Before hitting us, Matthew showed its fury in Haiti
Living through a hurricane is no fun. The race to stock up on food from dwindling shelves. The snarled lines at the gas pumps. The exertion of putting up shutters or plywood. The stocking up on batteries.
Then the long hours, hunkered down in the sealed house, listening to the night sounds of whistling winds and things breaking outside. And then emerging to assess the broken landscape. No fun at all. But now imagine that you had no solid house to begin with. That your concern after the storm is not your insurance claim but cholera.
That’s the reality for thousands of people who got hit by Hurricane Matthew just days before the monster storm moved through Palm Beach County Thursday night. It roared through the Caribbean. And as if the hemisphere’s least fortunate nation needed yet another set of miseries, it hit Haiti hardest.
In normal times in Haiti, one out of every 14 children there dies before the age of 5 from hunger. Water is frequently contaminated.
“It is such a rough life normally,” said Angel Aloma, executive director of the aid group Food For the Poor, “and for them to have an earthquake that was so horrendous six years ago — almost a quarter-million people died from it — and now, after two or three years of drought, which decimated most of their crops.”
Then, on Tuesday, Matthew chewed through Haiti as a Category 4 destroyer hurling 145 mph winds, tearing metal roofs from unsteady houses, flooding villages and, as Aloma said, “their farm animals and their goats and their pigs were drowned — I mean, it’s such a nightmare.” Several hundred were reported dead, with 350,000 more needing some kind of assistance, as of Friday.
Aloma’s group was standing ready in the capital, Port-au-Prince, with truckloads of food, hygiene kits, blankets and other critical supplies for heavily stricken sections of the country, but unable to proceed immediately because of fallen bridges, obstructed roads and choppy seas. In one southern area, he told The Post’s Editorial Board on Wednesday, thousands were made homeless because nearly every roof had vanished.
To South Florida, a catastrophe like this is not some foreign concern. When tragedy strikes in Haiti — as in Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic or any number of Caribbean islands — it intimately strikes our own multicultural community. As many as 75,000 Haitian immigrants, concentrated mainly in Boynton Beach-Delray Beach area, live in Palm Beach County — the county’s largest immigrant group.
Food for the Poor, based in Coconut Creek, is a Christian-based charity that works in 17 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America to help, as it says, “the poorest of the poor,” providing housing, water projects and other important needs besides food — more than $11 billion in aid in total, the organization says.
Nature is capricious. Human beings have no control over whether a hurricane or tornado hits here — and not there. But as Hurricane Katrina showed us in New Orleans, and now Matthew demonstrates in Haiti, the impacts of nature’s devastation are very much dependent on human affairs. It is the poorest of us, those with the fewest resources, who suffer the most.
As we here in Palm Beach County give thanks for dodging the worst of Matthew, let’s be mindful of those who weren’t so lucky.