Distraught parents mourned the loss of two children in a camp for Haitian earthquake survivors on Wednesday, a day after rains caused a wall to collapse on top of a row of tarp homes.
The family’s tragedy is another reminder of the perilous conditions of an estimated 1.6 million people living under tarps and tents on dangerous ground six months after the quake devastated Port-au-Prince.
Enrique Joseph, a 30-year-old policeman, was on the job downtown on Tuesday evening when his cellphone rang with the horrifying news: After losing his home in the quake, he had lost his makeshift home — and his eight-month-old son, Kesnel, and a two-year-old nephew, Kika Leus, were under the wreckage.
He raced back to the Terrain Acra camp in the Delmas neighborhood, home to tens of thousands whose tarp homes blanket a hillside owned by one of Haiti’s wealthiest families. He was too late. The boys’ lifeless bodies already were wrapped in sheets.
“If we knew the wall could fall, we would have moved,” Joseph said, his eyes red with tears.
“The material things don’t matter. I lost my papers, I lost everything. But I lost my son. That means I lost my life,” Kika’s 25-year-old mother, Ketlanda Leus, said, rocking and weeping beneath a neighbor’s tarp.
Little reconstruction has been done since the magnitude-7 quake pulverized the capital. Piles of rubble and thousands of collapsed buildings remain where they stood in January. Even transitional shelters remain a pipe dream for most.
Donors pledged US$5.3 billion for two years of rebuilding at a March donors conference but less than 10 percent has been delivered. On Wednesday, the US Congress passed a bill to partially fund the administration’s US$1.15 billion pledge to Haiti and sent it to President Barack Obama.
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