One year on, Haiti is still struggling to recover from quake

WHEN the ground shook a year ago, killing around 250,000 people and toppling homes as if they were built from a deck of cards, world leaders promised quick action to ease the human tragedy and rebuild Haiti.

• People walk through an empty lot that had been cleared of earthquake rubble. Picture: Getty

But a year on, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country is still reeling from the earthquake's effects, and the international community's capacity to deliver and sustain aid effectively is being sorely tested.

The cold facts of one of the world's biggest urban disasters make terrifying reading: at 16:53 local time on 12 January, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake rattled the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and surrounding regions. It killed around a quarter of a million people, injured more than 300,000 and left more than 1.5 million homeless.

Lofty promises at high-level diplomatic meetings to "build back better" ring hollow as Haiti marks the first anniversary of the quake this week, caught in the grip of a deadly cholera epidemic, a new political crisis and widespread pessimism over reconstruction plans that are barely off the ground.

Mackenzy Jean-Francois, 25, a university student in Port-au-Prince, said: "When you go around the country and through the tents (in the survivors' camps] and you look at the situation people are facing one year after the disaster, it's hard to see much sign of how that (aid] money was spent."

In almost every open space in and around the wounded city - in public squares, outside the presidential palace, by the airport, the main golf club, on slopes outside the capital - the weather-beaten blue-and-white tents and tarpaulins of quake survivors are crammed in.

Collapsed and crumbling buildings, some wildly askew and many still hiding bodies, still punctuate every street.

Piles of rubbish and leaking sewage add to the chaos.

In a hard-hitting report, charity Oxfam blamed the lack of progress on "a crippling combination of Haitian government indecision, rich donor countries' too-frequent pursuit of their own aid priorities, and a lacklustre Interim Haiti Recovery Commission", a body co-chaired by former US president Bill Clinton.

Unni Karunakara, the president of Mdecins Sans Frontires recently slammed the "failure of the humanitarian relief system" to stem cholera epidemic deaths in Haiti, despite the presence of an estimated 12,000 private charities in the country.

He said: "The aid community at large has failed to prevent unnecessary deaths in a population so tragically affected."

Defenders of the emergency operation say it was able to quickly deliver large amounts of life-saving food and medical assistance to huge numbers of quake survivors.

Ordinary Haitians have turned their anger and frustration against the outgoing government of President Rene Preval, who faces accusations he failed to take a strong lead in the recovery after the quake.Resettlement of the homeless is tangled in land tenure issues. Only 15 per cent of required basic and temporary houses have been built, Oxfam says. But the International Organisation for Migration says the numbers in displacement camps have almost halved since July to 810,000.

"Anyone who thought there would be no camps in Haiti after 12 months was living in cloud cuckoo land," commented one former aid worker.