Haiti Wraps Up an Unkind 2010

It’s been quite a year for Haiti. With election turmoil, a cholera epidemic and manifest misery almost a year after one of the most destructive earthquakes of recent times, Haiti still awaits reconstruction and many of the aid dollars promised to help it recover. —JCL

Reuters:

Maritza Monfort is singing along to a Christmas carol in Creole on the radio, but the Haitian mother of two is struggling to lift her spirits.

“I sing to ease my pain. If I think too much, I’ll die,” said Monfort, 38, one of over a million Haitians made homeless by a January earthquake that plunged the poor, French-speaking Caribbean nation into the most calamitous year of its history.

With a raging cholera epidemic and election turmoil heaping more death and hardship on top of the quake devastation, Haitians are facing an exceptionally bleak Christmas and New Year marked by the prospect of more suffering and uncertainty.

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AP / Gregory Bull

Last January’s quake in Haiti devastated the country and killed an estimated quarter of a million people.