Haiti devastated

I am utterly horrified at the earthquake that hit Haiti. We have a big Haitian community in Quebec so the public concern and media coverage are huge. The reports are fragmented and worrisome to the extreme. Communications are down. Roads are unusable. Hospitals have collapsed. The UN chief of staff in the capital died along with a long of his co-workers in their building that also crumbled. Police and army are rumored to have fled. Videos show dusty people walking in city streets bordered with ruins. Even the majestic white presidential palace, symbol of Haiti standing tall proud in spite of continued disasters, was finally brought down by this last, devastating blow. It was incredibly sad to see.



The victims might be numbered in tens of thousands. Port-au-Prince is a 2.3 million inhabitants city and most buildings were made of heavy concrete blocks erected on top of each other in defiance of any security norm. Nobody knows how many people are trapped under the rubble. I saw a report on a newspaper's site about a woman in North Carolina who KNOWS her family is currently trapped inside their collapsed house, because they were able to communicate with those outside, but people are unable to free them because the debris are too heavy. Support from the international community was immediate and massive, but the capital is all but cut from the world; the airport's runway is apparently intact but there is no one left to coordinate the rescue efforts. How long will it take before help arrives and becomes efficient?

We know that the Montreal policemen who were in Haiti are apparently safe and so are the journslists from La Presse who were acoompanying author Dany Laferrière for a literary festival. But Laferrière himself hasn't been heard of since right after the first quake and there have been aftershocks all through the night. I met the author a few times in movie premieres and other events and he came across as a very nice man who I respected. I hope he is safe. But with the size of the disaster, there is no way we won't learn of some athlete or artist losing family members in the quake, and that's only for the public figures. There are 130 000 Haitians in Quebec, making up the vast majority of our black population, and I'm sure every one of them still has immediate family in Haiti. My neighbours across the street do. I pray that their family survived.

I sent my $50 to the Canadian Red Cross. It's not much, but if everyone who can does the same, it can make a big difference.