PREVIEW: Haiti's quake: A shudder, silence, and a year of catastrophe

By Michael Kieffer Jan 9, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Port-au-Prince - The images and the noises of the January 12, 2010 Haitian earthquake keep coming back to those who experienced them, whether they are awake or asleep.

They remember a loud blast, then absolute stillness. Within just a few seconds, the capital Port-au-Prince was destroyed.

'There was a noise as if at war,' recalls former Haitian soldier Fritz Charlottin, 61, who is now unemployed.

At the time of the quake, Charlottin was at home with his second wife and youngest daughter, one year old at the time. At first he thought the authorities were moving against demonstrators, but then he realised the noise came from the walls, which shook for seconds.

Charlottin could see nothing, dust filled the air. Miraculously, his building withstood the disaster - 'Thank God,' he says.

The quake, measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, killed more than 230,000 people and launched a catastrophic year for the poorest country in the Americas.

Ministries, schools, hotels, supermarkets, office buildings, homes and even the cathedral collapsed. Thousands were buried in the rubble of the capital and the nearby cities of Leogane, Petit-Goave and Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast.

Some 300,000 people were injured. Many had limbs amputated. More than 1 million were left homeless.

Carlos, 33, lives with his grandmother at a camp for quake victims opposite the ruins of the presidential palace. He sells naive paintings of Haiti to earn a little cash. Carlos used to work with computers, but his home near the palace collapsed in the quake. He says there are 2,800 people in his camp alone. His own tent holds little beyond a mattress.

The bodies of those who died were loaded onto trucks and driven outside the city, most destined for mass graves, uncounted and unidentified. The death toll remains an estimation.

Twelve months later there is still no sign of state-directed reconstruction. Most of the rubble was taken out of the city and dumped along access roads, sometimes even with corpses among the debris. Some rubble was used to fill up lowlands, as foundations for the tent cities for those left homeless.

The international community rushed to help. The presidential palace and many ministries had been destroyed, many employees were dead, the government was non-functional.

Even the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), stationed in the country since 2004, lost its leadership and more than 100 soldiers and employees.

The quake was just the beginning of a catastrophic year for Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the relatively wealthier Dominican Republic. A cholera epidemic, fuelled by the lack of clean water, has claimed more than 3,400 lives since November. And the country is mired in political dispute after elections that had held hope of pointing the country in a new direction.

Aid money has been slow. The international community supplied just 63.6 per cent of what it pledged - or 1.28 billion dollars, the United Nations and World Bank said in recent days.

'For reconstruction we need a democratically-legitimized government,' MINUSTAH chief Edmond Mulet says whenever he gets the chance.

In order to have that, the country needs among others to clear up fraud allegations surrounding the November 28 presidential elections. Initial results were challenged, and the Organization of American States is conducting a recount. The top two vote-getters will vie in the run-off, which has been postponed until later in the year.

So far there are only the piecemeal projects of aid organizations to reconstruct schools or children's homes, while several new supermarkets have been built.

Some small, wooden houses are springing up. Many people have refashioned fragile structures from the debris of their former homes. Blue, white and grey tents perch atop precarious flat roofs.

The year has left Haiti looking even more vulnerable and powerless. More than 1 million people live in camps, and millions more live in slums.

'There was also poverty in our country before (the quake),' says popular singer Michel Martelly, a presidential candidate who has challenged the election results after coming in third, and not second as had been expected from exit polls. 'Today, however, there is misery. We are lost as a nation.'

Haiti was at least lucky in one respect: it was spared the hurricanes and heavy rains that usually plague the Caribbean nation.

But the cholera adds one more hurdle to daily life in Haiti.

The quake left Yvonne to take care of her young grandson, Bobo. The 2-year-old boy's father had left him even before the disaster. His mother died in the quake.

Yvonne talked to the German Press Agency while watching Bobo romp around the flattened square in front of Port-au-Prince's quake- levelled cathedral, squealing with pleasure as if there were not a care in the world.

Yvonne's greatest concern these days is how to get enough money to buy clean water for the toddler.

Read more about Haiti Quakes