Haiti: Day by Day - Life Post Earthquake in Port-au-Prince

"Today we can eat, so we eat. Tomorrow we can't eat, so we don’t."

Haiti is a country on a fault line, a place that seems to be forsaken; yet, a place of underestimated power vibrating just under the surface.

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake ripped through the area around Haiti's capital city, killing an estimated 230,000 people, rendering a million more homeless. In the days, weeks and months that followed, humanitarian organizations from all over the world rushed to Haiti's aid. During this time, the same dynamics that had been plaguing the island country rumbled on.

Once again, the eyes of the world were drawn to Port-au-Prince. Therefore, the rest of Haiti's 10 provinces were ignored and abandoned as the efforts to excavate the capital drained resources, people and funds away from the outer reaches.

We arrived in Port-au-Prince exactly seven months after the earthquake. Debris was still everywhere. Piles of crushed concrete, rebar and garbage towered above our vehicle, like mountains, six to ten feet tall. Tents and tarps filled every empty space. Buildings, like ruined layer cakes, slumped on every street, were left empty and waiting.

In Cité Soleil, the city's most notoriously dangerous area, we were told about the dynamics that keep Haiti's poor in an unending cycle of poverty. Beginning as a housing ghetto for people who worked in nearby factories, Cité Soleil was originally populated by families unable to afford transportation who set up makeshift homes near their work.

The underpaid factory workers couldn't afford to educate their children, beginning what's become a generational cycle of poverty, crime and violence. "When people are hungry, they do bad things." This is a refrain I heard again and again throughout the country.

"There's several reasons for the gangs," Emmanuel explained. "There's poverty, that's one reason. People don't have jobs and didn't get any education, so they choose mafia and gang activity to make money, to live."

My imagination runs riot as we walk the dusty streets of Cité Soleil. My senses feel pressured and on high-alert as we pick our way through rubble, rebar and the halfcrumbled walls of what were once simple homes. Stories of shootings, kidnappings, gangs, and violence against women swirl in my head until, finally, we arrive at the piece of plastic sheeting that serves as a door to the haphazard collection of materials that Chal Delure calls home.

Suddenly, standing in front of this diminutive Haitian woman, squinting against the hard midday sun, I am present.

Chal says she is having a very, very hard life. Things are not very easy, she tells me, and after the earthquake, she lost everything. She used to sell things, but since the earthquake no one has any money, and therefore nothing sells. A basket of candy sits melting in the sun. "I was selling things – bottles of water, bottles of juice – and the earth started to shake," she says. When she ran home, her house had collapsed.

While the earth shook, she ran through the community, looking for her eight children. One by one, she found them. "I thanked God I was not inside of the house. I lost things, but me and my children remained in life. I have to be grateful to God because if I lost the kids, I would go crazy."

Chal and the children went to a public place where they stayed for five days. "Five days without food or drink or anything," Emmanuel explains. "Because the international aid was not there yet. She got a tent (for earthquake survivors). The tent in the sun, I can tell you, it is hell."

In the months since the earthquake, Chal has built a home by hand and sent two of her children to live in the country. The flies swarm her melted candy and her greatest hope is to build her business enough to keep her children in school.

"They live day by day," Emmanuel tells us. "They don't have a plan."

"Day by day," Cate echoes and I echo it again and so does Emmanuel until it becomes a chant or a mantra – day by day, day by day – at once soothing and terrible.

"Day by day," she tells us. "Day by day."