Category: Blog

Earthquake Effects Linger On

During the morning hours of a recent clinic day in Port au Prince, a young man limped up. “Im 15 years old now” he told us with a shy smile. As he conveyed his story, he told us of the day of the earthquake when the roof of the house he was staying in came down on top of him. “It landed on my leg” he said. He told the story of the terror and pain of being without treatment for many days. “One day we found an American team, who told me I had a broken leg” he conveyed. “It was a blessing from God, I think.” In a mobile clinic on the streets of the city they inserted an external fixator, a device that consists of two long screws inserted into the bone and connected by a metal rod outside of the skin. The only trouble was, no one had a plan for its removal.

Amidst the chaos after the earthquake, many people came to help and almost all soon left. This left the people of Haiti in the same condition that they were before, only now caring for major injuries.  “From clinic to clinic, all around the city” this young man and his mother had traveled for months looking for help. Afraid to touch something that had been in so long, time and time again everyone told him the same thing: “tell whoever put it in to take it out, not me”. Now nine months later, still having a device inserted into his bones that should have been removed after only a few weeks, his leg muscles were stiff to the touch and contracted. It was apparent that he would need surgery soon.

Seeing the need of this young man we took him to one of the largest facilities in Port au Prince, the Medishare/University of Miami Hospital to locate a orthopedic surgeon. Here, was one of only three places in a city of two million people effected by the earthquake which had orthopedic surgeons left in the country. Unfortunately, we also discovered another reason that this family was unable to have this metal tool removed from his bone. In Haiti today the average wage stands at 300 US dollars per year, making it difficult to keep a family fed. To have this procedure done, this aid hospital required over 200 US dollars, an amount that was impossible for this poor family to raise. Due to generosity of people just like yourself, we were able to cover the entire hospital fees for this young man. At the time the clinic was over, he was scheduled for surgery and was grateful most of all to God who made a way for him to get care.

Please continue to pray for this young man, as surgery will only be the beginning of the long struggle of rehab that will need to take place to allow him full use of a leg that had remained immobile for 9 months. Please also pray for the hundreds left in Haiti like this young boy who need orthopedic care now that all of the major aid has left the country. The needs are still as great as ever in Haiti.

Flooding increases cholera risk in Haiti

ST. DENIS, Haiti — Three medical workers arrived at a clinic near here over the weekend on a mission to deliver supplies and spread the word about preventing a deadly cholera outbreak from getting worse after the torrential rains brought by Hurricane Tomas.
Multimedia

Several of them said, yes, they drank water from a river known to be contaminated with the cholera-causing bacteria. And, no, they don’t always have money to buy bottled water.

“We know there may be cholera in there, but sometimes it is all we have to drink,” said Alienne Cilencrieux, 24. “If we have Clorox, we pour some in and drink it. It tastes bad. Or we dig in the ground until we find water and drink that.”

The cholera outbreak, which has killed more than 500 people and sickened more than 7,000 in the past two and a half weeks, is largely confined to this region of rice paddies and small settlements, where the water has long provided life and livelihood.

But after several inches of rain fell as Hurricane Tomas passed on Friday, health authorities are racing to keep people from drinking unsanitary water, particularly here, where the Artibonite River is known to be contaminated with the disease.

At the public hospital in nearby Petite Rivière, the number of cholera cases has risen since Friday, after trailing off during the week. But doctors said it was too soon to say whether the increase was an anomaly or a sign that the epidemic may worsen with the flooding.

There were also several reports that new cases were suspected in far-flung areas of Haiti, including several cases under investigation on Monday in the capital, Port-au-Prince, raising concern that the disease may have spread there.

The city’s overcrowded earthquake survivor camps and unsanitary conditions could promote the disease. But previously, the only cases confirmed in the capital were among people who had traveled from areas already affected.

Surges in suspected cases are common, as people confuse common diarrhea with cholera, which is much worse and can quickly dehydrate and kill its victims if untreated.

Even spikes in confirmed cases have “happened from time to time, and it may not be directly related to Hurricane Tomas,” said Crystal Wells, a spokeswoman for the International Medical Corps, a group working here in the Artibonite River region. It is now building a cholera clinic at a hospital in Gonaïves to handle the surge in suspected cases there.

Singer Ronald, a spokesman for the Health Ministry, said Monday that the ministry was testing the new cases to confirm the disease and determine where it might be spreading.

In the countryside, medical workers from Doctors Without Borders have quickly found that they have to battle not only the water, which is everywhere, but also the fact that generations of Haitians use the river and its tributaries for almost everything.

Rice farming requires heavy water use, and irrigation ditches and branches from the Artibonite lace through here. The people cook with the water and wash clothes in it. And most alarmingly for those trying to check the spread of cholera, which is found in feces and spread through water, the people sometimes defecate in it.

“The two things we do not have enough here are bottled water and latrines,” said Ruben Petit, a local minister helping the workers educate the community.

Anne Khoudiacoff, a Doctors Without Borders nurse, said it was impractical to tell people not to wash or bathe in the waters, even with the risk of incidental consumption, because of the lack of alternatives.

Instead, the focus is on urging people not to consume the water directly and delivering purification tablets and bottled water far and wide.

Still, many residents said they often could not afford to buy the tablets or bottled water. They depend on distribution from aid groups, several of which fanned out over the weekend to deliver supplies.

“We worry about it a lot,” said Solomon Pierre, who lives in a farming hamlet near L’Estère in this region, adding that one of his seven children had cholera but recovered. “Before the cholera we drank from the river and the canals all the time. Now we try not to.”

Away from population centers, rural victims often get sick, try home remedies and travel long distances to crowded public hospitals, arriving in advanced, acute stages of the disease with an increased risk of death.

Our Inspiration, Dr. Van

Dr. Van Middlesworth worked for over 60 years at the University of Tennessee medical school. At the age of 90 he became the inspiration and driving force of AFH’s work in iodine deficiency. He is a inspiration to all of those who meet him. Please take a moment to read these two articles about this man.

#1: Buck Rodgers of the 21st century

#2: A science lab closes, but its muse, 91, carries on.

As he has almost every day since he arrived on campus in 1946, Lester VanMiddlesworth wore a bow tie Thursday. But on this special day, he was wearing a red carnation pinned to his thin blue sweater as well.

VanMiddlesworth, nicknamed “Van,” was the star of a social hour celebrating his achievements as a physiologist at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, on the occasion of the closing of his lab (he officially retired in 1989). He is 91.

As a child, he spent his days daydreaming about science, inspired by radio broadcasts of “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” and buying a nickel’s worth of charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur at the local drugstore for his homemade basement chemistry lab. He idolized Thomas Edison, who died when Van was 12, and adopted Edison’s habit of sleeping just four hours a night.

In college at the University of Virginia, often penniless, he earned money sweeping the gym floor and answering phones for a taxicab company. He’d sneak naps on the floor of Edgar Allan Poe’s old dorm room.

While working on the Manhattan Project as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, he slept on the lowest shelf of his lab.

After moving to Memphis in 1946 — and meeting a beautiful Smoky Mountain nursing student named Rue, his future wife (and lab assistant who worked for free, a “husband’s discount,” she joked) — he began studying radioactive iodine in the thyroids of cows that were ingesting the radiation from nuclear-testing fallout drifting through the atmosphere. His work was so pioneering and so invaluable that it was crucial in the development of the global Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; his findings are now on display in the Smithsonian Institute.

Van was already retired when his department head, Gabor Tigyi, arrived in 1992, but, Tigyi said, “He has been the most passionate man I have ever known. His lab” — he stopped, as if struck by the mental image flashing through his mind — “it’s like, wow, the workshop of a mechanic or an inventor or even a mad scientist. So much beautiful chaos, so many half-finished projects; the kind of lab that is a shrine to the mind and wonderful thinking.”

The author and editor Phyllis Tickle, also in attendance, calls Van “a muse.”

Van’s commitment during his time on campus was extraordinary. “I didn’t come to leave,” he said matter-of-factly at Thursday’s reception.

Van handled the animal cages himself, scrubbed the floors himself, paid out of pocket to attend conferences or speak at far-flung awards ceremonies, often staying at the local YMCA (until the school found out and gave him a travel budget). When academics would visit, he insisted they stay at his home and not at some impersonal hotel — a habit that made for interesting dinner conversations with his wife, their two sons and two daughters.

Spry and cheery with thick, floppy white hair, he can seem bounding with energy even while leaning on a cane. When a neighbor broke her leg three years ago, he surprised her by mowing her lawn for her. Until recently, he rode his bicycle to and from work.

“There are two types of teachers,” said Abbas Kitabchi, an endocrinologist colleague, in an address to the crowd of about 140 people, including Van’s children and grandchildren, “those who can’t be forgiven and those who can’t be forgotten. Van is the latter. His teaching is legendary and he himself is a legend.”

Kitabchi began choking on his words; Van put a hand on his shoulder before grudgingly becoming the center of attention himself.

When the time came for Van’s own speech, 64 years of service were distilled into 8 words: “I can’t say anything, except: thank you, all.”

Later, in the thick of welcoming the receiving line that snaked around the room, he said of leaving that “if you tear off a chunk of yourself — and that’s what you’re doing when you leave everyone you’ve known — it can’t quite be done. It’s artificial. You can’t really be separated.”

Then he grabbed the next handshake with the next grateful student-turned-colleague-turned-friend and joked: “See?” he smiled, his hand squeezing tight, “We’re inseparable.”

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/oct/15/a-science-lab-closes-but-its-muse-91-carries-on/

Fond Doux Community Building

Our long time friend and member of the AFH Board in Haiti, Pastor Bruce’ s work in Fon Doux. Please remember him in prayer as his village will soon be hit with the hurricane.

A vision for the future: Haitian community offers an example
FOND DOUX, Haiti – What a difference a suitcase full of seeds can make.
It was just after Hurricane Gustave ravaged Haiti in August 2008 that Clayton resident Helen Little – who has been doing humanitarian work in the impoverished Caribbean nation since the mid-1980s – sent the suitcase to Brucely Delma, a pastor she had come to know in the community of Fond Doux, just outside Petit Goave about 25 miles west of the capital of Port-au-Prince.
The fecund luggage contained some seeds that would be familiar to anyone raised on a farm in Johnston County – as Little was. There were pumpkin, carrot, eggplant, collard, butter bean and bell pepper seeds. But there were also seeds for exotic flora such as papaya trees.
“We used every last one,” Delma said.
Two years later, the agriculture project Delma has overseen in Fond Doux is thriving, with dozens of men from the community working the land and their families reaping the rewards of their labor.
Those who cultivate the hilly but fertile land get some rice and beans up front, Delma said. Then they receive some money once the produce is harvested and sold at market.
“They make all this money – and they see it,” the pastor said.
There’s also a community well in Fond Doux, and residents have started a tilapia pond, too.
“We dug this till we found water,” said Delma, overlooking the green pool. “I got some men, and we dug for four months.”
Delma, 52, had returned to Haiti in 1995 after living in the United States for two decades. He had been in Fond Doux, where he had purchased some land and started a community school and church, for about three years when Gustave struck and destroyed an estimated 70 percent of Haiti’s agricultural sector.
“I’d been coming back [to Haiti] and seeing how the people were living,” Delma recalled. “It was in my heart to come back to my home and see what I would be able to work out.”
Today, he has over 400 people in his church congregation and a 10-room school that has 500 students who attend in two shifts Monday through Friday during the school year.
He has started teaching basic English to pupils ages 5-11 and plans to start a Saturday Bible study class for the community.
Delma’s ministry – the school, the church and the agriculture/aquaculture project – receives help not just from Little and the congregation at Clayton’s Horne Memorial United Methodist Church but from others including benefactors in Greenville and Cary.
“To me, this is the hope of Haiti – people with a vision doing things,” said Little, who is currently accepting donated old treadle (foot-powered) sewing machines so she can help launch a project that will employ women in Fond Doux.
As Little and others consider the next phases of development for the Ryan Epps Home for Children in Michaud, a northeastern suburb of Port-au-Prince, they are looking at Delma’s success in Fond Doux as a model.
Horne started the orphanage in January 2007. All but one of the 10 children currently in the home was in it before the Jan. 12 earthquake.
The children, ages 5 to 9, have been living in their new location – which has a prefabricated structure with electricity thanks to donated generators, indoor plumbing and running water from a well made possible by nearly $6,000 in donations from Horne – for just over two weeks. Before that, they had been living in donated camping tents in nearby Cazeau since the quake.
The first building at the Ryan Epps Home’s new location will eventually house a six-classroom school and church/community center that are intended to serve not only the children who reside in the home but the orphanage’s neighbors in the Michaud community.
A second building that will be a permanent home for the children, the orphanage’s director, his family and two caretakers will be erected by a United Methodist Volunteers in Mission group will in mid-November.
Clayton resident and Horne member Patrick Tormey toured some of Michaud with Ryan Epps Home Director Yvon Pierre during a recent mission trip.
He met Thermilus Jeanlis, 29, who lives in a small cinder-block and concrete house with two other adults and four small children, including two of his own.
Jeanlis, like others in the community, has free access to the well at the Ryan Epps Home. Before the well was available to local residents, they had to walk about 20 minutes to get water – and they had to pay for it.
Tormey also spoke with Angela St. Louis, a 43-year-old woman who lives in a corrugated metal shack on a dirt lot with six children, her husband and mother. After the earthquake, a few of her friends also moved onto the property and are living in a camping tent.
None of St. Louis’ children, who range in age from 8 to 19, is attending school. That’s not unusual in a country where half of the children – including half a million youth ages 6 to 12 – did not attend school before the quake, according to the United Nations.
Tormey asked St. Louis whether she would consider growing some food for the orphanage in exchange for schooling for her children. She seemed receptive to the idea but noted that she did not own the land where she had her garden.
After the tour of the community, Tormey said he hoped Michaud could eventually be like Fond Doux.
“I don’t get that sense that everybody is working that way in Michaud right now; there’s still a little bit of a handout mentality as opposed to a cooperation mentality,” he said.
But, sounding an optimistic note, he said he was confident that the Ryan Epps Home could forge a strong relationship with the surrounding community.
“Once that’s fully completed, then I think a lot of things happen on a self-sustaining basis,” he said.

Cholera Spread in Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Days after an outbreak of cholera began in Haiti’s rural Artibonite region, killing at least 200 people, there are now five confirmed cases of cholera in the busy capital city.

The cases “do not represent spread of the epidemic” because they originated in central Haiti, according to a bulletin circulated by Haiti’s UN peacekeeping mission with the heading “Key Messaging,” obtained by IPS.

“The fact that these cases were picked up and responded to so fast demonstrates that the reporting systems for epidemic management we have put in place are functioning,” it concludes.

Residents of the capital city are not so confident. “It’s killing people – of course, I’m scared. We’re in the mouth of death,” 25-year-old Boudou Lunis, one of 1.3 million made homeless by the quake living in temporary settlements, told the Miami Herald.

Radio Boukman lies at the heart of Cite Soleil, an impoverished slum crisscrossed by foul trash-filled canals where cholera could be devastating. The station has received no public health messages for broadcast from authorities, producer Edwine Adrien told IPS on Saturday, four days after reports of cholera-related deaths first emerged.

At a small, desolate camp of torn tents nearby, a gleaming water tank is propped up on bricks. Camp-dwellers said it was installed by the International Organization for Migration last week, more than nine months after the January earthquake damaged their homes.

But it’s empty because no organization has filled it with water. “We need treated water to drink,” a young man named Charlot told IPS matter-of-factly.

Cholera, transmissible by contaminated water and food, could be reaching far beyond the capital city. There are suspected cases of the disease in Haiti’s North and South departments, according to the Pan-American Health Organization, as well as confirmed cases in Gonaives, the country’s third largest city.

In Lafiteau, a thirty-minute drive from Port-au-Prince, Dr. Pierre Duval said he had stabilized two cholera-infected men in the town’s single hospital, but could not handle more than six more patients. One died Friday. All of them came from St. Marc, near the epicenter of the epidemic.

The main hospital in St. Marc is crowded with the infected. Supplies of oral rehydration salts were spotty when he arrived Friday after rushing from Port-au-Prince, American medic Riaan Roberts told IPS.

“We first talked to some lady from the UN who told us, ‘Oh I have to go to a meeting, I’ll mention your names, but just come back tomorrow,’” he said. “These microcosms of operational logistics are just beyond them.”

Roberts said a Doctors Without Borders team quickly put his skills to use, adding, “[The UN] is so top-heavy with bureaucracy that they can’t effectively react to these small outbreaks which quickly snowball and spread across an area.”

Buses and tap-taps filled with people speed in both directions on the dusty highway connecting the Haiti’s stricken central region to Port-au-Prince. There are no signs of travel restrictions or checkpoints near the city.

At a Friday meeting convened by the Haitian government’s Ministry of Water and Sanitation, “there were conversations around shutting down schools and transportation routes,” said Nick Preneta, Deputy Director of SOIL, a group that installs composting toilets in displacement camps.

“But if that’s the conversation now, however many hours after the first confirmed case, it’s already too late,” he continued. “One of the recommendations was to concentrate public health education at traffic centers. . .there were a lot of no-brainers at the meeting.”

Cholera bacteria can cause fatal diarrhea and vomiting after incubating for up to five days, allowing people who appear healthy to travel and infect others. The medical organization Partners In Health calls it “a disease of poverty” caused by lack of access to clean water.

The Artibonite river, running through an area of central Haiti known as “the breadbasket” for its rice farmers, is considered the likely source of the epidemic after recent heavy rains and flooding. Analysts say the regional agrarian economy has been devastated by years of cheap American imports of rice to Haiti.

http://www.mediahacker.org/

Haiti at risk of hurricane

Tomas, temporarily weaker, still poses major threat for Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE —    A day after President René Préval traveled by
helicopter and road to the southern and western coasts to assess hurricane
preparations, Haiti stepped up evacuation plans for Tropical Storm Tomas.

The system, though slightly weaker on Tuesday, was expected to return to
hurricane strength over the next few days as it turns north toward Jamaica
and Haiti.

“Since 2004, we have been getting hit by hurricanes,” Préval told The
Miami Herald by phone Monday as he left the southwestern city of Les Cayes
and headed to Jeremie on Haiti’s western tip.

“This is why we started early, to make sure there are no deaths. We are
doing everything we can to make sure there are none.”

At 5 p.m. Tuesday, the National Hurricane Center said Tomas had weakened
during the day, its sustained winds dropping to 40 mph, but it remained on a
track that could sweep uncomfortably close to Jamaica on Thursday and strike
the southwestern tip of Haiti the next day. The Jamaican government issued a
hurricane watch.

John Cangialosi, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center
in West Miami-Dade, said the powerful center of the storm could shift
significantly to the east toward Jamaica or west toward the Dominican
Republic before it makes landfall.

Despite the weakening on Tuesday, forecasters still expected the storm to
regain hurricane strength and, at the very least, dump a lot of rain on an
island with denuded hillsides prone to dangerous, sometimes deadly flooding
and mud slides.

FLOODING FEAR

In Haiti, however, wind speeds won’t be as critical as rainfall totals. The
center warned of a “significant threat of heavy rainfall.”

Flooding from Hurricanes Hanna and Ike in 2008 killed more than 800 people
and the four hurricanes that hit Haiti that year left $1 billion in damage.
A tropical deluge also could overwhelm efforts to contain an outbreak of
cholera, caused by drinking contaminated water, that already has killed more
than 300 people.

Meeting with authorities from the surrounding vulnerable regions around
Les Cayes in southwestern Haiti, Préval asked for an inventory of needs,
announced that a fleet of government vehicles including evacuation buses and
heavy earth-moving equipment were already on site and that shelters had been
identified. The health ministry was evaluating the possibility of evacuating
patients at the government-run hospital, which is prone to flooding.

“We are trying to get everyone to work together,” Préval said. “We began
with the South, but we are not certain that is where it will do the most
damage.”

Still, the southern coast’s largest city — and Haiti’s fourth largest,
Les Cayes — is vulnerable to floods even with normal rainfall.

“Once a hurricane hits us, we are in a mess,” said Pierre Leger, a Les
Cayes businessman, recalling how twice in two years mud burried the city of
Gonaives after hurricanes.

“We have two canals — one on the left, one on the right. They are
blocked with trash, there are houses built on them. What happened to
Gonaives could happen to us.”

On Monday, U.S. officials announced that the USS Iwo Jima was on its way
to Haiti. The ship, which can support helicopters, is scheduled to arrive
later this week.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the government was calling on people
in the South to evacuate if the storm poses a dangerous threat. But even as
officials planned for potential disaster, concerns remained.

A recent survey of hundreds of tent cities in Port-au-Prince revealed that
only 30 percent of the displaced had a place to move into, and officials
were still trying to identify potential buildings that can shelter people.

“We are making buses available to evacuate people in the camps, like
children. But when we say evacuate, the question is where do we take them,”
Bellerive told The Miami Herald.

As officials plan for the storm, they continue to deal with the cholera
epidemic. On Monday, a government official confirmed a U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention report that the cholera strain found in Haiti
matched strains commonly seen in South Asia. The U.N. has denied that
Nepalese soldiers at a base in the city of Mirebalais, in Central Haiti, are
responsible for the outbreak.

Since the epidemic began in Haiti’s lower Artibonite Valley two weeks
ago, Haitian officials have been fighting to keep it from spreading.
Humanitarian aid officials say rain and floods make for a “toxic
combination” for the spread of the waterborne infection.

“This storm could not have come at a more difficult time,” Humanitarian
Coordinator Nigel Fisher said. “Although we have made extensive
preparations and prepositioned stocks across the country, some crucial
supplies have been badly depleted by ongoing needs, particularly the
response to the ongoing cholera epidemic.”

The U.N. has appealed to donors seeking emergency shelter, including
tarps, water, sanitation supplies and oral rehydration salts for cholera
treatment.

Meanwhile, Haiti’s neighbors were also preparing for Tomas. The Dominican
Republic closed beaches along its southern and eastern coasts as the
Emergency Operation Center warned residents to brace for 9- to 12-foot waves
within the next 24-72 hours. The country’s Ministry of Health also issued an
infectious disease warning, saying that swollen rivers and lakes could lead
to a rise in illnesses.

IN JAMAICA

Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding held an emergency meeting with
his cabinet Monday and was expected to address the nation later Monday. The
Meteorological Service said the country could feel the outer bands of the
storm on Thursday or Friday, with periods of heavy rain and strong winds as
it passes east of the island.

The government also advised fishing fleets to return to the mainland.

The storm has already been blamed for anywhere from three to 12 deaths in
the eastern Caribbean, where Tomas raked across Barbados before gaining
strength to hit St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines as a Category 1
hurricane.

The Caribbean Disaster Management Agency said the storm killed at least
three people in St. Lucia, injured two in St. Vincent and the Grenadines,
and damaged hundreds of homes and dozens of government buildings throughout
the region.

St. Lucia Tourism Minister Allan Chastanet, however, said there were at
least 12 confirmed dead, the Caribbean Media Corporation reported.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/02/v-fullstory/1903580/in-cross-hairs-of-
a-storm-haiti.html

Haiti could suffer another earthquake, scientists warn

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/31/haiti-earthquake-warning

Haiti could suffer another earthquake, scientists warn
The Guardian, Robin McKie   Sunday 31 October 2010

Haiti is at serious risk of further devastation from earthquakes in the near
future, geologists have warned. Their research, to be published in next
month’s issue of Nature Geoscience, indicates that not all the geological
strain that triggered the original quake in January has been released as had
been thought.

More than 230,000 people died in the magnitude 7.0 quake on 12 January and
more than one million were left homeless. Now geologists are warning that
Haiti faces the prospect of further devastation.

“The January earthquake only unloaded a fraction of the seismic energy that
has built up over time in Haiti,” Eric Calais, a geologist at Purdue
University, Indiana, who is also a science adviser for the UN development
programme in Haiti, told Nature. “Other earthquakes are therefore
inevitable.”

The Haiti quake  which struck at 4.53pm local time and lasted 30 seconds
occurred at the interface of the Caribbean and North American tectonic
plates, which are slowly sliding past each other. Seismic strain builds up
at certain points where the plates touch and this is abruptly released when
they jump position. Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, has twice been
destroyed, in 1751 and 1770.

For the past 10 months, geologists have been investigating a geological
fault system on the boundary of the two plates known as the
Enriquillo-Plantain Garden. This was thought to be the centre of the quake.
However, to their surprise no evidence to support this assumption has been
found.

“This is pretty bizarre,” said Roger Bilham, a geologist at the University
of Colorado. One explanation, he suggests, is that the surface part of the
fault was clamped shut by a complex series of ground slips. “If so, another
strong quake could happen any time, right about the January epicentre.”

The Haiti earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince. Buildings destroyed or badly
damaged included the presidential palace, the National Assembly building,
the cathedral and the main prison, while the list of those killed included
the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Serge Miot, the opposition leader,
Micha Gaillard, and Hédi Annabi, chief of the United Nations stabilisation
mission in Haiti.

Since then, a major operation to rebuild the city with international help
has been launched, as doctors warn that there is a growing risk of a cholera
outbreak in refugee camps.

“What we know hasn’t brought us any closer to understanding Haiti’s seismic
future,” Bilham said. “We can only recommend rebuilding Port-au-Prince as
safely as money allows.”

Clean Water in Haiti

Since becoming a part of the community in Lacule, in southern Haiti, we noticed a great need. Outside the clinic gates runs a simple drainage ditch. Far away from a river, water running through this ditch serves as the communal bath, clothes and dish washing area but also a latrine and garbage dump for the community. Seeking to give back to the community, AFH partnered with Arch Nova, a German NGO, and Water Missions International to help construct, administer and treat a new source of clean water. Now serving the entire community of Lacule for the first time, stands a well, 10,000 gallon clean water tower and treatment system. With Haiti’s past history of water born diseases, now including cholera, this clean water system is designed to provide this community with clean drinking water for years to come. Thanks to everyone that helped make this possible!