People living in Grand’Anse felt the impact of last month’s earthquake instantly. In a matter of minutes, the 5.5 magnitude quake that hit Haiti’s west coast on 6 June flattened houses, blocked main roads and inundated healthcare facilities with patients.
At the Saint-Antoine hospital in the regional capital Jérémie, people with open wounds and dislocated joints were forced to stand in the corridors wailing, say doctors.
Though the earthquake was not the strongest in Haiti’s horrific history of natural disasters, it shook the flimsiest of foundations. It cruelly came just days after flash floods had displaced more than 13,000 people and killed at least 50.
“Disasters keep hitting Haiti, left and right. People have not had sufficient time to recover from previous disasters, only to be hit by flash floods, an earthquake, and landslides in a matter of days,” says Dr Didinu Tamakloe, Haiti country director for Project Hope, a humanitarian aid organisation responding to the crisis in Jérémie.
Officially four people were killed and 37 were injured in the earthquake, but many were unable to reach hospitals due to landslides and blocked roads, and prohibitively expensive fuel prices.
The collapse of the Haitian state in recent years means there is little help for people to rebuild their houses and lives. “The local government has no capacity to respond. Each time a disaster happens, a cyclone, an earthquake, we are left to help ourselves,” says 51-year-old Orelin Esnaille. His arm is in a sling after dislocating his shoulder during the quake. He will need help as he recovers from extensive shoulder surgery over the coming months and will have to rely on friends to feed, house and care for him.
“Without work I cannot pay my children’s school fees, I cannot pay for my medication, I cannot even find money to eat,” he says.
Since Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse was killed in July 2021 the country has spiralled out of control as armed gangs fight for control. The economy has been paralysed, millions are going hungry and cholera has returned. On 1 July, the health ministry reported 400 weekly cases of the bacterial disease since the earthquake, four times the number reported on 31 May.
Some health centres remain just rubble after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck the south of the country in 2021, while beds in other hospitals sit on cinder blocks and are tended by overworked nurses who lack basic medicine and medical supplies.
“These conditions are expected to continue – and potentially worsen – throughout hurricane season,” says Brenda Rivera-García, senior director of Americares Latin America and Caribbean programmes. The NGO is currently preparing a team to send to Jérémie.
“People by any legal or illegal means are leaving the country. There is no more hope,” says Flavia Maurello, Haiti country director of Italian NGO AVSI. Many NGOs have also left because the country has become too unsafe or difficult to work in.
MSF has suspended its operations at its hospitals or closed centres in Port-au-Prince a number of times in the past two years. On Friday, it suspended all activities at its hospital in the Tabarre district of the capital after 20 armed men stormed the building and seized a patient at gunpoint.
The organisation has said that Port-au-Prince “continues to sink into exponential violence”. About 90 gangs now control about 80% of the city, but civilians remain caught up in street skirmishes between rival factions, self-defence brigades and the police.
A month after the earthquake, NGOs are warning that the mental and emotional impact of the disaster, added to the violence and previous calamities, will be felt for generations unless addressed.
The cumulative trauma Haitians have experienced has made them fragile, says Hannah Mackynzie Archer, Project Hope’s monitoring and learning manager. “All this takes a toll on a person’s mental health, a community’s wellbeing and the ability to heal in an empowered way that allows you to overcome obstacles,” she says.
Marie Joseph, who watched her neighbours’ house topple over, killing the three people inside, says she is constantly anxious about whenthe next tremor will come. “We do not feel safe or comfortable … we know our houses are not safe,” she says.
“I knew those people that died. They were my neighbours and it is traumatic to run outside, watch their house fall and them die under it. I have no support for this. Our children grow up surrounded by trauma. The whole community feels stress … and that stress develops in other symptoms, you can’t sleep, you get sick, you can’t work, you can’t live like that … we have no time to heal.”
Photograph: Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters
Leaders across the world agree Haiti urgently needs international help to restore order and end the country’s abject suffering, but there is no diplomatic consensus as to how.
Haiti’s prime minister, Ariel Henry, has called for the UN to send troops but that would mean backing a government with little legitimacy. Previous international missions have also been mired in scandal, making diplomatic resolutions tricky.
Last month, the UN official William O’Neill called for an arms embargo, saying: “The survival of an entire nation is at stake.”
In the meantime, Haitians are left to rebuild their houses knowing that another disaster will come soon and there is little they can do to prepare for it.
“We do not have the construction or building materials to make better housing that will not fall during an earthquake. A lot of people know that their homes are not safe, but what else can we do?” Esnaille says.
