People took care of each other and shared what they had. My host family had 17 people sleeping in their house for a while. This is a house the size of my living room.
One woman near my guest house is living in a tent in her yard because the roof on her small house is concrete and she is afraid of it falling on her in another earthquake.
Most people have seen this on the news, but the presidential palace is still in a shambles. I couldn’t help but think that a country like the U.S. would have bulldozed that eye-sore long ago. But on the other hand, some Haitians say that some bad shit went down in that presidential palace in the past, so it is fitting that it stay there as a symbol of evil getting its due.
In downtown Port au Prince there are some vacant lots where I was told demolished buildings had been cleared, but there is still loads of rubble EVERYWHERE. It was difficult to get photos of all that I saw because we were driving through and it seemed voyeuristic to stop and take photos of misfortune, but these are pretty typical scenes of the rubble:
The government has gone through and painted these signs on all the buildings- commercial and residential. If the paint is green it means the building is all right and you can go in it; red paint indicates that the building is off limits.
I know what earthquakes are like. In 1989 I lived in an unstable loft and was home when the Loma Prieta earthquake shook with a 7.1 on the Richter scale. It was scary. 63 people died in that earthquake.
The 2010 Haitian earthquake was 7.0 on the Richter scale. 316,000 people died. Even after seeing the rubble with my own eyes, I can't wrap my head around that number.
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