As Haitians mark the anniversary on Wednesday of the earthquake that flattened much of the capital Port-au-Prince, hopes that a better nation could rise from the rubble have given way to a crushing sense of bitterness and despair.

Reconstruction work has barely begun despite billions of dollars in pledged aid, profiteering by Haiti’s tiny and notoriously corrupt elite has reached epic proportions, and a national cholera epidemic has added to the misery of a country where the magnitude 7 quake killed about 250,000 people and left more than a million homeless.

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, was in bad shape before the quake. But promises from the international community to “build Haiti back better” now ring hollow to many of the country’s most vulnerable.

Banks, schools and government offices were ordered closed for the anniversary and a national day of mourning was to kick off with a service offered by the papal envoy to Haiti at the quake-shattered remains of the National Cathedral in downtown Port-au-Prince.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the special U.N. envoy for Haiti who heads its main disaster management body, was due to attend the service along with a host of officials including outgoing Haitian President Rene Preval.

Clinton, in an interview with NBC News’ Mara Schiavocampo, said he was not satisfied with the rate of progress, but remained optimistic that this would change.

“Everyday there’s hope and there’s frustration, but I’d say the hope still outweighs the frustration,” he said. “I think there has been some real progress. We got 60 percent of the pledges for the first year distributed.”

Schiavocampo, noting that some of the additions to the tent camps to make them more livable — such as concrete structures and latrines — also made them easier to rely on as permanent housing, asked Clinton if he expects them to still be in use in the next several years.

“If they’re here in five years, I’ll be really diasppointed,” responded Clinton, who co-chairs the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission with Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. “But I have to tell you, I didn’t think we’d get a third of the people out in a year because we knew couldn’t do any comprehensive block-by-block building.”

Clinton continued, saying that those who have left the camps were able to clear rubble from

their existing homes, or get into temporary housing.

“So, where actually that’s the one area where there are more people out of those camps than what I thought would be, but I want to really see a lot of rapid movement.”

‘Continuing spirit’ of Haitians
He said between 40 to 60 exhibitors were expected at a housing expo in spring and the Haitian government would then choose which of them were eligible for aid.

“Then I’ll be surprised if we don’t really start going to town on the housing,” Clinton said. “I think you’ll see big time movement and there’ll be employment and there’ll be new businesses as a result of it. So, we’ll do better on housing this year.”

He said he was “most encouraged by the fact that I can’t find any donor who has given up,” but also by the the “continuing spirit of the people of Haiti.”

Clinton has faced pointed criticism for painfully slow progress in relief and rebuilding efforts so far. He acknowledged disappointment with the commission’s work in remarks to foreign reporters on Tuesday.

“Nobody’s been more frustrated than I am that we haven’t done more,” he said.

In his interview with Schiavocampo, Clinton said he was asked “a lot” by donors about what their money had been spent on.

“If someone wants to know how was their money spent and was it well spent, how do you answer that question?” he said. “Well, I think first of all, to answer how it was spent, I have to know to whom they gave it.

“But, for example, anyone who gave me money … I just raised for about three days $15 million  and we spent 85 percent of it and I can tell you how every penny of it was spent,” he added.

In Champs Mars, Port-au-Prince’s central plaza where thousands of families made homeless by the quake live in a sweltering tent city, residents said the official ceremonies and renewed pledges of aid and progress for Haiti from foreign officials, were like something taking place in another world.

Hundreds of thousands are still living in such camps and are falling victim to the cholera that has already taken some 3,750 lives since mid-October.

Political impasse
A political impasse since a disputed presidential election on November 28 has fueled further instability in the Caribbean country.

“I hear about aid on TV but us in Champs Mars, we’ve never seen it. We have no way to get out,” said 55-year-old Ginelle Pierre Louis.

“The diplomats pass through in the air, in helicopters, but they never come through here on the ground,” said Hyacinthe Mintha, 56, a resident of Champs Mars, which overlooks the heavily damaged presidential palace.

Mintha’s daughter, Hyacinthe Benita, 39, lives in a metal and wood shack with a frayed tarp roof and a thin pallet as the only bed for herself and her four children.

“We are still here in misery,” she said of the quake anniversary. “I hope this year brings serious change because 2010 was hell for us,” she added.

“The president’s right over there,” said Benita, gesturing toward the annex where Preval, who is deeply unpopular, works behind the presidential palace. “He’s never done anything for us, he’s never come to see us at all. They look at us like animals,” she said.

The new chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said Tuesday that real recovery and development in Haiti depended on accountability and strong leadership by the Caribbean country’s government.

“Leadership that is not there,” she said after returning to Miami International Airport. “It will be crucial, critical, necessary for Haiti’s next leader to take every step necessary to institute the needed changes to bring transparency, trust and credibility back to this nation.”

Ros-Lehtinen said future U.S. and international support for Haiti depended on concrete eff orts to curb corruption and graft. The congresswoman said she planned to reintroduce legislati on to increase oversight of U.S. funding to Haiti.

Cheryl Mills, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, has said the U.S. could support throwing out the disputed results of Haiti’s first-round presidential election in November, if that’s what is proposed by a 12-member election team from the Organization of American States.

Fraudulent ballots
A draft copy of the OAS report on the election, obtained by The Associated Press, said the disputed vote should neither be thrown out entirely nor recounted.

But it said enough fraudulent or improper ballots should be invalidated to drop ruling-party candidate Jude Celestin into third place and out of the second-round runoff.

Denis O’Brien, a supporter of Bill Clinton and chairman of the Irish-owned cell phone company Digicel that is Haiti’s biggest foreign investor, told Reuters in an interview this week that the former U.S. leader had a solid understanding of what needs to be done to get Haiti back on its feet.

But one of his big problems, according to O’Brien, is that most members of Haiti’s ruling class have done little to help, seeking only to profit on the back of their nation’s catastrophe.

“There’s very few of the elite families that are actually doing a lot for Haiti,” O’Brien said.

“They’re making massive profits on the importation of goods, products, services, everything … Profiteering at a major scale is going on here,” he added.

Jimmy Jean-Louis, a Haitian-born actor and performer who now lives in Los Angeles but has visited his homeland frequently since the quake, said the ruling class had always benefited from chaos and mayhem in Haiti.

“The more destabilization there is, unfortunately, the more money the elite makes,” he said.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): PURECASHMAGAZINE, OUTBLUSH

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) — It should be possible to keep an outbreak of cholera out of Haiti’s capital, but the potentially deadly disease remains a major risk, an international aid worker told CNN on Monday.

“I think we’ll be able to contain it fairly well, but it is a risk, it is a major risk,” said Jason Erb, deputy country director for the International Medical Corps.

The fast-moving outbreak has claimed at least 253 lives on the impoverished island nation, which has yet to recover from January’s massive earthquake. Another 3,015 cases have been reported, according to Haiti’s Health Ministry.

Even if the disease can be kept out of the capital, Port-au-Prince, it remains a serious risk in the tent camps that remain home to tens of thousands of earthquake survivors, Erb warned.

“It’s a danger because the camps are so crowded and so unhygienic,” he said on CNN’s “American Morning.”

Aid workers are trying to educate people about the importance of hand-washing and clean water in preventing the spread of cholera, he said.

A small number of cases have been reported in Port-au-Prince, but Erb said they seem to be the result of people carrying the disease from the camps — not from contaminated water in the capital.

And he cautioned against panic.

“You have to have quite a few people to contaminate a body of water,” he said. “It’s not just going to be one or two cases. That’s going to be quite controllable. It’s not good … but it’s not going to lead to a massive outbreak.”

There is “an awful lot of monitoring” for the disease, he said, and “cases generally don’t go unnoticed.”

Five patients in Port-au-Prince were infected north of the city in Artibonite, said Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti.

They traveled to the nation’s main city, where health officials discovered them to be infected within the incubation period, she said.

The five have been isolated and are receiving treatment, she said.

Meanwhile, officials are stepping up sanitation efforts and setting up quarantine areas in Port-au-Prince. Authorities are bracing themselves for a possible larger outbreak nationwide.

“I think the only responsible thing we can do at the moment is prepare and plan for the worst-case scenario,” Wall said.

Wall said aid organizations are working on constructing facilities to treat patients and sending more doctors to the affected areas.

“We’re all right for supplies … but we’re short on medical personnel,” she said.

The cholera outbreak comes after recent heavy rains caused the banks of the Artibonite River to overflow and flood the area.

The river was dammed in 1956 to create Lac de Peligre and is Haiti’s dominant drainage system.

On Friday, officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Agency for International Development discussed efforts on a containment strategy for the outbreak.

The CDC will send an 11-member team to Haiti over the next few days to find out which antibiotics will be most effective in treating the outbreak.

USAID will provide supplies needed to set up treatment centers.

The group already has 300,000 oral re-hydration kits in position and is distributing water purification kits in affected areas.

Cholera is caused by a bacterial infection of the intestines and, in severe cases, is characterized by diarrhea, vomiting and leg cramps, according to the CDC. In such cases, rapid loss of body fluids can lead to dehydration and shock.

“Without treatment, death can occur within hours,” the agency says.

A person can get cholera by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the bacteria.

During epidemics, the source of the contamination is often the feces of an infected person, and infections can spread rapidly in areas where there is poor sewage treatment and a lack of clean drinking water.

All the reported cases in the Lower Artibonite involve severe diarrhea and vomiting, Wall said.

Ian Rawson, director of Hospital Albert Schweitzer Haiti near Verrettes, said patients began showing choleralike symptoms October 16.

The pace picked up significantly Tuesday and beyond, though he said the situation was under control Friday at his 80-bed facility about 16 miles east of St. Marc.

“So far, we’ve been able to manage it,” Rawson said, noting that new patients were now coming in via pickups about every 10 minutes.

Temperatures in the mid-90s exacerbated the dual concerns about dehydration and people contracting cholera by drinking tainted water.

People with buckets lined roadsides in and around villages, hoping that passers-by might have clean water, said Eric Lotz, Haiti’s national director for the nonprofit Operation Blessing.

The U.N. mission in Haiti credited access to clean water and free medical facilities for preventing feared outbreaks of cholera and tuberculosis.

Source (article): CNN

Source (pictures): PRESSTV, ONLINE.WORLDMAG, 101NEWS

SAN BERNARDO, Chile - The Desarmes family left their native Haiti two weeks after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, joining the eldest son in Chile for what seemed a refuge from the fear and chaos of Port-au-Prince.

Their sense of security lasted barely a month. It was shattered at 3:43 a.m. Saturday when one of the most powerful quakes on record shook a swath of Chile.

All the Desarmes’ immediate family survived both quakes. But twice cursed, the family now sleeps in the garden of a home that the eldest son, Pierre Desarmes, found for them just south of the Chilean capital of Santiago. They fear yet another temblor will strike.

“I left my country and came here because of an earthquake,” Seraphin Philomene, a 21-year-old student and cousin of Desarmes, said Wednesday. “And here, the same thing!”

“My God, I left my country and I didn’t die, but I’m going to die here!”

Pierre Desarmes, 34, managed to get his family out of Haiti thanks to personal contacts at the Chilean Embassy in Port-au-Prince and the Chilean armed forces. Nine members of his family — his parents, two brothers and their families, and three cousins — arrived in Santiago on a Chilean air force plane Jan. 23.

Desarmes, the lead singer of a popular Haitian reggaeton band in Chile, still gets choked up when he recalls seeing his family for the first time stepping off the plane.

“I saw them but I didn’t believe it. I said, ‘My God, they’re here.’ It was a very difficult moment,” he said, speaking in French in the garden of the house the family now calls home.

“Each time I think about it, I get sad, because I realize I was able to do this because I was here. But there are so many people who are there and I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”

Deeply unsettled
His relatives had to leave Haiti with only hours’ notice, receiving instructions on where to go via cell phone text messages from a relative in the United States who was in contact with Desarmes in Santiago. Philomene didn’t even have time to pack, dashing to the Chilean Embassy when she received word the family had been cleared to fly out.

Saturday’s earthquake has made a difficult transition even more traumatic.

“When the aftershocks come, they refuse to stay in the house,” Desarmes said, sipping a Coke at a table in the garden, his relatives sitting nearby.

“I have to talk to them all day long telling them: ‘There are no problems, it’s a country that’s prepared for earthquakes, it’ll pass, it’s not so bad.’ But they don’t hear me. Psychologically for them, they’re still really affected by it.”

Desarmes’ brother, Stanley Desarmes, 32, is deeply unsettled. The father of a 2-year-old girl, Nelia, who plays in the yard, he worries for his family’s safety and is thinking about uprooting them again to move somewhere with less danger of earthquakes.

“I don’t know what I can do, but staying isn’t possible,” he said. “I could die and I could lose my family. I have to leave. I don’t know where, I don’t know how. But I don’t want to die with my family here.”

Philomene, his cousin, plans to stay, hoping to bring the rest of her family to Chile. She was the only member of her immediate family to get out because she was living with the Desarmes in the Haitian capital to finish her studies. Her mother, father, two sisters and a brother are still in Cap-Haitien, a town in northern Haiti about 90 miles from the capital.

“I’ve had no news from them,” she said, choking up.

‘God is looking out for us’
Reached late Wednesday by The Associated Press in Cap-Haitien, Philomene’s father, Luigene Philomene, was elated at the news that his daughter was safe. He said he hadn’t heard from her since before Chile’s earthquake and had been trying to reach relatives in Port-au-Prince for an update.

The elder Philomene said when he heard that his daughter had been in the Chile earthquake he thought of a Haitian saying that loosely translates as “we saved her from the river and she ended up in the sea.” Now he feels she has divine protection and the 43-year-old said he would eagerly join his daughter in South America if he could.

“God is looking for out for us,” he said. “Our family didn’t die in Haiti so they aren’t going to die in Chile either.”

Francius Pierre, a cousin of Seraphin’s in Port-au-Prince, had already learned from a brother that his relatives in Chile survived. Pierre, a university student who injured his knee in the Haitian quake, said Seraphin and his other relatives moved from Haiti for safety.

“If they knew something like this could happen again they never would have gone,” he said.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): BAHAMASLOCAL, DAILYMAIL

SANTIAGO, Chile - A massive magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, killing at least 85 people, triggering a tsunami and damaging buildings more than 200 miles away.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a “state of catastrophe”.

At least 23 aftershocks were reported, including one registering at 6.9 on the Richter scale.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck 56 miles northeast of the city of Concepcion at a depth of 22 miles at 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. ET).

Jessica Sigala, a geophysicist with the USGS told NBC News that the quake released 500 times more energy than the than the one that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12. The quake was felt in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is located more than 800 miles away.

Tsunami warnings were issued over a wide area, including Hawaii, South America, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, Russia and many Pacific islands.

NBC station KNHL reported that the first tsunami wave was expected to reach Hawaii’s coastline at 11:19 a.m. local time (4:19 p.m. ET). It warned that “urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property.”

Giant wave
Reuters reported that a tsunami caused by the quake caused “serious damage” to Chile’s sparsely populated Juan Fernández Islands. Citing local police, CNN reported that the islands had been hit by a 40-meter (131-foot) wave.

Bachelet, the country’s president, urged people to stay calm. She told Reuters that 85 deaths had been confirmed.

Edmundo Perez Yoma, the interior minister, warned the death toll “will continue rising.”

An Associated Press Television News cameraman said some buildings collapsed in the capital Santiago, which lies about 200 miles north of the epicenter.

In the moments after the quake, people streamed onto the streets of the capital, hugging each other and crying.

Jen Ross, a journalist based in Santiago, told NBC’s TODAY that she felt “three minutes of shaking”.

Broadcaster TVN reported that several hospitals had suffered structural damage and were being evacuated.

‘It’s like the end of the world’
“Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it’s like the end of the world,” one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings.

Simon Shalders, who lives in Santiago, told Sky News: “There was a lot of movement. The houses were really shaking, walls were moving backwards and forwards, and doors were swinging open.

“Santiago has got a history of earthquakes and basically there’s not a lot of old construction in Santiago because of these earthquakes.

“The new buildings in Santiago are designed to withstand fairly strong quakes and they probably held up pretty well.”

There were blackouts in parts of Santiago and communications were still down in the area closest to the epicenter.

Santiago resident Leo Perioto told CNN that “windows were wobbling a lot” in his six-story building.

“The whole building was shaking,” he added. “We could feel the walls moving from side to side.”

An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over can cause “tremendous damage,” the USGS said. The quake that devastated Port-au-Prince on January 12 was rated magnitude 7.0.

‘Threat to more distant coasts’
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the Chile quake generated a tsunami that may have been destructive along the coast near the epicenter “and could also be a threat to more distant coasts.”

According to a 2002 census, Concepcion is one of the largest cities in Chile with a population of around 670,000.

In 1960, Chile was hit by the world’s biggest earthquake since records dating back to 1900.

The 9.5 magnitude quake devastated the south-central city of Valdivia, killing 1,655 people and sending a tsunami which battered Easter Island 2,300 miles off Chile’s Pacific seaboard and continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - France’s national anthem blared across the tarmac on Wednesday as Nicolas Sarkozy made the first visit ever by a French president to Haiti, once his nation’s richest colony — offering aid to a country prostrate after a catastrophic earthquake.

Sarkozy promised $370 million over two years to support Haiti during its reconstruction and announced France’s decision to forgive Haiti of its $76 million in debt.

Moments earlier, Haitian President Rene Preval greeted the French president as a brass band played the Marseillaise to start a quick tour of the earthquake ravaged capital and a French field hospital.

Some Haitians are welcoming France’s new interest in their nation as a counterbalance to the United States, which has sent troops there three times in the past 16 years. But Sarkozy’s visit is also reviving bitter memories of the crippling costs of Haiti’s 1804 independence.

A third of the population was killed in an uprising against exceptionally brutal slavery, an international embargo was imposed to deter slave revolts elsewhere and 90 million pieces of gold were demanded by Paris from the world’s first black republic.

The debt hobbled Haiti, it seemed for life.

A country plagued by natural and unnatural calamities was desperately poor and mismanaged even before a magnitude-7 earthquake smashed up the capital Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, killing more than 200,000 people and leaving more than a million homeless.

New era for relations?
Haitian politicians this week diplomatically skirted the question of French reparations — a demand put to Paris by ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. That suggests Sarkozy’s four-hour visit could herald a new era.

French officials say Sarkozy will announce details of “a French plan for the reconstruction of Haiti” — if Haitian officials agree. It differs little from proposals from Haitian, U.S. and U.N. officials to decentralize power away from the devastated capital and boost agriculture and tourism.

The trip brings Sarkozy to an island where, French officials acknowledge, fascination with things French duels with strong, lingering resentments.

One official close to the French presidency, briefing reporters in Paris on condition of anonymity, hinted that France is not deaf to calls for reparations, calling Sarkozy’s visit “an occasion to show that France is mobilizing to give Haitians control of their destiny and pay past debts.”

France has already said it was canceling all of Haiti’s 56 million euro ( about $77 million) debt to Paris.

Repaying France for ‘lost property’
In 1825, crippled by the U.S.-led international embargo that was enforced by French warships, Haiti agreed to pay France 150 million francs in compensation for the lost “property” — including slaves — of French plantation owners.

By comparison, France sold the United States its immensely larger Louisiana Territory in 1803 for just 60 million francs. The amount for Haiti was later lowered to 90 million gold francs.

Haiti did not finish paying the debilitating debt — which was swollen by massive interest payments to French and American banks — until 1947.

But Haiti’s wealth already was destroyed. It had been the world’s richest colony, providing half the globe’s sugar and other exports including coffee, cotton, hardwood and indigo that exceeded the value of everything produced in the United States in 1788.

By the early 1780s, half of Haiti’s forests were gone, leading to the devastating erosion and extreme poverty that bedevils the country today.

France’s other former colonies in the region — Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Martin, St. Barts and Guiana (in South America) — all have voted to remain part of France and send legislators to the French parliament.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): ENGLISH.PEOPLE, ENJOYFRANCE