On our way into Port-au-Prince from the Dominican Republic, the driver, who is Haitian, but lives in the DR, said that he was really touched and impressed by the response of the Dominican people to the tragedy in Haiti. \u00a0Relations between the two countries have historically been troubled. \u00a0But this Haitian driver described a Dominican telethon that raised a very large sum of money to help the Haitian people. \u00a0And he told us how Dominicans without a lot were giving generously, like maids giving $50 from their savings.<\/p>\n
We know that a lot of money has been pledged from around the world to Haiti. \u00a0But we still hear stories and meet people who are not receiving help. \u00a0Today, we visited the town of Petit-Goave, which was close to the original earthquake’s epicenter. \u00a0And it was the very epicenter of the second quake, the 6.0, that hit on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Great damage has been done to the once pleasant seaside town. \u00a0Some houses still stand. \u00a0Some appear unharmed. \u00a0Others are completely flattened. \u00a0Residents claim they are not getting food aid, not getting water, and they are desperate. \u00a0They say they need people to come in and tell them if the houses that still stand are safe enough to enter, even if just to grab a few personal items. \u00a0There are no professional teams clearing sites. \u00a0It seems the capital remains the priority so that things don’t descend into chaos there.<\/p>\n
Petit-Goave is just 40 miles from Port-au-Prince, and yet it took us two and a half hours to get there. \u00a0Much of that has to do with the congestion in the capital’s roads but also some of the road leading to Petit-Goave are badly torn up in places. \u00a0Residents say they did not see outside help until a week after the earthquake. \u00a0And we did not see evidence of people distributing aid in Petit-Goave.<\/p>\n
Still, despite all that, life is slowly getting back to normal, on some level. \u00a0There were people out vending goods.<\/p>\n
Yet, we came across a local who used to live in Boston. \u00a0He had moved back to Petit-Goave. \u00a0His house had survived but he was worried to go back in. \u00a0We spoke about the immediate needs of the area. \u00a0I asked him what the town was famous for. \u00a0He looked dazed, and couldn’t come up with an answer. \u00a0He just said it was too hard to think about those things. \u00a0That the horror of what had happened to his country and to his town, trumped everything else. \u00a0He repeated, it was very hard to think about anything else but the painful present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On our way into Port-au-Prince from the Dominican Republic, the driver, who is Haitian, but lives in the DR, said that he was really touched and impressed by the response of the Dominican people to the tragedy in Haiti. \u00a0Relations between the two countries have historically been troubled. \u00a0But this Haitian driver described a Dominican […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}