Haiti’s Earthquake through ‘16-Year-Old Eyes’

By  by Bennett Gordon
Published on January 26, 2010
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The chaos and destruction caused by Haiti’s earthquake are difficult for anyone to articulate, especially for a teenager. Global Voices points to two teenage bloggers who have provided eloquent first-person views of the earthquake and the emotional and physical devastation that it has caused. Before the disaster, a 16-year-old calling herself Krizkadiak wrote about singing and dancing alone on a Friday night. Afterwards, she wrote this:

I saw my school fall in front of me. 
I saw people running covered in dust, hearing that their houses fell… sometimes with people in them. 
I saw a refugee camp, as they are on tv… people praying, people alive but not really… 
I saw a baby half dead, covered in bandaids… 
I saw a friend at the cemetery burying his little cousin. 
I saw the oldest and prettiest houses of jacmel reduced to nothing. 
I saw pickup truck filled with corpses… 
I saw my teacher walking to the cemetery behind the car where his wife’s dead body was… 
I saw kids from my school, people i KNOW, at the refugee camp… 
And lots of stuff… i hear about dead people every second, tsunami alerts when i know i leave at the beach, stupid people trynna take profit, no gas, no water no food. 
But what I didn’t see though… Is the haitian police and the Mayor. shame. 

Source: Global Voices

Photo by the UN Photo/Marco Dormino, licensed under Creative Commons.

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