Haiti earthquake
A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck southern Haiti just before 5 p.m. on Jan. 12, 2010, destroying more than 100,000 buildings and damaging 200,000 in densely packed Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns. Haiti’s government put the death toll at 316,000; some estimates were lower. An exact accounting was impossible given the widespread devastation. Many Haitian officials and police officers died in the quake, leaving the government paralyzed. The United Nations, which has had peacekeepers in the country since 2004, lost 102 staffers in the disaster. In the immediate aftermath, more than 1.5 million Haitians were living in crowded camps.
— Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Before the earth shook and turned their lives upside down, Rosena Dordor was like millions of poor Haitians, living with her family in a cramped home with no running water or sanitation, struggling to get by and fearing the next rent increase would force them out.
Today, nearly five years after the devastating 7.0 earthquake, Dordor has a new place to live with her husband and five children: a one-room shack with a plastic tarp for a roof and walls made of scrap metal and salvaged wood. It’s perched on a cactus- and scrub-covered hillside, a long walk from the nearest source of water, and meals are cooked over fire pits.
Life is still a struggle in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, but Dordor’s new settlement does offer a measure of freedom because there is no landlord for her family or for the tens of thousands of other homesteaders who rushed to stake a claim in arid hills after the government expropriated a barren zone of 18,500 acres just north of Port-au-Prince following the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.