Haiti Blog

Acephie

On my flight from New York I was sitting beside a young woman, Acephie, who was taking her two month old daughter to visit her family for the first time. When she was a child, like thousands of Haitians, she and her parents fled Haiti to live in America. She had seldom managed to visit but had made sure that she continued to practice her native language - Creole. Over the last two years she had been able to visit twice, after many years in which it was too dangerous to go home due to the political violence that made parts of the country the most dangerouns in the world according to the UN.

Acephie was interested in why I was going to Haiti and guessed correctly that I worked for a development agency. Toursits are still very rare as visitors are warned away by guide books and Western government's websites. Acephie said that she would love to live there but, as a nurse, she was acutely aware of the fact that that one in five Haitian babies never reach their first birthday - the vast majority of these dying from easily preventable diseases. She explained that it wasn't so much violence that she feared but the poverty which makes every day for most Haitians a struggle for survival.

From the aeroplane we looked down on Haiti - a barren brown mountainous island that is the most deforested country in the world with only 3 per cent of the original forests left. With no forest cover, soil erosion is a serious proble; when there are heavy rains, rivers the colour of milky coffee flow into the turqoise Caribbean, filled with precious top soil. Haiti was once a verdant green paradise and when it was first 'discovered' by Christopher Colombus in 1492 he wrote in his journal: 'There in that high and mountainous country is the land of God'

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