Reader’s Digest Canada – September 2019

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON of January 12, 2010,

an earthquake struck Haiti near the town

of Léogâne, 25 kilometres outside the

country’s already destitute capital, Port-

au-Prince. As many as 300,000 people

were killed, another 300,000 injured and

1.5 million made homeless. The carnage

was caused not just by the earthquake,

which was 7.0 on the Richter scale, but

also by decades of neglect and poverty.

Haiti was then—and remains—the

poorest country in the western hemi-

sphere, a place where one-third of

children were malnourished and half

never attended school. People had

built concrete homes in the capital’s

valleys and hillsides with cheap mater-

ial and no oversight. Now those build-

ings killed them.

An hour after the initial undulating

tremor, night fell over the country like

a blackout blind, and locals relied on

the lights from their cellphones while

desperately clawing by hand through

the rubble for their loved ones.

International help flew into the

Dominican Republic, on the other side

of the island, and then drove across the

border. What started as a trickle became

a flood, and Haiti soon became the

recipient of an enormous international

aid effort—something that would in

time reveal itself to be a mixed bless-

ing. But in those first fragile days after (PR

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reader’s digest

92 september 2019