Haiti earthquake: one day a new beginning

Trócaire is responding to the Haiti crisis through the Caritas network,  Michelle Hough, Caritas Communications Officer reports from Port-au-Prince on the response.

BBC Radio Ulster interviewed me this morning and asked how this compared to other disasters I’d been to.  The only earthquake I’ve worked on was the one in L’Aquila, Italy last year. When  I arrived on Easter Sunday, five days after the earthquake, the whole city was covered in blue tents where people were sleeping. People were receiving food and water wasn’t a problem.  In Haiti they are sleeping in the streets and doctors are performing amputations without anesthetic.

L’Aquila is in one of the world’s richest countries, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Port-au-Prince is a far cry from the hills of Abruzzo. Even before the earthquake, Haiti had massive problems due to poverty, inequality and a basic lack of development.

Now large parts of Port-au-Prince – a city of three million people – have crumbled. I interviewed the president of Caritas Haiti, Bishop Pierre Dumas, last night and he said: “All of the symbols that join us together: the cathedral, the president’s palace, ministries, the schools, religious communities and many more places are in ruins.”

People in L’Aquila suffered enormously because of the earthquake. When I visited six months afterwards, some people were still in tents, some still in hotels miles from the town. But lots of earthquake-proof flats had already been rebuilt. Having said that, people’s lives were still upside down and they were still dealing with the trauma of the disaster and the loss of their loved ones.

As I travel through the streets of Port-au-Prince where house after house has collapsed and pass by damaged schools which still probably have the bodies of children inside, I wonder how such a poor country will be able to undertake such an enormous rebuilding project.

That’s without even thinking about how people are going to manage to live and work. When I went to a food distribution on Sunday one man I was chatting to said: “I was a teacher, but all the schools have collapsed. What am I going to do to earn a living now?”

At the moment aid has started arriving and countries are promising large donations to help Haitians. This will help them eat, it will help save lives and it will help give them shelter. But what will their lives be like in a year’s time? How much will we have forgotten about the emergency? How much long term aid and development will really be invested in people’s lives?

Bishop Dumas, who lost his niece and brother-in-law in the earthquake, sees the earthquake as an opportunity to rebuild Haiti.

“Now we have to build again to be able to live together. We have to do it in a way that prejudice and discrimination are done away with and in a way that engenders trust. It must be done in a way that gives rise to solidarity and an open spirit,” he said.

For the tens of thousands of people who have died and the millions are suffering, let’s hope that solidarity comes from far and wide for a long time to come.