Seven months later
Posted on Aug 26, 2010
Dr. Mark Hyman arrived in Haiti shortly after the January earthquake, and worked alongside PIH staff to help provide medical care to survivors. Seven months later, he returned and filed the following report. Read his full essay in The Huffington Post.
 | |
Mark Hyman |
Seven months after the January 12, 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, I returned for the third time. This time, not to help the wounded, to perform surgeries, but to help facilitate further funding for the University Hospital and to feel and see with my own eyes what changed, what hasn't and what needs to. The world has moved on to the next disaster, from the BP Gulf Oil Spill to the floods in Pakistan, but the memories of that first week after the quake -- the smells, the loss, the destruction, the extraordinary heart of the Haitian people -- worked its way under my skin. It is a part of me. It is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere where 55 percent of the population earns less the $1.25 a day and 58 percent of children are under-nourished, and it is not rebounding. Though there is less rubble in the roads and pockets of rebuilding have started, still today 1.6 million people are homeless and still in the tent camps (often made from sheets and sticks) -- or living on the median of a highway in Carrefour, doused in exhaust and dirt and hoping to survive each night as they sleep with cars flying by, deprived of all human dignity and decency as they bathe and defecate in view of everyone.
The night Wyclef Jean was disqualified from running for president (he has since petitioned to change the rules), a young energized crowd gathered outside the restaurant where they waited expectantly for the news. Long convoys of heavily armed UN peacekeeping forces in armored trucks patrolled the streets ready for riots that never came. As we quickly drove past the crowd, I asked Clairveux, our young driver, what he thought of the upcoming election in November. "Education is the only thing that will lift up the people," Clairveux said. Most of the population in Haiti, where the life expectancy is 55, is under 30. They are the future of Haiti. Yet 85 percent of the education in primary and secondary schools is expensive and private.
