Haiti: a week after the earthquake
Relief efforts are under way in southern Haiti, exactly a week after the country was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. As many desperate Haitians flee the capital, Port-au-Prince, for what they hope will be relative safety in other towns and rural areas, and as growing numbers of relief aid workers and foreign troops arrive, bloggers and Twitter users continue to report on local developments, make pleas for emergency assistance, and comment on the government and international response to the crisis.
A handful of frequent Twitter users have been invaluable sources of information over the past week. Musician and hotelier Richard Morse, tweeting as @RAMhaiti, had a great deal to say today about the pace and effectiveness of relief efforts:
He warned:
But he still managed to crack a joke:
Even with all this earthquake trauma, I still get spam mail from Nigerian bankers.
Journalist Carel Pedre (@carelpedre) has been another frequent tweeter. On the morning of 19 January, he shared the good news that a couple of supermarkets in Petionville had reopened for business, and struck a note of optimism:
Photographer Frederic Dupoux (@fredodupoux), on the other hand, made an urgent call for help in the Fontamara area west of downtown Port-au-Prince:
In fontamara 27 there is no aid, no medical team no water in sight. #haiti #help #SOS
Religious charity workers have been among the most regular on-the-ground bloggers. From Port-au-Prince, Troy Livesay gave a status report on the afternoon of 19 January on the ad hoc medical clinic his Heartline Ministries organisation has set up:
We've become a hospital, in that many patients cannot be treated and released. I may not have the accurate count, but I believe we're keeping 14 right now. We're rolling with it….
Via Twitter (@troylivesay), he passed on news from the town of Leogane, close to the earthquake's epicentre:
In Jacmel, Gwen Mangine paid tribute to her colleagues helping to organise the distribution of airlifted supplies from the town's small airstrip, but she also shared a story of unexpected selfishness in the time of crisis:
We've been trying to locate oxygen for a team of doctors that came in. They need it before they can operate. We located a supplier in Jacmel…. He has oxygen. He had tanks. He wouldn't give us the tanks. He said unless we have empty tanks to exchange we cannot have oxygen. I told him that we need it for surgery. He told us than we better get some tanks. I said I would pay him whatever he wanted. Anything. Just ask and I will pay it. He refused. I told him that people were DYING because they need surgery and we cannot do the surgeries without the oxygen. He said he didn't care. I asked him again, “So you're telling me that you want me people to die rather than give us the tanks?” He said, “Yes.”
Meanwhile, in the rural village of Fond des Blancs, Canadian charity worker Ellen in Haiti was far removed from the zone of immediate crisis, but expressed the shock and sorrow of many Haitians experiencing the ripple effects of the disaster:
…we are not seeing much of the physical suffering, but it is still difficult. The stories are hard. Everyone I know has lost close relatives. Fred, a university grad who had recently been at St. Boniface for a work experience, showed up yesterday. He lost two brothers and everything he owns. He had nowhere else to go….
As time goes by, the realization of how much things have changed is sinking in. The whole world is different. Any plans anyone had for the future here have changed. People have hope, but they realize that even the smallest things may never happen or need to be put on hold indefinitely.
In Les Cayes, Pwoje Espwa posted photos of the traffic congestion caused by people fleeing the capital:
People are arriving from PaP and many are trying to get out to the provinces where they have family…. Some gas and some medicine have come into town which has alleviated the crisis a bit. Much more is needed so we are hoping that what we read on the net about supplying the countryside will happen.
And the blog of the Konbit Pou Ayiti organisation gave reports from several areas of the country today. The civil society group KOFAVIV, the Commission of Women Victims for Victims, gave an account of conditions in Chanmas, a Port-au-Prince neighbourhood:
…many women are sleeping in Chanmas in bad conditions, in the damp night air, where the sun beats on them, rain falls on them, damp air hits them, many of them lost a lot of their family, we can say, many of them already did not have anything to their name, now hunger almost kills them
Konbit Pou Ayiti also posted a report from a SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods) staff member, who gave a glimpse of the situation in the Champs de Mars, a city park where many homeless people have taken refuge:
…amongst the swarms of displaced people there was calm and solidarity. We wound our way through the camp asking for injured people who needed to get to the hospital. Despite everyone telling us that as soon as we did this we would be mobbed by people, I was amazed as we approached each tent people gently pointed us towards their neighbors, guiding us to those who were suffering the most. We picked up 5 badly injured people….
Back in Jacmel, students of the Ciné Institute have continued to post video from their town at the institute blog. Today that included a report (by Lesly Decembre) from a makeshift refugee camp, and footage of the first aid vessels arriving at Jacmel's harbour.
5 comments
Thanks for this update!
In reading this post, it has just crystallised for me that Haiti has never been as disconnected from the world or as distant from our consciousness as many would have us believe. This post made me realise that the majority of what I know about the effects of this earthquake hasn’t come from CNN or the local news. It has come directly from Haitian people. Language barriers have not been a problem, in a way that it clearly is for many international reporters who haven’t even bothered to ask Haitians themselves to speak to what is going on. Through this disaster, the internet has facilitated some important connections between Haitian people and others in the Caribbean. I hope that Global Voices will find ways to help the rest of us sustain these relationships in the years ahead.
I love haiti! I see hope and smile on so many faces today!