Haiti cries

Ten years ago today, a half-minute movement of tectonic plates took the lives of more than 300,000 people on the small island nation of Haiti. It left another 1.5 million people homeless. The road to recovery has been winding, expensive and riddled with potholes. And it appears to have dead-ended.

Paul Farmer, former special adviser to the UN secretary general, recently embarked on an effort to account for $10 billion pledged for rebuilding, about $6 billion of which has been disbursed. He says billions remain unaccounted for and concludes that the funds committed, intended to put the deeply impoverished nation on a path to a decent future, “did not cover much more than the cost of economic and physical damage incurred.”

Meantime, a series of plagues have followed the initial devastation.

A cholera epidemic — one for which UN aid workers were themselves responsible — took at least 10,000 lives.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew brought winds of up to 145 mph, a storm surge and untold devastation.

President Trump, who cruelly dismisses Haiti as just another “shithole country,” yanked the special immigration status of some 60,000 Haitians who came to the U.S. after the earthquake, forcing them to go back rather than rebuild their lives here and send money home. If courts don’t intervene, the program will end next January.

And all the while, the Haitian government has been plagued by sickening but familiar corruption and poverty so intense, half the population lives on less than $2.40 a day. When the people quite rightly demanded the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse, they were met with an iron fist.

Reflecting on the lost decade, a 56-yearold father of four told the Miami Herald, “Nothing has changed. On the contrary, it’s gotten worse.”

Not breaking news: The Haitian people have been failed again, both by their government and by the wider world.