Remembering the Earthquake part 2

Today is the second anniversary of the Earthquake or the 12th of January, as they call it here. I have not heard anyone say the work Earthquake here yet. 300,000 people were killed on that day and 1 million left homeless. I did not see Haiti pre-EQ so I have no idea what it was like before or right after. But we have seen it recently and I have to say we have seen progress between when we visited and this time. Especially in Petion-ville (PV) near where we live. There was a large tent city that was taken down just prior to our last visit and another large one that has been recently taken down. A beautiful fountain has been put up in the first park. And while there is progress in PV, there is still a lot of work to do in the city.
We took the opportunity to go downtown and see the sites. It was actually a great day to do it because everything was closed and there was NO traffic, a rare thing here. It took us less than an hour to get to Port-Au-Prince(PAP).
The lack of foot traffic had me concerned where everyone was today. Then we started seeing them. Churches with people were packed inside. We saw many people wearing white today too. When I asked the kids what they would remember about today CT said "lots of people wearing white." (Really we take him to the only third world county in the Western Hemisphere that was hit by one of the largest natural disasters know to mankind and he remembers people were wearing white?)
The stairs to a church, you can see it was packed.

On our way we saw many buildings that looked like this. With second stories collapsed on to the first story.

The first stop was the area around the white house. As you can see a lot of people were gathered to hear a preacher talk about Peace. He was standing on this giant speaker on wheels, yelling something about how "Jesus wants peace." He was telling the people not to steal or hurt others. We listened to him for a while in the car. I promise it was a lot more safe than it looks and we saw several other Blans' out walking around. We did bring an armed police woman with us too. The UN came in to start clearing the road for the president and we left. We saw his entourage of black cars on our way to the next site.
All BJ saw was the "ladder" the man was using to climb the giant speaker, of course.

There is still a very large tent city right across the street from the white house. Justin heard Canada just pledged a ton of money to get it cleaned up.

We drove past the court, the law school, the government buildings, the police station and the nursing school all of which were destroyed. The police station is being rebuilt, therwise everything else is still in rubble. Apparently almost everyone in the nursing school was killed. Now how does a place rebuild and have a functioning society if it does not have government buildings, the safety of the police, or upcoming educated leaders?

The Cathedral, which can hold 10,000 people, was largely destroyed. Many people lost their lives here on that day.

The Hospital General. This is a large hospital compound. It has many different buildings and is the main "public" hospital in town. It was largely damaged by the earthquake and you can see in the pictures they are just now starting to rebuild it. See the top floor with wood doors and cement walls.

I posted this because our bishop told us about a couple who made wheelchairs out of lawn chairs. Here are a few examples of ones we saw today at the hospital.

On the way back the police woman was able to use her badge to get us into the Digicel stadium. Digicel is a company here run by a Dutch guy who has made a fortune and now dumps a ton of money back into the economy here. I swear everyone has a cell phone here. People who make less than $2/day have a cell phone. You can buy the phone for less than $15 and then you only pay for outgoing calls by buying a card that puts minutes on your phone. Great idea. I think this guy is great because not only does he make money, but he puts it back into Haiti too. In my opinion, Haiti could use a few more people like him. Or better yet, good jobs for the local people who are educated.
Anyway the stadium was built after the EQ and is really very nice, right in the heart of all this crazy. My camera was dead so Justin will have to post pictures from his phone.