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