Haiti is struggling to come out of its umpteenth “nightmare” amid the rubble of the earthquake that killed more than 2,000 people

Life stopped for a few seconds in Haiti on August 14. A Magnitude 7.2 earthquake on the Richter scale, it shook part of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, leaving more than 2,000 dead and again causing a “nightmare” What, as humanitarian organizations point out, it will not be solved without international help.

“I felt the tremor and I ran because I did not understand what was happening,” said Germine, 10, who gives voice to the 540,000 children who suffered the consequences of the tremors in one way or another. of another. While she had not yet left the house, debris was already starting to fall on her and she was only able to get up when her mother returned from the market, when she located her with various traumas.

His testimony, collected by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), serves to personalize the toll of a tragedy that has claimed approximately 1.2 million lives. The organization estimates that 650,000 people are in need of humanitarian aid, including 260,000 children, and stresses that it is “urgent” to meet basic needs, starting with having a roof to sleep on.

Juan Haro, a spokesperson for UNICEF, visited some of the affected areas and testified. “The first thing they ask of us is a tarp, something to sleep under”, he explains, in an interview with Europa Press in which he recalls that the region is in the middle of the hurricane season, cyclone ‘Grace’ has wreaked havoc in areas that had already suffered the earthquake.

Haro saw a country in ruins, with “devastated towns to the left and right of the road,” and there are still areas that remain virtually inaccessible. Unlike what happened in the 2010 earthquake, where more than 300,000 people died, this time the tremors mainly affected rural and scattered areas.

“Yesterday we met a mother who had lost her 18 month old child because the house had fallen on her”, like Haro, who saw with his own eyes “the gaze of traumatized, depressed people”, so they lived and what maybe to come.

The the panorama is “sad”, almost “apocalyptic”, but humanitarian agencies have been set up to serve not only those who have lost everything, there are about 50,000 houses completely destroyed, but to deal with emergencies that may arise. “The needs are enormous and they are more than it seems”, underlines the spokesperson.

Diseases such as cholera, malaria or diarrhea are recurrent in this type of context., especially when “it continues to rain every two or three days”, but Hurtado points out that there are hospitals and schools badly damaged or directly destroyed. UNICEF is working to distribute basic medical supplies and equipment, as well as to carry out a “time trial” of educational infrastructure before the theoretical start of the school year.

Insecurity, which was rife before the emergency, also threatens to increase, and children excluded from the education system could fall into the hands of gangs. In fact, Haro explains that some of these groups control the routes humanitarian aid must take to disaster areas.

EMERGENCY EMERGENCY

Haiti’s recent history revolves around need and tragedy. The UN estimates that 4.4 million citizens, or nearly 40% of the population, suffer from food insecurity and 217,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition.And the assassination in July of President Jovenel Moise does not contribute to the fact that in the political field there is not even a minimum of stability.

Haro praised the “strength and resilience” of a population which “began to remove stones by hand and with a shovel”, in an attempt to “start over and try to recover from this nightmare” . At the same time, however, he recognizes that “strength has a limit and human dignity also has a limit”.

UNICEF initially requested $ 15 million to meet urgent needs, but on Friday raised the figure to $ 73.3 million. So far, you have received less than 1% of this amount.

Haro admits that no one is “prepared” for scenarios like Haiti, despite the fact that in this country there is already previous experience in responding to earthquakes and that humanitarian agencies are particularly mobilized. For this reason, he asks “that people continue to help”, because “more is needed”, with a clear message to the international community.

In this sense, he recognizes that the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan “the tragedy of Haiti is forgotten”, further from political and media concerns. Unsurprisingly, the earthquake occurred just a day before the Taliban took control of Kabul and triggered the massive wave of international evacuations from the airport in the Afghan capital.

Now that “all eyes” seem to be on Afghanistan, UNICEF insists that the reconstruction of Haiti “will not be done in a few weeks or months, it will take years”. “We can no longer forget Haiti once again,” warns his spokesperson.

(with EP information)

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