Alice Smeets | Blog » Back in Haiti

Back in Haiti

March 6th, 2010 at 01:04 (Haiti)

Yesterday I arrived in Port-au-Prince around lunchtime. I flew in the country with a commercial flight, which is possible again after the earthquake since Monday. I don’t see much difference to the situation when I was here in January, except that there are more tents everywhere. Most of them look rain-resistant, so that’s good. People that didn’t get a tent, started to built shacks in the middle of the city. There are shacks in very weird places – in front of the university on the sidewalk. The rainy season started already, yesterday evening it rained for about one hour and today the sky was gray and it was quite cold for Haitian conditions. It’s amazing to see how life continues normally. When you are in a bus and don’t look outside, you would not notice any difference of the country.. People dress as before, they act as before, they smile as before. But when you do look out of the window you see that so many of the buildings are destroyed, it’s horrible.

I’m staying in the house of Natacha, my friend who is the director of the NGO “Haiti Care”. She moved into a new place last year and this house is really amazing – it has not one scratch. There still is no electricity at all, but she has a little generator that we use from time to time.

Today I took pictures for the German NGO “Kindermissionswerk”. I will work for them most of the time that I am here (I will stay for 3 weeks). Tomorrow I will visit a project of them in Jacmel.