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...gold-trimmed letters marking Haiti's Legislative Palace still shine brightly on the front wall of the seaside building in Port-au-Prince. But the massive earthquake that hit the nation on Jan. 12, killing more than 200,000 people, left a hole on one side of the structure, exposing a black wrought-iron staircase. The quake ripped open the building's opposite side, where detritus like metal, concrete, chairs, desks and paper scraps spewed forth like volcanic lava...
Before the earthquake, Ruthza St. Louis was an accredited therapist in Port-au-Prince, specializing in counseling rape victims. Now she has become a detective of sorts, walking the city's rubble-strewn streets, talking to children who are on their own and then using every resource she can to locate caring relatives who can take them...
...keep children out of risk, de la Soudière needs the help of people like St. Louis and Edith Philistin. A Haitian nurse volunteering on the U.S. naval hospital ship in Port-au-Prince Bay, Philistin was tending to a 6-year-old boy named Kenzie, who was getting emergency treatment for a fractured leg. Both of his parents had died in the quake, and when he couldn't name any relatives - child psychologists say it's not unusual in traumatic situations for a 6-year-old's memory to get cloudy - doctors on the ship were inclined to send...
...plenty of bribes to so-called government inspectors. Structures have scant reinforcement and are often set on weak foundations. That's why 13 of 15 federal ministry buildings pancaked in the Jan. 12 earthquake - and why, in 2008, 91 students and teachers died when their school in a Port-au-Prince suburb collapsed. The school's owner was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after admitting he barely even used mortar to hold its concrete blocks together. (See pictures of the Chile earthquake aftermath...
...fair, Haiti has had far less experience with earthquakes, and therefore earthquake preparedness, than Chile has. (Before Jan. 12, the last major quake to hit Port-au-Prince was in 1751.) There will, of course, be the apologists who insist it's unfair to compare a basket case like Haiti, the western hemisphere's poorest country, with a showcase like Chile, which has Latin America's highest per capita GDP and is set to become the first South American member of the exclusive, Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Chile can do things right, Haiti defenders argue...