The tents in the refugee camps are in a very poor state. Champ de Mars camp, Port-au-Prince.
For the last two years, Rev Raymond Lacroix and his family – along with 63,000 other people – have lived in the camp known as Delmas 40b. Like many of the refugee camps in Port-au-Prince, it is dirty, unhealthy and dangerous. For the last two years, he has been scared for his own and his family’s security.
“There are all kinds of people here,” he says simply.
Bibles
For the last two years, thanks to gifts from the Bible Society, he has been giving Bibles and New Testaments to people in the camp who were in search of some kind of meaning. He continues to lead a church in the Delmas area and is a Bible Society volunteer.
But he is exhausted. It can be hard to sleep properly when anybody can get into your tent and steal your belongings – even kill you – and when you can hear everything that your neighbours say and do, and when the rain and wind may sweep your tent away?
Rev Raymond Lacroix in January 2012.
Despair
In despair, Mr Lacroix has decided to leave Port-au-Prince and to build a kind of little shelter (not a house for he cannot afford it!) on a small piece of land that belongs to him on the way to Saint-Marc, some miles away. The place is called… Jerusalem! Here, and in neighbouring Canaan, many earthquake refugees have been settling in for the last year or so. The conditions, though, are most dreadful: probably worse than a shantytown and not much better than the camps.
Once in Jerusalem, he will be much too far away to go and work in the Delmas quarter of Port-au-Prince, where his church is. So how will he and his family live? What will they do for money? He doesn’t know. But he feels they have no choice. Maybe they’ll be able to build a brand new life there.
Mother and baby in the Champ de Mars refugee camp opposite the presidential palace.
Still 500,000 refugees
The story of Mr Lacroix gives an idea of what hundreds of thousands of people are currently going through in Port-au-Prince: two years after the earthquake there are still 500,000 refugees living in the camps. They have lost everything and many feel they have been abandoned.
“My life is in the hands of God,” says Mr Lacroix. “Only God can do something for my family and me.”
Houses on a hill in Port-au-Prince. In the centre can be seen the remains of a house which was destroyed by the earthquake of January 12, 2010.