Five years have passed since the devastating magnitude seven earthquake struck just outside of Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince, killing tens of thousands of people including aid worker and Elmira native Yvonne Martin.
Despite the tidal wave of volunteers and donations that flooded the impoverished Caribbean nation in the wake of the disaster, the humanitarian crisis persists to this day.
And a number of local individuals and organizations continue to do their part to help.
Elmira’s Marilyn McIlroy works as a liaison between the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada and Haiti’s AEM (the national missionary church).
Her missionary and volunteer work in Haiti stretches back to the early 1980s and continues through today: she’s currently doing work in the island nation.
She was with Yvonne Martin on the trip that took her life.
“It’s hard to believe five years have passed,” McIlroy wrote on the EMCC website last November. “That eventful day is a faded memory for many, but for those of us who were there in Haiti, memories of January 12, 2010 are indelibly etched on our minds. At 4 p.m. our small team of Canadians arrived at the Wall’s International Guesthouse in Port au Prince. It was the “stop over” location on our way to the Plateau Central and the city of Hinche the following day. At 4:53 p.m., everything changed. A massive 7.0 earthquake shook the city. Life would never be the same. Not for the Martin family, not for our little medical team, not for thousands of Haitians and foreigners who were in Port-au-Prince at the time. Yvonne Martin, one of our teammates, lost her life under a heap of fallen rubble. The nation of Haiti mourned the loss of over 200,000 citizens and searched for thousands more. We mourned with them as we grieved for one of our own.”
To honour her memory, the Martin family and the EMCC established the Yvonne Martin Scholarship Fund, which sponsors Haitian students pursuing careers in the health sciences.
“Already there are several students enrolled in medical programs and some have graduated and are working to alleviate the suffering of fellow Haitians,” McIlroy wrote.
The Mennonite Central Committee is another organization that has continued to provide aid in Haiti long after the cabal of international reporters and television cameras-in a never-ending globe trot from one catastrophe to the next- departed.
“We took immediate and longer term views of the situation,” MCC executive director Rick Cober Bauman explained. “In the immediate term we helped to inspect homes that were damaged but not destroyed to let people if it was safe for them to return to their homes. So we tried to get some housing stock back into the system very quickly by providing skilled engineers to make those assessments along with our partners in Haiti. The next stage was actually rebuilding, and building back even better was a strong commitment that we have held. We aren’t interested in helping families get back into substandard housing. We wanted to help provide housing that could provide long term, dignified possibilities. And the third layer for us was actually not in earthquake central. A lot of the MCC’s work over the years has been done in rural communities outside of the capital. People sometimes wonder why we would respond to an earthquake with resources that aren’t being used in the capital where the earthquake was centred. But our logic was that the earthquake really exemplified the fact that so many people had fled to or migrated to big cities like Port-au-Prince because there isn’t infrastructure, employment or any economic opportunities in their rural communities. And so we have been part, along with many other (non-governmental organizations) of trying to restrengthen countryside rural economies through education, reforestation, and agricultural development to make it less likely that people will leave and go to what are really very vulnerable situations in Port-au-Prince.”
While funding for these projects was strong in the aftermath of the earthquake, it has waned over the years. But there is still a need for both money and supplies, Cober Bauman said.
To donate to the MCC of Ontario, visit https://donate.mcccanada.ca. To contribute to the Yvonne Martin Scholarship Fund, visit https://www.emcc.ca/donate.
