Today marks the eleventh anniversary of that fateful January 12, where a devastating earthquake shook an entire nation, leaving hundreds of thousands dead after its passage. This Tuesday Haiti remembers one of the darkest spots in its history, one that seems indelible to the eyes of many.
“We will never forget this day, a day that cost a lot in the country, we lost thousands of people and to this day the wounded are still alive. Today is a very sad day for us, everyone lost a little that day, but we were very strong “, had said the Haitian president Jovenel Moise, during one of the multiple acts of remembrance that have carried out since then.
It is estimated that the passage of this earthquake, of magnitude 7.0 on the Richter scale, left about 300,000 dead and even more injured.
Just 35 seconds were enough to destroy part of a country’s infrastructure, exposing a weakness of Haiti, a tragedy that after a decade has not been completely overcome.
“A lost decade”
More than 1.5 million Haitians were reported homeless, leaving local authorities and the international humanitarian community facing a colossal challenge in a country that has no land registry or building rules.
“It’s been a lost decade, totally lost,” Haitian economist Kesner Pharel said in a 2020 interview. “The capital has not been rebuilt, but our poor governance is not the sole responsibility of local authorities. At the international level we have not seen a mechanism to administer aid that will allow the country to benefit.”
He also indicated that the millions of dollars that were donated to the cause of Haiti’s reconstruction were not received in full, which was reflected in the situation of many survivors who by that date were exposed to same dangers that existed before earthquake.
Not so temporary settlements
One of the most common aid measures in the days following the earthquake was temporary settlements for the millions displaced.
However, still in 2020 thousands of Haitian nationals continue to live in these spaces that were designed temporarily, according to a report by the news agency Efe.
According to this writing one of the most populous temporary settlements of the 22 that followed on foot is Corail, the name of a community of hundreds of homes built 25 miles north of Port-au-Prince.
“We live in misery here, misery surrounds us. If we had money we could do something, but we don’t have it,” Helene Laura, a mother who shares a small house with her six children, told Efe.
Some 34,000 people, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), continued to live in a similar situation in 2020 since the earthquake.
The houses in Corail were built by a non-governmental organization (NGO) in order to serve as a shelter for up to two or three years, although most people have already been relocated.
witnesses
“In fractions of a second we started to climb this column of dust, from the part we had been climbing and I thought: Well if all this dust were houses that collapsed there are a lot of problems, there will be a lot of deaths,” he said. state Jorge Cruz, photographer of the Daily List, who was present during the earthquake.
Cruz and his partner Javier Valdivia were in the neighboring nation for an assignment of this means, and he heard the movements of the earthquake as they moved to Petionville, the Haitian capital.
“I remember the bus started moving in an unusual way for me because I’ve never been to a place where an earthquake occurs … Valdivia if you notice and he told me right away: Jorgito take care that it’s an earthquake, ”he explained.
He believes he admits that after this experience, which he defined as one of the worst days he has lived, it was hard enough for him to sleep, assuring that for three months any unexpected movement or rubbing in his bed was already awake and waiting for the worst.