It was the Haiti of 1992, a place where the poorest population in the Western Hemisphere struggled to survive the ravages of everyday life.
Before this earthquake dislodged the shaky foundation supporting their subsistence economy, 80 percent of Haiti's 9.8 million people lived below the poverty line, wherever that is by Haitian standards. More than half the population lived in abject poverty.
Haitians, by the tens of thousands, risked their lives that year, 1992, in vain attempts to cross the 600 miles of choppy waters that separate them from the U.S. I stood on a dock in Port au Prince as a Coast Guard cutter that was ironically numbered 911 returned 186 of them to a shore they couldn't escape.
Before the earthquake, life in Haiti was almost unbearable for a people who have had to bear misery on a biblical scale in the 200 years since they fought for and won their freedom from slavery.
Hard to even imagine what their lives will be reduced to by this devastation. Even the aerial photos that take in the destruction in vast sweeps are hard to look at. The view on the ground is surreal, with bodies lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in make-shift morgues as people who look stunned themselves rush to do what they can for their wounded countrymen.
By 3 p.m. yesterday, the International Red Cross was estimating that the death toll would reach 45,000-50,000. It's anybody's guess how high the body count will climb in the months ahead as decaying corpses spread disease.
But the international response has been swift and substantial. A search team from Iceland was on the ground within hours of the quake. Digicel, an Irish telecommunications company, sent $5 million and a team of technicians to restore the phone network. Organizations like UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders, who are always on duty in Haiti, are working round-the-clock.
