Outside Port-au-Prince Haiti Towns are Destroyed

Most of the CNN and other news media coverage of the devastating earthquake in Haiti are centered on the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Now reports are beginning to trickle in that outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti towns are totally destroyed.

Jacmel was the artsy town Kathryn Bolles would travel to on weekends, a pleasant break from the bustle of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. But when a colleague with the Save the Children organization returned from once-scenic Jacmel on Friday “He said it’s horrible what’s happened there,” said Bolles, the emergency health and nutrition director for Save the Children in Haiti. “People are lost, dead, missing. Houses are down and facilities are down. It sounded similar to what we’re seeing here in Port-au-Prince.”

“What we’re hearing from text messages, from e-mails is that all along the coast going west and then down south, towns are absolutely destroyed,” said Bolles, who has worked in Haiti since 1999 and spoke to CNN from Port-au-Prince. She learned of the extent of the damage from colleagues, people on the street and other aid groups.

Cine Institute founder David Belle told Salcer in an e-mail shared with CNN. “Moving into the city … the destruction gets worse and worse and the street is lined with piles of swollen, rotting bodies. …Periodic road blocks have been set up by residents, protesting the lack of any aid presence and angry at stench and indecency. Huge tractors and dump trucks were just beginning to arrive and load bodies as we passed thru.”

There is no doubt that the earthquake in Haiti has given new meaning to the words “The Long Crisis”. With over 2,000,000 people affected in Port-au-Prince and probably at least another 1,000,000 poor souls affected in towns as far as 30 miles away from the capital city the outlook is bleak. It will be difficult for authorities to maintain civil order. When you have 3 million people without proper housing, food, water, or medical care becoming more desperate with each passing day panic and civil disorder can not be far away.

The cleanup and restoration of destroyed infrastructure, buildings, and lives, will take many years of hard work and billions, if not trillions, of dollars. In the meantime much of the population will be in a great struggle just to survive.

It will be a severe challenge to the international community to continue to provide Haiti with the needed funds and resources over such a long time frame. While there is a great outpouring of support and resources directed to Haiti in the days immediately following the earthquake disaster it is uncertain how the reconstruction effort will play out over the long term.

At a time when many nations are struggling with a poor economy, extremely high rates of unemployment, and excessive debt loads, another long crisis is about the last thing that world leaders need to have piled upon their already overloaded plates. It will likely be a long, long time before the destroyed towns outside of Port-au-Prince or the capital city itself are restored to anything like normal.