At Wednesday's 16.53 (22.53, hora peninsular Spanish), Haiti will silence to remember the sound that a year ago he made the earth to open. After a minute in churches and police stations will sound the "dial tone to the dead and hundreds of white balloons are released into the sky. At that precise time, on January 12, 2010, an earthquake measuring 7 on the Richter scale shook Puerto Principe, raising a huge cloud of dust and taking with them 230,000 lives, most of which have not yet counted.The earthquake destroyed, especially the poorest neighborhoods, so that between slums, private buildings and public offices, the material losses amounted to 6,000 million euros. Since then, 1.5 million Haitians have lived in camps, 800,000 of them are still there. The celebrations begin at 08.00 (16.00 GMT) with a mass in the ruins of the Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, with the participation of Haitian President Rene Preval and former U.S.
President Bill Clinton. Then there will be prayer cross, Protestant and Catholic, throughout the city. Starting today, will open a register in each municipality to families of the victims recorded the names of their own, they did not come see dead but no longer. Marie Claude Georges data point will go to her husband: "I spent three days searching, but never appeared.
Then someone told me that my husband had died in the car we had bought a couple of months ago. Months after my mother died and my aunts. It was too much for my life. "Marie Claude, the earthquake also survived a suicide attempt with 20 tablets of diazepam, now works as a nurse in a hospital Medishare.
Hundreds of crosses were nailed on the graves of Saint Christophe, Titanyen the town where they were buried 206,000 bodies left in its wake the quake and more than 3,700 who consumed the cholera epidemic in the last six months. René Preval yesterday to pay tribute: "On behalf of Government the public and Parliament, I renew my condolences to the families of all victims of the earthquake on January 12, "said the president.
About 50 trucks full of corpses were also downloaded between February and March 2010 in a huge tomb Puerto Main Cemetery. "We will never know how many are buried there," says Auguste Alexandrix, who for the past 12 years has been the inspector of the cemetery. IDPs camp which stands on the Plaza Toussaint Louverture, opposite the ruins Palace Nacional, where even government offices work, reproach Preval did not cross the street even once in the last year to visit them.
"It we do not even turn on the lights in the plaza to have some security at night. And the cops patrolling the streets, but never enter the camps," says Guerda Anier, which until last year worked as a secretary the Ministry of Social Affairs and now lives, unemployed, with her husband and five children in a tent.
Guerda, now president of a women inside the camp, he wanted to buy hundreds of white candles, give one to each neighbor of the ten camps that populate the streets of the Champs de Mars in downtown Port-au-Prince, and exit procession during the night, through the dark streets. But it has not gathered enough money to do so.
Had to settle with the prayers to the beat of congas evangelical pastors began to preach in the evening of Tuesday, from an armed platform near the National Palace. Has no other thing, says: "What plan can we have? We can only pray."
No comments:
Post a Comment