For one Nunavut woman, this earthquake hits home

Haitian-born Iqaluit resident Michèle Bertol shows the wedding photos of her mother Odette and her late father Georges Bertol. Now elderly, Odette survived the Jan. 12 earthquake that destroyed much of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. (PHOTO BY GABRIEL ZÁRATE)

It’s never easy to watch your hometown suffer.

Born in Haiti’s devastated capital city, Michèle Bertol, the City of Iqaluit’s director of planning, could have lost her mother, brother and his children in the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.

She called it “sheer luck” that their house in Port-au-Prince remains standing while the house next to it was “flattened”.

“All things considered, they’re basically okay,” she said.

Accompanied by her son and his children, Bertol’s mother returned to Haiti after decades of exile in the United States so she could get round-the-clock care in her old age.

Through images broadcast by the international media, Bertol can still recognize some of the streets and buildings of her childhood among the rubble of what remains of Port-au-Prince.

But in Bertol’s opinion, Port-au-Prince was a disaster area long before the Jan. 12 earthquake with its six-figure probable death-toll.

“People fought to stay alive on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “The insecurity of life in that slum is difficult to fathom.”

Living in one of the poorest countries in the world, Haitians already suffer from short life expectancies and high infant mortality.

Port-au-Prince is so notorious for violent crime, the United Nations mission there was once considered one of the riskiest assignments in the world.

Haiti’s governments are also often violently unstable.

For decades the country has been government by repressive military dictatorships, with its first democratically elected president in 1991. There have been several military coups since then.

Bertol’s family fled their homeland when she was eight, during one of the most brutal dictatorships the region has ever seen.

The notorious François “Papa Doc” Duvalier made thousands of Haitians fear for their lives, and many fled to other countries in the 1960s and 1970s.

At the age of eight, Bertol left on a two-week visa to the United States with her mother so the Duvalier dictatorship would think they were just going on a short vacation.

The next time she returned was decades later. She found it hard to accept the difference between the Port-au-Prince of her youth and the one she saw as an adult.

“It was like two different worlds,” she said. “It was light years away, the dire poverty.”

And now Bertol adds a third vision of Port-au-Prince to her memory: that of a physically shattered city.

With little or no building codes to require structurally safe buildings, the damage to the country’s housing and infrastructure has been terrible. One Haitian minister said the death toll might be more than 200,000.

For the first time in years, Haiti’s need has caught the attention of an international audience. Aid is flowing into the country faster than its national infrastructure can distribute it.

Bertol said anyone who wants to help should donate to the Red Cross.

Bertol opened a bank account at the Royal Bank and accepted donations from her City of Iqaluit co-workers and passers-by at Northmart and Arctic Ventures on the weekend.

From Jan. 15 to Jan. 17, she and her son raised over $6,000 to donate to the Red Cross for Haitian relief.

Also this week, the Government of Nunavut donated $25,000 to the Canadian Red Cross.

“We understand and feel deeply about all Haitians are feeling right now,” Aariak said.

Communities throughout Nunavut are organizing bingos, talent shows at other events, and are arranging for credit accounts at Northern and co-op stores to receive donations.

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. donated $20,000 for Haiti relief, while each of the three regional Inuit associations donated $10,000 each.