Friday, February fourteenth, the   UN says at least 22 people have been killed in a village in the Northwest region of Cameroon. Over half of those killed were children. No one has claimed responsibility for Friday’s incident but the opposition parties blame the killing on the government.

Haiti again by another Hurricane

A few months after the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti, I stood on the terrace of my hotel and looked out onto the Champs de Mars plaza, a central square in Port-au-Prince that had become an encampment for people who'd lost their homes.


It was May and the skies looked ominous as a storm hurtled toward the Haitian capital. What would become of all the Haitians left homeless in the quake, I wondered. How would they make it through the rainy season?

That storm, of course, paled in comparison to the force of Hurricane Matthew, which pummeled Haiti on Tuesday with 145 mph winds and heavy rain.
The worst hit was the southern port city of Les Cayes, but all of Haiti's 10 million people were exposed to danger. Among those, some 60,000 people still live in the post-quake camps that journalists referred to as "makeshift." The International Organization for Migration estimates 45 such camps still exist in the Port-au-Prince area.

Somehow, they became permanent; they became "home" for those who had nowhere to go. Thousands more live in flimsy homes that can easily wash away.

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I tried to imagine what that must feel like: to be huddled with babies and children under plastic sheeting or a patched-together roof with little between you and the ground in the fury of a Category 4 hurricane.

Matthew was another "catastrophe," the word Haitians used when they spoke of the earthquake.

It hardly seemed fair that Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, should be punished this way again.

In its 240 years of existence, Haitians have died because of dictatorships, violence, corruption, mismanagement and disease. And they have died in earthquakes, storms and floods. Two years before the 2010 quake, 800 people were dead and damages totaled $1 billion as three hurricanes and a tropical storm hit Haiti in a matter of four weeks.


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