Posted on
2/22/2010 9:55:42 AM
She was a smiling little earthquake victim in braids and a pretty white dress, happily chirping, "Bonjour."
Minutes later, Army Maj. Pascale Guirand, a Haitian-born, Queens-raised nurse practitioner from an elite Army team, was working to save 2-year-old Gislaine's precious life.
Guirand's team was in the squalid, rain-drenched Marrassa homeless camp - shaggy hovels of bedsheets and tarps draped over twigs in a couple of swamped, garbage-choked fields near the capital's airport.
The U.S. soldiers were doing a medical and security assessment of conditions when I was greeted nearby by this impoverished princess, who stood barefoot in the mud with her brothers.
Then I heard her deep, phlegm-clogged cough. It stopped me cold.
As a dad with young daughters, I know a bad cough when I hear it. Back home, a trip to the doctor and some antibiotics cure it with little worry. But in Gislaine's dingy tent shanty, that kind of cough can kill as fast as an aftershock.
I grabbed a S
|
Posted on
2/22/2010 9:53:10 AM
Haiti was jolted by another earthquake on Monday. The mild 4.7-magnitude quake occurred 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake occurred at 4:36 a.m. at a depth of 6.2 miles. At this time there are no reports of further damage or deaths to the already devastated island.
Prior to this latest quake, Haitian President Rene Preval said the death toll from last month's 7.0-magnitude quake could rise to 300,000. Officials say current death tolls include the more than 200,000 bodies recovered from the streets, however, many more still lie trapped in the rubble.
If the death toll continues to climb, it would make the quake one of the most lethal disasters in modern history.
Some 1.2 million people in Port-au-Prince alone remain homeless. Another 460,000 people are displaced as many have left the country's capital for the outer provinces.
Currently 1.1 million people are receiving aid through the World Food Program
|
Posted on
2/22/2010 9:50:24 AM
Led by evangelical pastors, several thousand quake victims, some with little more than the clothes they stand in, have thrown up flimsy dwellings of wooden frames draped in cloth or plastic in plots marked out in the dry earth with machetes.
"There's nothing here, it's a desert, but we feel safer," said Jean Oswald Estcyr, as members of his family put up the stick supports that will frame their new home. In the hills around, hundreds more such crude homes are going up.
The shanties look the same as the sprawling crowded tent encampments that cram every space and cranny of the wrecked capital -- except that they are sited several miles (kilometers) outside the city in a parched no-man's land not far from where mass graves hold the bodies of thousands of quake dead.
Haitian President Rene Preval now says the final toll from the catastrophic January 12 quake, one of the most lethal natural disasters in modern history, could reach 300,000.
Delays in delivering humanitarian aid,
|
Posted on
2/22/2010 9:49:07 AM
8
Share
The first downpour of Haiti's rainy season came on Feb. 17, Ash Wednesday, a day when Christians ponder their mortality. Most Haitians are Roman Catholic, but they hardly needed the reminder — not after the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 of them. Marie Chantal, a baker who is living in a vast and squalid shantytown on the Champs de Mars park in downtown Port-au-Prince, says the rain that leaked through her makeshift tent on Wednesday night made her grieve more for the two children she lost in the quake when their house collapsed. To comfort her surviving child, 6-year-old Jean, Chantal wrenched what she could from the wreckage, including her white lace curtains, and hung them in the shack. "But I still can't protect him from the rain," says Chantal, 45. "We were supposed to receive real tents by now. Where are they?"
(See TIME's complete coverage of the Haiti earthquake.)
At his damaged residence overlooking the capital, Haitian Prime Minister Jean
|
Posted on
2/22/2010 9:47:30 AM
The death toll from last month's devastating earthquake in Haiti could jump to 300,000 people, including the bodies buried under collapsed buildings in the capital, Haitian President Rene Preval said on Sunday.
"You have seen the images you are familiar with the pictures. More than 200,000 bodies were collected on the streets without counting those that are still under the rubble," Preval told a meeting of Latin American and Caribbean leaders in Mexico. "We might reach 300,000 people."
That would make Haiti's earthquake one of the most lethal natural disasters in modern history, more than the 200,000 people killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.
The cost of rebuilding the impoverished country after the 7.0-magnitude quake could be as high as $14 billion, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.
Preval's plea for aid will be at the top of the agenda at the regional summit being held near the Mexican resort town of Playa del Carmen.
With 250,000 houses destro
|
Posted on
2/22/2010 9:45:28 AM
Here on the hills above Port-au-Prince, a vision for a very different capital city is taking shape.
In a loft of architectural offices, a map of greater Port-au-Prince promises a reordering of the country's historic capital, overtaken long ago by sprawl and slums and struck last month by a cataclysmic earthquake.
"Expressway" is etched along the city's winding seaboard. "New Housing Area" is written over a swath of undeveloped land far from the detritus of downtown. And "Debris" is written in several spots where it is to be put to constructive use.
Presiding over the map, and over the massive reconstruction effort that will define the country for generations, is a Haitian-born Howard University graduate who serves as Haiti's tourism minister.
Working out of spare space far from his destroyed downtown offices, Patrick Delatour must sell a future for Haiti to his own people and an audience of international donors, who will help fund an urban rebirth starting from virtually
|
Posted on
2/18/2010 10:55:28 AM
The top U.S. trade official urged clothing manufacturers and retailers on Tuesday to help rebuild Haiti by importing 1 percent of their apparel production from the earthquake-ravaged country.
"One percent may seem small, but it means new jobs and new opportunities for the Haitian people who so desperately need forward-looking solutions in the wake of January's devastating earthquake," U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a statement.
Kirk and officials from Gap Inc, Hanesbrands and the U.S. Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel announced the new initiative in Las Vegas at a fashion and apparel industry conference.
Companies representing more than $195 billion in U.S. consumer clothing sales were expected to attend the industry meeting, Kirk's office said.
"USA-ITA will work with our member companies who already source in Haiti, and will encourage our members who are new to Haiti to participate in the Plus One initiative," the group's president, Julia Hughes
|