Life in Haiti After the Earthquake: Weary but Resilient
This was written earlier in the week by Ken Laura, a member of our Haiti Relief Team. He has been in Port-au-Prince working with our Haitian staff since shortly after the earthquake.
Five-thirty comes early most days, but especially on a Sunday morning when you hope to get some extra sleep before church. Not this week, however. I was wide awake at 5. I forced myself to stay in the sack for another 30 minutes despite the rooster’s consistent crowing.
The high-pitched chirp of some baby doves asking for food and the soft cooing of their parents as they brought another tasty morsel to them brought back memories of 30 years ago when I was living in Limbe’ at the hospital where I worked. One of the other missionaries at that time was raising a pair of turtle doves for the eggs.
Calling my tent a sack is an exaggeration of for what I’ve been sleeping in the last three months. My tent living is nothing like what the vast majority of Port-au-Prince residents are living in at the moment.
As you’ve no doubt seen on the news, tent cities are all over town. More than 300 camps are registered in the city and more than 19 of them have 5,000-plus people living in them. The families are crammed together in muddy lots with only a sheet between them and the next family. Privacy is not a word in their vocabulary right now.
Continue Reading ›Thoughts on Haiti From Haiti: 21 Days Later
This was written yesterday by Bob Thorp, a member of our Complementary Interventions team, who has been in Haiti working with our staff since shortly after the earthquake.
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“I’ve witnessed a metamorphosis here since arriving here 21 days ago. Then, the words I could use to describe what I saw was a whole city in shock, walking around like zombies, walking wounded. Blank stares. Hollow eyes, caked with mud, now dry from an inability to produce more tears. A survival mentality had set in – each one for themselves. Walk right past someone trapped, because they needed to get home to find their own loved ones.
“Today, car horns blare from 4:00am on late into the night. The continual roar of traffic, occasional squealing of tires, movement everywhere. Life is returning to Port-au-Prince. It started like a drip – in dire need of food and water, street vendors started setting up shop – hawking anything and everything. Fruits and vegetables started appearing. Clothes, used and new – recovered from the rubble of someone else’s house – who knows – now hand on clothes hangers covering a filthy crumbling wall like royal curtains. Mountains of shoes have also made it to the street vendors. Even seen a place where you could buy just one shoe! Not sure why, either they had a niche for those that could only find one of their shoes. Or more morbid, selling shoes to all those who lost limbs because of this tragedy.”
Read the entire blog post.
“I’ve witnessed a metamorphosis here since arriving here 21 days ago. Then, the words I could use to describe what I saw was a whole city in shock, walking around like zombies, walking wounded. Blank stares. Hollow eyes, caked with mud, now dry from an inability to produce more tears. A survival mentality had set in – each one for themselves. Walk right past someone trapped, because they needed to get home to find their own loved ones.
