“International aid workers fear the final death toll could top 200,000. About 250,000 more were injured and 1.5-million left homeless in the wake of last week’s disaster.” – Business Day (2010/01/19)

It was a quiet Wednesday morning in Mumbai, on the 13th of January. And all I will remember of that day will be a 31 sec video that ran on a loop on YouTube, showing a girl holding her mobile and looking out of her terrace in disbelief as the city beneath her had suddenly disappeared under a thick cloud of dust. A voice kept breaking down in the background, “the world is coming to an end”. She didn’t realize how true her words were, that their world had actually come crashing down.

Very soon, news had started to filter in from the western hemisphere about an earthquake in the island nation of Haiti. The quake hadn’t lasted beyond 30 seconds and when it was over, the earthquake of magnitude 7.0 on the Richter scale, had forever changed the landscape and the lives of more than two million people who inhabit the poor island nation.

Slowly the first pictures started to come in. A gray cloud of dust rose out of the rubble of the dilapidated buildings in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Smoke rose in the distance as fire seemed to have flared up from devastated houses. There was shock and pain written on every face as the people tried to understand what had hit them. The air was filling up with wails of pain, angry screams, desperate cries for help. People were still in a daze, their faces a dusty gray and bloodied faces, looking around trying to find loved ones, friends, relatives, calling out names, helpless in the disaster. The quake torn streets were slowly stirring into action as people started to move away chunks of cement while some dug at the wreckage with their bare hands with the hope of saving some who may still be alive under the debris. Some school children stood in a huddle unable to understand how to find their way home or whether their homes were still standing where they had left them in the morning. People carried away bloodied bodies of loved ones, friends, relatives. And all this while no help had arrived, no police, no paramedics, no firemen – everybody was on their own.

The city thus lying in shambles happened to be just 6 miles away from the epicenter of the quake. And from the time after the major quake shook the city, 33 aftershocks had trembled underneath the city up to Thursday morning.

Elsewhere, the police headquarters had been razed to the ground. The Presidential Palace lay flattened to the ground, the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping mission had simply collapsed to the ground; hospitals, schools and residential buildings had caved in, rolled down ravines or lay in heaps of masonry. In places entire neighbourhoods were sleeping on the streets.

By Wednesday the body count had started to rise.The world was rushing in with aid. But with the devastated city the whole infrastructure seemed to have collapsed. Major roads were cut off, the port was damaged beyond repair and airports remained disconnected.

“Getting rescue and emergency medical help to those who needed it was proving, in the words of UN spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs, “a logistical nightmare” – The Independent (Sunday, 17 January 2010).

An earthquake of this scale is no doubt a major calamity but not unheard of. But given the state of Haiti – where people languish without proper medical facilities in normal times – the disaster has made death an easier option. This desperately poor country, politically unstable, struggles to sustain its people. The people live more in despair than in hope – fulfilling basic needs – food, better education and medical facilities, are distant dreams – dictator after dictator has thwarted expectations of good governance.

The 200 years of history of the nation bares witness to a people struggling to live on under dictatorship and political unrest. The UN and some other aid agencies struggled day in and day out to keep some semblance of sanity in the overall aura of hopelessness. But with last Tuesday’s earthquake, the whole country has once more been plunged into darkness. The increasing body count, makeshift hospitals in parks, trucks converted into ambulances, mass graves for the rapidly decomposing bodies, the imminent epidemic following such disasters are just some of the problems on the surface. Even a week later the people still await the daunting task of slowly rebuilding Haiti.

Image courtesy : Reuters and AP