Donna Nassoiy Darling recently spent 13 days in nation still reeling from deadly earthquake.
A woman carries water bottles inside a camp for people displaced by January's earthquake after a rain in Port-au-Prince Friday. A hurricane season predicted to be one of the wettest on record opened officially on June 1 in the Caribbean, where hundreds of thousands of Haitian earthquake victims have only tarps or fraying tents to protect them in a major storm.
Donna Nassoiy DarlingDonna Nassoiy Darling finally made it to Haiti.
Darling, of Fair Haven, a volunteer school administrator with the Lansing United Methodist Church’s Haiti Connection, was supposed to make one of her thrice-yearly trips to the island nation in January. But the massive earthquake that devastated the country forced her to postpone until April 29, when she arrived for a 13-day stay.
The Haitian people are resilient and there are slim signs of a return to normalcy, but many remain housed in tent cities, their lives and dreams in shambles, Darling told The Post-Standard. Here are excerpts of that interview:
How to help
The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, established by former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at President Obama’s request, supports tax-exempt nongovernmental, nonprofit corporations providing Haiti earthquake relief.
Donations can be made online or mailed to The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, care of the William J. Clinton Foundation, Donations Department, 610 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock, AR 72201, or care of Communities Foundation of Texas, 5500 Caruth Haven Lane, Dallas, TX, 75225. (Communities Foundation of Texas is Bush’s foundation.) Darling: Many, many people in the area (Port-au-Prince) continue to sleep outside, even if they have a decent structure to stay in — they’re just so psychologically traumatized, they’re still sleeping in their tents at night. It’s incredible to see the tent cities.
We saw kids going to school in tents. And I’ll tell you, I don’t know if you’ve ever been camping, but a tent in the heat of the day is a miserable thing . . and yet they have kids trying to get educated inside these tents during the day.
Hurricane season started this week and I’m telling you, a lot of these tents are just like sapling trees with tarps strung to them. If a hurricane blows through there I don’t know what people are going to do.
I noticed on the news last night, ex-President Clinton had said he was concerned by the slow progress and I will tell you, that was the thing that really concerned me, is things are just happening very slowly.
Tent cities house thousands of Haitians driven from their homes by January's earthquake. Some sleep in tents and cars even though their homes survived because they fear future quakes, said Donna Nassoiy Darling, a Fair Haven resident who recently returned from an education mission to the stricken Carribean nation.
Is there anything in addition that Americans can do? Certainly there were a lot of missions to Haiti after the quake, a lot of money raised.
And that continues. I’m part of the United Methodist Church and I can say that UMCOR (United Methodist Committee On Relief) has received a generous amount of donations, just tons of money piled in for them.
The biggest thing really is that people just need to not forget. Funding needs are still going to be there and any organization that you can volunteer with. But money is the big thing, it’s still the big thing.
The other interesting thing there, too, that the quake did, I mean, in some ways it provided this leveling process. In some ways you can see that people that were poor are even at a greater disadvantage now, but even people that were rich.
One man that we talked to had four houses and all of them were destroyed in the earthquake and he had no means of getting anything from insurance because there’s no insurance policy he could purchase. He had like $200,000 in the bank, but he couldn’t even access his money because the banks were limiting how much money people could take out.
Even still while we were in Haiti, people would line up at the bank, which would open at 8:30 or 9, and they’d line up at the bank some two hours before to get a good spot.
Haitians driven from their homes by January's earthquake take refuge in a tent city erected on the median of the Route de Carrefour.You don’t talk to anybody who doesn’t know somebody that died in the quake. Many people in the Port-au-Prince area lost two, three , four or more family members. You wonder how people are getting out of bed every day, let alone going to work and functioning in their regular responsibilities. Haitian people are amazing people.
Is there anything that you can point to and say, ‘At least this is working, this has been restored’?
Yeah! This is the resourcefulness of the Haitian people. Like, they worked out their systems to return to their little market ventures and things. Even in the tent cities around you’ll see they have little marketing situations set up. They can have a little shop so people can charge their cell phone batteries, and you know, places where people have little bits of things, toilet paper and staple supplies that they’re selling.
But there’s still people living in terrible conditions. Many people sleep in their cars. (They’re) not able to sleep well at night. The trauma is so bad that people were in church where Montas Joseph (a program aide and interpreter) lives ... and he said a big truck, a big machine, had passed the church. It created this loud sound and this vibration and everybody just screamed and ran outside the church, because they are so traumatized they interpreted it as another quake.
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