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Haiti rising out of the ashes: 2 years after the quake
Fabien Jean-Baptiste recalled when the terrible events of January 12, 2010. She said she had just stepped out of her home to run errands at a market when the earth heaved at 4:53 p.m. Her six children had stayed home, and she thought fearfully that there was no way they could have survived and she assumed they were dead.
They weren’t.
“I said, ‘God is in the sky, thank you,'” Jean-Baptiste, 35, said between her morning prayers on the cracked sidewalk outside the church.
The street vendor lost two siblings to the quake, but took solace that her children survived.
“God gave me the grace. I’m here,” Jean-Baptiste said. “I still have my children.”
Haiti’s government, Western embassies and foreign charity groups were targeted by criticism as a mobile wake drew several dozen protesters and wound through downtown Port-au-Prince, one of the hardest-hit areas in the quake.
Carrying signs that called the government “imported,” the demonstrators focused on the need to house the 500,000 people still without homes.
“We’re asking for the state to give us good homes because we really don’t have any,” Fritznel Joasil, 36, said.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille announced that the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund was donating US$2 million in hopes others would match that for an effort to rebuild the University of Haiti’s Faculty of Sciences.
