PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (RNS) — Driving through downtown
Port-au-Prince, it can be difficult at first to see much change from a year
ago, when a devastating 7.0 earthquake devastated this impoverished island
nation.
The presidential palace is still in ruins, with thousands —
among an estimated 1 million homeless Haitians — living in massive tent city across
the street. Around the corner, a tent city remains on the grounds of the
destroyed Roman Catholic cathedral, still full of piles of rubble and shattered
stained glass.
But despite the surface appearances, faith-based aid workers
who have been active here over the past year insist there has been progress in
dealing with the humanitarian catastrophe.
“The progress is slow, maybe not as quick as other
emergencies, but … we’re moving ahead,” Nicole Peter, the Haiti operations
director for the Christian relief agency World Vision, told Religion &
Ethics NewsWeeekly.
World Vision has already spent more than $100 million in post-earthquake
work, including shelter, water and sanitation, job creation, education and
family support.
That includes the Corail displaced persons camp about an
hour outside the capital city, where the Haitian government moved some 7,000 people
last April.
At the time, there were no preparations, no essential services, no
infrastructure.
World Vision and other private agencies provided tents,
latrines, clean water and set up schools. The government still hasn’t developed
a long-term housing and resettlement plan for the people in the camp, so World
Vision has begun building sturdier transitional shelters.
“We had to negotiate with donors to convince them that
timber frames were necessary,” said World Vision’s Mary Kate MacIssac. “They said
that those were perhaps too permanent, but we said, no, these people need
something strong if they’re going to be out here.”
MacIssac said she’s heard a lot of criticism from the media —
and even some donors — about the slow pace of recovery. She said she, too, is
frustrated, but said critics don’t fully understand the realities on the
ground.
“Haiti was a country that was facing a humanitarian crisis
even before the earthquake,” she said. “Then you have a massive earthquake hit
an urban center, the capital of a country. And it’s a complexity of urban
disaster that agencies have not had to deal with before.”
Adding to that complexity is a rising cholera epidemic,
which Peter called an “emergency within an emergency.”
World Vision set up cholera treatment units near various
tent camps. Visitors are disinfected before they enter and when they leave.
According
to official figures, more than 150,000 people have come down with cholera, and
nearly 3,500 have died.
Aid groups say the numbers are vastly underreported.
Rick Ireland, administrator of the Free Methodist Haiti
Inland Mission, is also all too familiar with the complexities here.
Last
January, he and his wife were in Western New York preparing to become
missionaries. When the earthquake hit, denomination officials asked him to get
to Haiti — immediately.
A
multi-story building on a church compound had been completely destroyed, and
the American
administrater of the mission, Jeanne Munos, was killed, as
were two other American workers and a Haitian staffer.
“It’s a little harder to get around — you’re dodging
potholes and broken-down vehicles,” he said. “If you want to go to the bank,
you’re probably going to have a three- or four-hour wait in line. Everything is
just a little bit harder here and that does get discouraging.”
The Free Methodists have been working through local
churches.
At one church, Sunday morning services start at 6 a.m. Shoe
shine vendors line up outside to help congregants look their Sunday best, while
local taxis ferry in more worshippers.
With more than 2,000 people in the
church, it’s standing room only. Ireland says this is the best resource to aid
Haiti’s recovery.
“They know their community,” he said.
Indeed, for many in this predominantly Christian nation,
faith has been the key to survival.
“They’re filled with tremendous hope,” Ireland says of the
Haitians. “It’s unbelievable because it would be so easy just to give up and
they haven’t given up.”
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