Orphans Lives Shaken by Haiti Quake

- SARA A. FAJARDO

The orphans at Foye Ti Zanmi Jezi (Little Friends of Jesus) were crammed in the TV room watching a documentary on the lives of children in France when the earthquake struck.

On the first violent shake the older children grabbed the younger ones and carried them down the flight of stairs that led to the open courtyard below. Huddled together the children, ages 3-19, watched as the two-story structure bucked under the pressure of the 7.0 magnitude temblor.

By the third vicious shake, the floor with the TV room and their bedrooms collapsed into their warehouse and Sister Elizabeth Eloi’s room below. Their adjacent light blue two-story “Bienvenue Mes Cheries” schoolhouse also caved into desks and benches, leaving rubble where walls once stood. The warehouse was stocked with food provided by CRS.

In less than a minute the orphans lost everything. Their bedrooms—gone. Their schoolhouse—gone. Their indoor kitchen—gone. Yet the group’s quick-thinking teenagers assured all 52 children survived.

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Haiti’s Children Adrift in World of Chaos

By DEBORAH SONTAG, NYTimes

Published: January 26, 2010

CROIX DES BOUQUETS, Haiti — Not long after 14-year-old Daphne Joseph escaped her collapsed house on the day of the earthquake, she boarded a crowded jitney with her uncle and crawled in traffic toward the capital, where her single mother sold beauty products in the Tête Boeuf marketplace. “Mama,” she said she repeated to herself. “Mama, I’m coming.”

Abandoning the slow-moving jitney, Daphne, petite and delicate, got separated from her uncle and jumped onto a motorcycle-for-hire. She arrived alone at a marketplace in ruins and ran, in her dusty purple sandals, toward a pile of debris laced with “broken people,” she said.

Growing closer, she saw her mother, lifeless. She froze, she said, eventually watching as her mother’s body was dumped in a wheelbarrow and her only parent vanished into the chaos.

“I wanted to kill myself,” Daphne said in a whisper.

Haiti’s children, 45 percent of the population, are among the most disoriented and vulnerable of the survivors of the earthquake. By the many tens of thousands, they have lost their parents, their homes, their schools and their bearings. They have sustained head injuries and undergone amputations. They have slept on the street, foraged for food and suffered nightmares.

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Haitian Camp: Feeding Multitides Requires a Plan

By LANE HARTILL, CRS

The once-swanky country club in Port-au-Prince is now home to some 50,000 displaced Haitians. The camp is already taking on the trappings of a community: In one section of the camp, you can charge your cell phone, call Europe at a phone kiosk, buy vegetables, and get your haircut. Cardboard street signs are even popping up on some trash-strewn paths. The place is so packed you have to turn sideways to get to some tents.

Behind the flowered bed sheets that serve as walls, you see shadows moving, hear babies crying and smell the akra sizzling in oil, the flat cakes made of flour and spices that Haitians love. The sun feels like it’s closer here, and most people lay in the shade, fanning themselves, trying to figure out how to make it through another day.

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Fighting Starvation, Haitians Share Small Portions

By DAMIEN CAVE, NYTimes

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Maxi Extralien, a twig-thin 10-year-old in a SpongeBob pajama top, ate only a single bean from the heavy plate of food he received recently from a Haitian civic group. He had to make it last.

“My mother has 12 kids but a lot of them died,” he said, covering his meal so he could carry it to his family. “There are six of us now and my mom.”

For Maxi and countless others here in Haiti’s pulverized capital, new rules of hunger etiquette are emerging. Stealing food, it is widely known, might get you killed. Children are most likely to return with something to eat, but no matter what is found, or how hungry the forager, everything must be shared.

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"Confusion in the Haitian Countryside" →

“In the smaller cities and countryside outside of Port-au-Prince, major obstacles still stand in the way of getting food, water and shelter to those affected by the earthquake.” produced by Rob Harris