IoS Appeal: Hope in ruins - Haiti two years after the quake
For a country that this week will mark two years since it was ripped apart by an earthquake of magnitude 7.0, Haiti has all the hallmarks of a place in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. More than half a million people are still living in squalid camps, vulnerable to attack and disease; around 200 people are diagnosed with cholera ever day and, according to the UN, half of the rubble left from destroyed buildings has yet to be cleared.
Inside the camps, sexual violence and other serious crime continues to be a problem. The tightly packed temporary settlements are hard to police, and a flimsy tarpaulin or tent wall offers little protection from intruders, who need little more than a shaving razor to break in. Conditions are so desperate that many will go to any lengths to seek a better life. Last week 128 Haitians were returned home after being found by the coast guard attempting to flee to the US aboard a sailing boat. The failed escape is one of many recent attempts, the most deadly of which took place last month, when 38 migrants died in a shipwreck off the coast of Cuba. The remaining 90 were sent home.
The international community has already given more than £1.5bn in humanitarian aid in response to the quake, though this is barely half of the nearly £3bn pledged in the immediate wake of the disaster. Despite what has already been invested, witnesses describe Haiti as looking more like a country two months on from a natural disaster than two years.
Perhaps the biggest setback to progress was the cholera epidemic – a plague that has itself been blamed on foreign intervention. Cases of cholera had not been reported in Haiti for nearly a century before the outbreak in October 2010. Now nearly 7,000 people have died from the disease in an epidemic that is one of the world's worst in recent history. The arrival of the highly infectious diarrhoeal disease has been widely attributed to a camp of United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal, and lawyers representing victims are now demanding that the UN pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/appeals/ios-appeal/ios-appeal-hope-in-ruins--haiti-two-years-after-the-quake-6286755.html