Suburbanites in Haiti: 'Every day is a new struggle'
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — Haiti is in a nightmare from which it can't awaken.
Conditions in Port-au-Prince, the onetime city of art, music and diverse culture, are barely better than in the weeks after the area was decimated by an earthquake a year ago today, says Lionel Legoute, 35, a Haitian formerly of Palatine who returned to his native land. He helps with relief efforts through Lutheran Church Charities of Addison, and World Relief and Human Care.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing” has been done since the earthquake to rebuild his beloved city, with the exception of some clearing of streets, says Legoute. He lost three cousins who were in their house when the 7.0-magnitude quake hit at 4:53 p.m. Jan. 12, 2010, killing nearly 300,000 people.
Buildings such as the Port-au-Prince Cathedral and the Presidential Palace remain as they did a year ago, untouched skeletal hulks of concrete, mortar and rebar that have become new, dangerous playgrounds for Haitian children. Children cool off during the heat of the day in dirty waterways choked with used plastic bottles.
“The debris is still there and the tent city is still the same,” Legoute says.
“No Hope for Haiti,” citizens invariably answer when asked about the prospect of a brighter future. Thousands of them now populate tent cities dotting the dirty, dusty and crumbling landscape of the city.
Some no bigger than a prison cell and nearly rubbing walls with neighbors, tents have risen everywhere since that day in which babies became orphans and parents became childless. Some of the pop-up tents appeared first as sheets of plastic near the landmark Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince. Now, they're even perched in highway medians, sometimes sheltering families of six or more in sweltering heat.
Even a year after the earthquake, Haitians are struggling with a new emergency: the cholera outbreak. More than 3,000 people have died.
Clean, cholera-free water is the goal of Lisa Ballantine of Elk Grove Village, director of the nonprofit organization Filter Pure International.
Using skills she developed in a Northern Illinois University ceramics class, Ballantine developed an inexpensive clay water filter. In the wake of the earthquake, she ramped up production and opened a factory in Haiti, trying to get the devices in the hands of more families. She's in Haiti now overseeing the work.
Legoute's bride-to-be, Rachel Ehrhard of Oak Park, believes that at the end of the day there is still joy and laughter. She finds hope in her work building houses with the Haiti Mission Project — though right now the building project is a chicken coop for an orphanage.
One of the Haiti Mission Project's new homes will go to Madam Venia Jean Baptiste, a good friend of Legoute who described what happened after the quake hit while she was in church with 25 other Methodist parishioners. She fell to her knees praying and escaped without injury, only to encounter a hideous scene outside.
Panic and dust filled the air. She stepped over bodies as daylight faded, looking for her house, which was destroyed when another house fell on it. All seven members of her family who were in the house at the time survived, but the six family members in the house that fell on hers all died. Her nine months in a tent city have been the worst of her life, she says.
Haitians are a tenacious, hardworking people who are willing to rebuild as they've done since the first earthquake was recorded in the 18th century. But it's a longer, harder job than many would have imagined a year ago, even though Haiti then seemed “like you would picture hell to be,” Ballantine said.
“Every day is a new struggle,” Ehrhard says. But for the moment, “most are willing to adapt to the situation, getting through today to get to tomorrow.”