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A truck drives past buildings in Jérémie that were destroyed in the earthquake
Photo: Matias Delacroix / AP
The video only lasts 23 seconds, but it leaves a painful impression of terrible destruction.
The pictures from the car window are from the town of Marceline in the earthquake area in southwest Haiti.
The car is driving down a street where only debris can be seen.
Collapsed houses, hills full of rubble.
Only the trees stand defiantly upright from the concrete desert.
At some point someone says in English: "Shit" and then in Creole: "All the houses on this side of the street have been destroyed". The video shared by singer and actor Joseph Zenny Jr. was circulating on social media in Haiti later this week. And Zenny wrote about it in Creole; "Misyon enposib, SOS". “Mission impossible, SOS. Please pass the message on. "
Marceline is on National Road 7, half an hour north of Les Cayes, Haiti's third largest city hit hard by the disaster. Marceline was cut off from the outside world for days after the quake last Saturday and the subsequent tropical storm "Grace". The people were left without help. Even now the place can only be reached via craters in the street and past landslides. And so the extent of the destruction is only gradually revealed. The two churches have collapsed, the school, the voodoo center, the small polyclinic. Everything broken or damaged. It's hard to calculate how many dead are still under the concrete slabs.
One week after the severe earthquake in southwest Haiti, the full extent of the disaster has not yet been measured.
It is difficult to take stock of the destruction, say representatives of local aid organizations to SPIEGEL.
Many remote towns, especially in Grande 'Anse, one of the three affected departments, have not yet been reached.
"These are places from which we have only just received calls for help," says Carl-Henry Petit-Frère, Field Manager of "Save the Children" in the city of Les Cayes.
There are places and hamlets that can only be reached by walking for several hours at normal times.
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And so the whole suffering on the Tiburon peninsula, which was shaken by massive tremors of magnitude 7.2 on August 14 at 8:29 am, is only gradually becoming apparent. At least once a day, the Haitian civil defense increases the number of victims by a few hundred. By Friday there were 2,100 dead and a good 12,000 injured. More than 60,000 accommodations have been destroyed, at least another 70,000 damaged in a region in which almost two million people live. 40 percent of them needed humanitarian aid, says Prime Minister Ariel Henry. In addition, after the passage of Hurricane »Grace« in the middle of the week, large parts of the disaster area are still under water.
Tens of thousands of children and young people alone are affected by the accident, emphasizes Petit-Frère. Many would have lost their parents. Even before the quake, 1.1 of the 11 million Haitians were facing famine, including hundreds of thousands of children. "The number will increase now," says the representative of "Save the Children". In addition to water and food, tents are now most urgently needed.
The battered Caribbean state, marked by natural disasters and political instability for decades, is again thrown far back by this quake. Only six weeks ago, President Jovenel Moïse was executed by a killer squad at night in his residence. There is no functioning parliament. The parliamentary and presidential elections planned for September 26th were already hard to imagine before the earthquake. Now they are excluded. Even before August 14, there was a lack of voter lists in many places, 16,000 thousand Haitians had to leave their place of residence due to gang violence. And above all, there is no security in the country, which is largely dominated by heavily armed gangs.
In Les Cayes, the third largest city in Haiti with around 100,000 inhabitants, one in five houses has been destroyed according to conservative estimates. Other places are literally razed to the ground. Fortunately, however, this time significantly fewer people died than in the 2010 quake of the century in Port-au-Prince, says the country director of Welthungerhilfe, Annalisa Lombardo. "But it is already clear that rebuilding and housing the survivors will be a huge problem this time."
More helpers and organizations pour into the country every day.
Rescue specialists from Colombia are looking for survivors in the city of Jérémie, in the very north of the peninsula.
US helicopters fly seriously injured people onto a hospital ship off the coast.
The United Nations, the US aid agency USAID and other large aid agencies have sent evaluation teams.
Even Haitians from the diaspora, especially New York and Miami, come to lend a hand or look for their relatives.
The European Union has pledged three million dollars in emergency aid, which will be distributed through the organizations operating in Haiti.
The aids are to be used primarily for equipping hospitals, supplying drinking water and providing emergency shelters.
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And so, at least temporarily, as in 2010, the country is transformed into the often criticized "NGO state".
Eleven years ago, countless aid organizations coordinated emergency aid, rescue and parts of the reconstruction virtually alone, a consequence of the long absence of President René Préval's government in the days after the disaster.
The current government around Prime Minister Henry is at least showing its presence, making promises and trying to coordinate aid through the state disaster control system.
The state is simply overwhelmed by the sheer dimension of the challenges, emphasizes Annalisa Lombardo from Welthungerhilfe.
Haiti remains a social case for the international community.
To make matters worse, access to the Tiburon Peninsula is in principle impossible because armed gangs control the road on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince and hardly let anyone through. A humanitarian corridor allegedly negotiated by the government is fragile, according to the aid workers. On Wednesday, two doctors, including a surgeon, were kidnapped in the capital, whereupon an association of eight private clinics in Port-au-Prince stopped work in protest for two days, except for emergencies. "The best way to get aid to the destroyed region is by helicopter," says Carl-Henry Petit-Frère from "Save the Children". That is the safest.
But still it is far too little, and especially the remote places hardly get anything. Nobody brings anything, nobody cares about the victims, the people tell the reporters and helpers on site. Above all, the government is letting them down. In Haiti, people are used to not being seen by the state. But with such dramatic events as the earthquake it becomes particularly clear.