ challenge in providing transitional shelter has been a lack of available land and bureaucratic hurdles to obtain space to build.
“It’s going to take many years to get people back into houses,” Cochrane said. “So you have to bridge that gap. You can’t have the people living in tents for such an extended length of time.”
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has a five-year plan and an operating budget of $340 million. To help Haiti come back they’ll build transitional shelters, offer health care and water purification, among other projects.
All that money that Americans and the world donated? (More than $3.2 billion has been raised or pledged to help Haiti recover.) That’s where it’s going.
But 11 months after the quake, when I was in Haiti, what was the measure of that progress? Cochrane said in early November that 2,000 shelters had been built throughout Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, their goal is to provide 7,500 families with shelter.
Cochrane told me of two sites in Port-au-Prince where the Red Cross was constructing transitional shelters, so I visited one. The tiny structures were partially built, but construction was suspended because of a tropical storm. Still, I spotted a few squatters peering from one of the empty doorways.
It was disheartening. How can a country rebuild if its people can’t even begin to rebuild their own lives?
This week, I checked back with Cochrane and he had good news to report. On Friday, 125 families moved into a set of wooden homes near the Port-au-Prince airport. Another 60-plus families moved into these transitional shelters at another nearby site in mid November.
Today, more than 3,800 families throughout Haiti have been placed in temporary wooden structures built by the Red Cross.
But it’s success by the dozen in a country of millions.
The Haitian residents I spoke to during my trip felt abandoned by charities, by the government; even by those Haitians who fled the country after the quake.
It’s those who stayed and understand the extreme poverty facing Haiti, who I believe will rebuild Haiti.
Theony Deshommes is among them.
Deshommes, 26, is in his final year of medical school, one of the prized graduates (class of 2003) from the much-coveted Louverture Cleary School, a private Catholic boarding school that helps disadvantaged Haitian children get a good, free education. .
When the quake struck, Deshommes’ first instinct was to rush downtown to help the injured.
The morning after the quake hit – a Wednesday – the almost doctor began treating patients outside a devastated hospital. He didn’t stop until the next Saturday, when he sat down and fell asleep.
“Where I was living was damaged, so I had no food… and no potable water to drink. But I went to the hospital and said ‘This was the possibility for me to help the others.’ … That’s why I stayed in Port-au-Prince. I said ‘I have to stay,” said Deshommes, who stabilized patients, provided antibiotics, and stitched wounds.
That loyalty to his country is rooted in the lessons he learned at Louverture Cleary – to give back what you receive. He’s experienced first-hand how education can be life changing. And he sees a thirst for knowledge in the children in his neighborhood as they clamor onto tap tap cabs to get to school every morning.
Deshommes knows Haiti’s image to outsiders.
“There are a lot of people who when they see Haiti they see the jungle; a place where people are killing each other, a place where there is no life, where there is no love, there is no hope.”
But he sees a different Haiti. He sees a country dreaming of change, children desperate to go school, people who want a better life. This why he says his No. 1 goal is to stay in Haiti and help his country climb back.
“Haiti is full of people who, even if there is a lack of possibilities, there is no electricity, there’s no food, there’s no water, there’s no trees, there’s no wood; nothing… They are trying to see their future.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-3649 or ycabrera@ocregister.com or twitter.com/ycabreraocr
