I just read the latest estimate of the death toll: 200,000. Four times the Red Cross estimate, two times the initial estimate preceding that one. God. I don't know what to add to that vocative.
The obstacles to distributing aid have led to looting and riots. People are fleeing the city. At church on Sunday we had a report of yet another facet of the disaster that hadn't even dawned on me until then: People in the countryside get a lot of their goods, including food, from the city. But of course now those market routes have been disrupted, and God knows when they'll be up and running again at their accustomed capacity. So the earthquake is producing shortages of necessary goods in the countryside as well.
Talking with my father the other night, he passed on to me the news that an LDS chapel which withstood the earthquake is being used as a medical center. (My father, who used to do construction for the Church, said he wasn't surprised to hear the building had survived because the Church's own building codes are stricter than those used in many developing countries.) Read the story.
The chance for resurrection I see coming out of this disaster—for bringing life and renewal out of death and destruction—is that (1) the need to rebuild creates opportunities to build right, to create infrastructure that can help lift this country and its people out of poverty; (2) Americans are perhaps more keenly aware than they were before of this incredibly poor country that's one of our nearest neighbors. I pray a commitment to Haiti endures after the earthquake finally passes out of the news.
They shall build the old wastes,
they shall raise up the former desolations,
and they shall repair the waste cities,
the desolations of many generations.
(Isaiah 61:4)
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