Haiti Earthquake: 6 Months Later

By Patrick Carney

Robin Contino arrived in the Dominican Republic less than one week after a devastating earthquake struck neighboring Haiti. Two days later, she began to drive toward the wreckage. As she reached the top of a hill just outside of Port-au-Prince, she saw Haiti's capital city lying in ruin.

"You would see collapsed buildings, whether they were big or small, everywhere," Contino says. "And there might be one big building that stood, but it would have big cracks or part of it was sort of askew, but the building next to it was just flat."

As she got closer to the center of Haiti's largest city, the sight of collapsed buildings gave way to heartbreaking scenes of people left homeless and disoriented by sudden disaster.

"In the side streets, you saw people setting up little camps or sleeping," she says. "You couldn't travel in the side streets, people were there. And in any sort of park or open space, people were starting to flock for safety. Nobody was sleeping inside."

As deputy coordinator for Catholic Relief Services' Haiti earthquake response, Contino was on the ground in Port-au-Prince to see the damage and assist in coordinating CRS' emergency response.

Compounding the human trauma was the magnitude of property loss. The earthquake, which killed about 230,000 and displaced 2 million Haitians, also made transporting goods and supplies throughout Haiti difficult, if not impossible in some places. The quake also caused incalculable damage to an already weak Port-au-Prince infrastructure.

"The thing that's different from the [2004 Indian Ocean] tsunami is the underlying poverty of Haiti," says Nicole Balliette, CRS' Haiti earthquake response coordinator. "The fact that there were such capacity and resource constraints, infrastructure was so poor, all of those things give a context which is even more challenging than what we faced with Indonesia and Sri Lanka with the tsunami response."

A key to advancing the recovery into the next phase is building transitional, earthquake-resistant homes for the Haitian people. While the end is clear, the path to rebuilding is strewn with obstacles. With so many landownership documents destroyed in the earthquake, just getting permission to clear land can be a long, complicated process.

"Everything came down with the earthquake and it's blocking everything. Everything is just right there where it fell, and the city was already so congested that it's just making things incredibly difficult," Balliette says. "If people didn't have all of that debris on their home sites, the transitional shelter program could have already started much more vigorously."

CRS supporters have already made a remarkable difference for the Haitian people. CRS has distributed food, provided clean water and medical care, and reunited children with their parents. The difference CRS has made, Contino notes, is visible when you walk down the streets of Port-au-Prince.

"When I went back [in late May], the streets were once again lined with markets," Contino recalls with a smile. "You could find anything from fruits and vegetables, to artwork, to tarps. People have gotten back to life. Those little small streets, people are not there anymore. They've gone to larger camps or they've gone to where they have family that has land. You can see many people in cash-for-work programs from various organizations doing assembly-line work to clear the debris out of places, clearing canals, so people are back to work."

Because of the poverty that existed in Haiti at the time of the quake, CRS continues to provide basic life-preserving services in addition to moving forward with reconstruction projects.

"We're still very much in that emergency response," Balliette says. "I think the problem of being able to transition fully is that people do still need to get support for their basic needs: water, food, sanitation, shelter. If we still need to be focusing on that, it takes away from the ability to transition fully into the reconstruction. That's not going to go away quickly."

Another critical CRS initiative on the horizon includes rebuilding Haiti's health care infrastructure and capabilities. CRS is working with St. Francois de Sales Hospital in Port-au-Prince, which was almost totally destroyed in the earthquake, and will be helping with the reconstruction. In cooperation with the government of Haiti and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, CRS is also supporting the creation of postgraduate education programs for doctors and nurses with specializations geared toward Haiti's needs.

CRS' work is enhanced by the interaction between Catholics in the United States and their brothers and sisters in Haiti. Through parish twinning programs, relationships have existed between U.S. and Haitian parishes for years.

"Because they're [Catholics in the United States] interested, they can be spokespersons for the situation in Haiti in their own parishes or elsewhere in their cities telling people about what's going on in Haiti because they have a relationship in Haiti," says David Rothrock, manager of CRS' U.S. Operations Haiti Partnership Unit.

"It's going to be slow," Balliette says. "I think the appeal is for people to be patient, especially over the next 6 to 12 months, because you're not going to see an overnight change. But, by the end of a five-year period, you would expect to see most of the most essential buildings reconstructed, hopefully following government-regulated, earthquake-resistant guidelines."

Difficulties and delays notwithstanding, Contino points to an advantage CRS brings to recovery efforts in Haiti. Agency staff, the vast majority of whom are Haitians, have worked in Haiti for more than 50 years. That history and commitment built a trust the earthquake could not rattle.

"I don't think you just see our vehicles, you see our people who are out there, who are working," Contino says. "I think people know that we have been there; we will continue to work for the long haul, whatever it takes to get things done."

Patrick Carney is an associate web producer, writer and editor for Catholic Relief Services. He is based in CRS headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland.

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. We alleviate suffering and provide assistance to people in need in nearly 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality.