Can Haiti change its fate ?
Sprinting on their crutches at breakneck speed, the young soccer
players who lost legs in Haiti's earthquake last year project a symbol
of hope and resilience in a land where so much is broken.
Playing a weekend warm-up match days before the anniversary of the
devastating Jan. 12 quake, the players control the ball artfully with
their good legs, avoiding "illegal" contact with their crutches.
A Hatian man walks through the ruins of the Cathedral ahead of
the one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in
Port-au-Prince. AFP |
The teams train on a dusty pitch near Cite Soleil, Haiti's largest
slum on the outskirts of the wrecked capital Port-au-Prince. They faced
off again on Monday in the National Stadium as part of a low-key yet
poignant commemoration of the disaster that killed around a quarter of a
million people.
"Everything can't get fixed after the earthquake but life goes on,"
said Mackendy Francois, whose friends used a hacksaw to cut off his left
leg below the knee when they freed him from the rubble of a shirt
factory a year ago.
Thousands of people lost limbs in the earthquake, which left more
than 1 million Haitians homeless and living in misery in the already
poor, calamity-prone Caribbean nation.
"Life didn't end when I lost a leg," Francois, 23, told Reuters.
He said he felt proud to represent his team against opposing side
Zaryen, named after the Haitian Creole term for a tarantula because of
the way the hardy spider keeps on going even after it loses a leg.
The players got treatment, athletic training and prosthetic limbs
thanks to a joint effort by Miami's Project Medishare and the Knights of
Columbus, which committed more than $1 million to the prosthetics and
therapy program.
More than 100 young quake victims have been fitted with limbs in the
program so far and hundreds more will begin treatment in the coming
weeks and months, Knights of Columbus Senior Vice President Patrick
Korten told Reuters in an email.
The soccer teams include some players disabled by birth defects and
amputees from accidents unrelated to the quake.
Despite the uplifting example of the amputee players, initial hopes
that a new, more successful Haiti could somehow rise from the rubble
with international help are becoming clouded by a sense of pessimism and
despair.
Even before the quake, about 70 percent of the 10 million people in
Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest state, lived on less than $2 a
day. Conditions for many now seem worse.
Zaryen midfielder Bernard Noubert, who lost both his parents in the
quake in the same building where he lost a leg, said soccer has helped
keep him going.
"It's the best distraction for me to lighten my heart," he said.
Despite billions of dollars in pledged aid and a generous outpouring
of world solidarity for Haiti after the quake, the anniversary promises
little in the way of celebration.
That may be due to a steady drumbeat of criticism from many quarters
about how little has been achieved so far in trying to rebuild the
capital city.
Major streets in Port-au-Prince have been mostly cleared of rubble
and tent cities that once held more than 1.3 million people made
homeless by the quake have slowly started to thin out.
But debris still covers vast tracts of the capital and bodies are
still being pulled from collapsed buildings.
Former US President Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti who
heads a reconstruction commission with outgoing Haitian Prime Minister
Jean-Max Bellerive, has also faced criticism over the lack of tangible
results.
Clinton is expected back in Port-au-Prince this week and is likely to
call for patience in the grueling rebuilding task.
Commemoration events this week include a ceremony on Tuesday marking
the reopening of Port-au-Prince's restored Iron Market, a cultural and
architectural landmark in the city's downtown area.
Built by the French in the late 19th Century, the market with its
ornate clock tower was badly damaged in the quake after a fire in 2008.
Its restoration was funded by Irish-owned telecoms company Digicel,
Haiti's largest private investor.
But such schemes are of little interest to Anise Sainee, a
54-year-old grandmother who lives with her husband and 11 children and
grandchildren in a tent in a crowded camp in front of the wrecked
presidential palace.
She holds little hopes for a better future.
"I can only count on God," she said.
A strong stench drifted from nearby latrines and from a sewer in
front of Sainee's tent, with its corrugated tin roof and dirty plastic
sheeting stamped with the words "U.S. Aid from the American People."
"I've seen no government here. There is no government," Sainee said.
"I've seen no progress either. It seems like the situation just gets
worse."
Nine months after the quake, a cholera epidemic hit Haiti and has
since killed more than 3,600 people.
Even the Nov. 28 presidential and legislative elections failed to
give greater credibility to the government, with the outcome of the vote
mired in uncertainty after widespread fraud allegations and sporadic
street violence.
Screeds of Creole graffiti on Port-au-Prince's walls chronicle
Haiti's chaotic politics.
One reads "Aba Okipasyon (Down With the Occupation)" but it is not
clear if it refers to the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti, the
reconstruction commission co-chaired by Clinton or the army of
foreigners involved in Haiti's reconstruction.
Given this instability, it is not surprising that some Haitians hark
back with nostalgia to the rule of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who
from 1971 continued the rule of his late despotic father Francois "Papa
Doc" Duvalier.
Sainee's 62-year-old husband, Fedor Cine, lost his job as a street
sweeper four years ago and is one of those who believes things were
better in the Duvalier era.
"He was a real president," Cine said of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who
lives in France after being ousted by a popular uprising in 1986 - a
rebellion that began Haiti's still ongoing experiment with democracy.
Reuters |