Contributor: Andrea Koppel

This was my fifth trip to Haiti.

I first visited 20 years ago, in 1991, when Haiti’s then first democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in a military coup. I was a young journalist back then working for a local television station in Miami, Florida. I’ll never forget walking through the slums of Port-au-Prince, the capital, and meeting some of the poorest of the poor in Cite Soleil. Here amidst open sewers, naked children, the flies and filth and the wretched shacks with tin roofs that were their homes -- lived some of Aristide’s most passionate supporters. They’d elected him in the hopes the former priest would be able to answer their prayers and deliver them from this living hell. A father begged me to please, please take one of his obviously malnourished children back with me to the U.S.

A Mercy Corps cholera kiosk outside Hinche. We're distributing chlorine concentrate to produce safe, drinkable water for families forced to get water from polluted rivers. Photo: Andrea Koppel-Pollack/Mercy Corps

Not only was Cite Soleil unfortunately, still intact, but the number of others living in the capital in abject poverty and misery had grown exponentially to include hundreds of thousands of additional people – men, women and children -- who were then approaching their first year living in countless impromptu tent cities.

This was the legacy of Haiti’s January 12, 2010 earthquake.

Read more ▸