Young people with Haitian roots were drawn to their homeland after the earthquake two years ago. For many Haitians, Jan. 12 invokes a somber mood. It marks the anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Haitians two years ago and left millions more destitute and displaced. In the [...]
Two years after the earthquake life is improving, but the nation still faces a cholera epidemic and a huge rebuilding challenge In Haiti, you’ll see a young man sitting on a crumbled wall blasting a song out of a bashed-up radio and singing along – apparently without irony – lyrics that just repeat “I love [...]
Gathered silently in the shade of a mango tree here, dozens of people patiently wait their turn to tell us about the horror that descended on their community a year ago. Shortly after drinking from the local water source, entire families started to get violently ill with diarrhea and vomiting. It was an outbreak of [...]
I started Yele in 2005 because I wanted to help people that were helpless in my home country of Haiti. People who didn’t have a voice, people who didn’t have resources, people who had mostly been forgotten. Since Yele launched six years ago we have helped close to half a million people. I will [...]
Port-Au-Prince, Haiti – The United States has deported more than 250 Haitians since January knowing that one in two will be jailed without charges in facilities so filthy they pose life-threatening health risks. An investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting found that the Obama administration has not followed its own policy of seeking [...]
UNITED NATIONs – More than 5,000 Haitian cholera victims are seeking compensation, action and an apology from the U.N. and the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) for the ongoing epidemic that has killed more than 6,600 Haitians and sickened more than 476,000 since October 2010. Brian Concannon, who is based in Boston and [...]
The World Health Organizationsays the number of cholera cases in Haiti is expected to exceed 500,000 by the end of 2011. The U.N. health agency says some 470,000 cases and 6,600 deaths have so far been recorded. WHO cholera expert Claire-Lise Chaignat told reporters in Geneva on Friday that the disease was also likely to [...]
Broken and collapsed buildings remain in every neighborhood. Men pull oxcarts by hand through the street. Women carry 5 gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street. Hundreds of thousands remain in grey sheet and tarp covered shelters in big public parks, in between houses and in any [...]
More than 600,000 people in Haiti are still living in camps after last year’s devastating earthquake, the United Nations (UN) has said, emphasising the ongoing need for humanitarian aid. The UN underlined that access to safe drinking water, sanitation and food are the most important humanitarian needs in Haiti over the next year as hundreds [...]
In July, one Haitian fell ill with cholera every minute. In August, after the “second peak” from the May/June rains receded, that rate has slowed and yet still one Haitian falls ill every two minutes. In our report, “Not Doing Enough: Unnecessary Sickness and Death from Cholera in Haiti“, we noted that funding was withdrawn [...]
The cholera outbreak in Haiti may have been caused by UN peacekeepers. How is it that more than 6,200 people have died in Haiti from cholera in just the past 10 months, and yet resources to fight the disease were reduced earlier this year before the rainy season, which predictably led to an upsurge in [...]
Amid great fanfare, and surrounded by an entourage equal to his status as newly elected President of the Republic, Michel Martelly visited the Canaraan displacement camp out on the barren outskirts of northern Port-au-Prince early this summer. He had a message to the approximately 30,000 families who eke out an existence there: Factories are coming. [...]
A new study has yielded the most solid evidence yet that U.N. peace-keeping forces from Nepal inadvertently brought cholera to Haiti last year, setting off an epidemic that has killed more than 6000 people so far. The paper, published today in the online open access journal mBIO, is the first to compare the whole genomes [...]
More than 600,000 Haitians in makeshift camps face prospect of mudslides and flash floods when Emily makes landfall Hundreds of thousands of Haitians still living in makeshift camps following last year’s devastating earthquakes are braced for heavy rain and winds as tropical storm Emily approaches. Forecasters predict the storm will make landfall on Haiti’s southern [...]
Gerta Louisama is a member of the Executive Committee and the National Women’s Committee of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti, Haiti’s largest and oldest peasant group. She is also head of the local Tèt Kole Women’s Committee in her village of Savanette. Here she speaks about the Tèt Kole’s [...]
Donors have so far delivered only 38 per cent of funds pledged for Haiti’s reconstruction from last year’s devastating earthquake, according to a new report. The Haiti Reconstruction Fund, managed by the World Bank, has received a fifth of the $1.74bn so far delivered, but is emerging as a key and efficient player in what little [...]
A month before a newly elected Haitian President René Préval was to assume office in 2006, frustrated U.S. officials found themselves in a diplomatic tussle with Haiti’s interim government over returning criminals to the country. Nine months earlier, the U.S. had unofficially halted deportations amid concerns that deportees were behind a wave of kidnappings and [...]
Yesterday, the Clinton Foundation pledged to respond to the findings of an Investigative Fund/Nation magazine investigation that exposed a range of problems with trailers the foundation provided after the Haiti earthquake to serve as both classrooms and hurricane shelters. My reporting partner, Isabel Doucet, and I found that the trailers, one of the first projects [...]
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI. What if one of our notorious Hoosier storms violently destroyed your entire neighborhood, killing scores, and leaving you and your neighbors homeless and penniless? Imagine that the immediate reaction to this disaster was inspiring, with celebrity-packed telethons being broadcast, leaders of state pledging to rebuild, and rich and poor alike donating [...]
Haiti experienced a major earthquake January 12, 2010. Tens of thousands died, estimates range from 65,000 to 230,000 people killed. About 2 million more people were displaced. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with a per capita income of about $2 a day. Seventeen months later, Haiti remains deeply wounded. The [...]
