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Haiti rising out of the ashes: 2 years after the quake
“To build a modern economy, Haiti needs more engineers, architects, chemists, experts in information technology,” Clinton said. “This faculty will help to provide the means for you to build your own future.”
In northern Haiti, Martelly inaugurated a US$30 million university built by the neighboring Dominican Republic. With 72 classrooms, the university will educate 10,000 students and hire hundreds of teachers, technicians, administrative and maintenance employees. It’s expected to open in September.
Martelly said he hopes the university will lure hundreds of Haitian professionals from overseas to come back and lend their expertise.
On the northern end of Port-au-Prince, the United Nations held a service to remember its 102 employees, from senior officials to drivers, who died in the quake. It was the biggest loss of life for the U.N. in a single disaster.
“Today we are here not to simply to remember those who were lost and the tragedy but to renew our commitment to Haiti’s future because we owe that to them,” Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, said from a lectern. “There are genuine reasons for hope.”
The ceremony, which showed a video of images of those who died, was followed by a wake outside in which Haitian families and others placed dozens of white roses on an iron memorial. It was designed to represent the pages of paper that floated to the ground in the seconds after the quake. It bore the first names of the U.N. workers who died.
“It’s always there, the memory of that day, I try to put it aside,” said Michel Martin, an analyst with U.N. police who lost two close colleagues. “I managed to put it away in a drawer. But today, I opened it, and everything came back.”
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
