1st Annual "Half 4 Haiti" Benefit Run

1st Annual "Half 4 Haiti" Benefit Run

When: Sunday, March 10th, 7:30am

Where: Lake Natoma, Folsom

Why: To support Haiti's most vulnerable children

How: Run the River City Half Marathon with us and ask your family and friends to pledge on your behalf 

Info: paulb1221@sbcglobal.net 

Letter From Haiti: Life in the Ruins

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

Amy Wilentz | January 9, 2013

A Haitian girl walks through a camp for people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince January 3, 2013. Reuters/Swoan Parker
 
Sometimes you can’t help but be sickened by the behavior of certain international organizations helping Haiti recover from the devastating January 2010 earthquake—hit, that is, by a wave of real physical nausea. The other day, I spent an afternoon in the displaced persons camp across from the ruins of St. Anne’s church in downtown Port-au-Prince. The place was awful, as awful as you can imagine squalid emergency living quarters might be—homes consisting of tent, tarp, tin, sheets, plywood, some cardboard—after three years of dust, dirt, sewage, torrential storms and, to top it off, Hurricane Sandy, which killed at least fifty-four people in Haiti.

Across the street from the camp, where an estimated 600 families are living, Chérestal Jean-Fougère, a camp leader, showed me the portable toilets that had been brought in by relief agencies in the first days after the earthquake. For months, a cleaning company contracted by international relief organizations and consisting of men in rubber regalia came regularly to wash out these toilets with high-powered hoses connected to special pump trucks. I remember watching them back then and wondering how long this miracle could last. Now I have my answer: for the past six months at least, Jean-Fougère said, no one has come to clean. The contract for the job has run out.

It shows. At the edge of the rocky field that was once the St. Anne sanctuary, the five or six portable toilets are festering shit holes, overflowing with stinking excrement and pieces of cardboard that have been used as toilet paper. On some, the doors hang open on broken hinges. “No one goes into these anymore,” Jean-Fougère told me. I asked him where residents font leurs besoins now, and he pointed to the curb and also to a gaping hole in the street. When I looked down into this, I saw brackish brown water, glinting and moving. This is the water the camp residents also use for laundry and bathing, Jean-Fougère added.