Sauvah Anderson (left corner) who studies welding at the training centre in Fonds Parisien which Trocaire constructed using donations from the Irish public. And Saul Darbouze (right corner) at his new home, which was funded by donations to Trocaire, at Villa Rosa in Port au Prince.
Two years after Haiti’s earthquake, Trócaire continues its work there, writes Eoghan Rice
In the labyrinth of narrow laneways that cut through Villa Rosa, Saul Darbouze leads us to the place he calls home. The path changes from concrete to mud as we enter further into this tangled web of side-streets and alleyways.
Eventually we arrive at our destination, a small white building fronted by a porch on which Saul’s three dogs sleep. Home sweet home.
Saul is still settling in. His memories are still raw of his old house, which stood on the same spot, and of his wife who died when it crumbled to the ground.
They had raised a family there together but when the earth shook on January 12, 2010, the home they had worked so hard to build crashed to the ground, destroying everything.
As a driver for his local parish, Saul was on the road when the earthquake struck.
”I was driving the car when it started to shake,” he recalls. ”The nuns who were in the car asked me, ‘what are you doing?’ and I said ‘it’s not me, it’s the ground’. I had to leave the car and walk home. I was very worried for my family. When I got home, everything was destroyed.”
Homeless
Homeless and grieving, Saul was forced to build a shack out of corrugated iron to live in. It was a pitiful existence, in no way suitable for a man of 74 years of age.
”It was a very difficult life,” he says in his understating way.
After 11 months in the shack, Saul was thrown a lifeline by people in Ireland. Through donations to Trócaire, a new house was built for Saul, allowing him to recover and get his life back on track.
He looks around at the devastation that is still evident in the Villa Rosa district of Port au Prince and he says he feels ”very lucky” to have a permanent roof over his head.
He knows that in Haiti even something as basic as shelter cannot be taken for granted.
”People should have access to the minimum they need to survive,” he says. ”I am lucky because I can survive but many others cannot. People should be able to live with respect.”
Stories such as Saul’s can be heard from countless voices throughout Haiti. All across this stunning land, people will tell you their tale — of how many family members they lost, of how their home was destroyed, of how they have struggled for survival ever since that terrible afternoon two years ago.
The Haiti earthquake was one of those disasters so big that it was almost too difficult to comprehend. At 4.53pm on that afternoon in January, people were going about their daily routine.
By 4.54pm everything had changed. Entire cities brought to the ground, 250,000 bodies lying lifeless under the rubble.
Response
The earthquake lasted just 33 seconds but during that time, Haitians died at the rate of up to 7,500 per second. Thirty-three seconds that changed a country forever.
People in Ireland opened their hearts to Haiti, donating €7.58m to fund Trócaire’s relief operation. Half of this money was donated at parish collections all over Ireland.
The response was enormous, and so too was the relief operation.
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Trócaire used donations to provide food for 1.5 million people, healthcare to 1 million people and shelter to 160,000 people.
In the days and weeks that followed the earthquake, Irish donations were used to keep people alive.
Having provided short-term emergency relief for people left homeless by the earthquake, we have now moved into long-term projects aimed at rebuilding Haiti and bringing real change to people’s lives.
Two hours drive east of Port au Prince, Sauvah Anderson is preparing to do his bit to help with the reconstruction.
Sauvah was trapped for two hours underneath the rubble of his school when it collapsed during the earthquake. Fortunately for him, he was on the top floor of the building when it collapsed — most of the pupils in the classrooms below were killed. He was rescued and left Port au Prince to return to his home town of Fonds Parisien, where Trócaire had teamed-up with the Carmelite Sisters to build a training centre and school for almost 300 young people.
The centre, funded entirely by Trócaire, equips the students with skills needed in the reconstruction of Haiti, including welding and masonry.
Sauvah is hoping to use his new skills to help the country.
”I would like to do this type of work and stay in this area,” he says. ”I am Haitian so I need to participate in the reconstruction. It is an obligation. You can’t wait for others — if you don’t do it yourself nothing will get done.”
Normality
Across Haiti, there are thousands of people such as Saul and Sauvah; people who have been given hope through housing, education, health and training programmes funded by Irish donations.
Through these long-term programmes, Haiti is beginning to see glimpses of light. It is beginning to recover — millions of tonnes of rubble have been cleared from the streets, dangerously damaged buildings have been demolished, and while 500,000 remain living in tents that figure is half of what it was this time last year.
Normality is returning to people’s lives. The difficulty is that what is considered ‘normal’ should not be acceptable.
This was a country of dehumanising poverty before the earthquake struck. It is not enough to merely return Haitians back to the level of poverty they were at before January 12, 2010.
It took centuries of conflict, misrule and exploitation to make Haiti the way it was and that cannot be reversed in just two years.
We must dig deep into the rubble of that tragedy and build a new Haiti. Only by working with the Haitian people over time can we begin to reverse the impact of generations of abandonment and exploitation.
The donations received for Haiti after the earthquake have made a massive difference. It has saved lives. Our task now is to let people live.
Eoghan Rice is humanitarian communications officer with Trócaire.