One Year After Haiti's Quake: Cholera Babies, School Without Walls
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti Jan. 12, 2011— -- In the normally black and white landscape one year after Haiti's catastrophic earthquake, the school pops out. It's name, the Institute Classic de Lalue, is festooned in blues and reds on a banner across the entrance. The latticed school rooms are painted in Caribbean purple and yellow.
The once three-story K-12 school represents both Haiti's promise and it's plight.
"We haven't received a penny from the government," Principal Gellene Charles erupted. "Nothing."
Instead, the schoolchildren's parents chipped in what they could. The school's superintendent Armand Telinor, a man with an urgent manner and an ill-fitting suit, mortgaged his home to scrounge up the rest of the money need for the bank loan.
It was enough to rebuild only part of the school, just a concrete foundation, supporting beams and a roof. The walls in the six classrooms are lattice wood and blankets. There are no windows and on the day ABC News visited the electricity was being installed -- in one room.
The computer lab remains a jumble of rotten screens with cables coiled on top of them.
"We have only started," said Charles. The principal, who wears her hair smoothed back and clips a pen in her blouse, hopes one day air conditioning will be installed so that the computers may be dusted off and turned on.
Like the school, Port au Prince, is busy building. Projects create dust on every street corner. But many, like the school, are privately funded and done piecemeal, often using the same rusted rebar that failed Haitians the first time.
It is estimated about 700 million cubic feet of rubble have yet to be cleared, enough to fill six Superdomes.
Only 10 percent of the rubble has been removed. It is Haiti's biggest challenge, the country's Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerieve told ABC News today.
Bellerieve blamed the international community for its reluctance to fund rubble removal. "It's not sexy. It's very expensive and doesn't hold up like a school or a hospital," he said.
