Haiti's Recovery Continues

One year after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, killing 220,000 people and making 1.5 million others homeless, the citizens of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere have achieved a lot with international aid, but much more needs to be done, a senior United Nations official said today. “Clearly, speeding up the reconstruction and recovery effort is the absolute priority for 2011,” the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Haiti, Nigel Fisher, said in New York two days before the anniversary of the disaster. The U.N. estimates that 810,000 people are still living in 1,150 camps in Haiti, just over half the peak of 1.5 million in July 2010. Of the 700,000 who have left the camps, about 100,000 have been relocated into 31,000 transitional shelters. People are returning to their homes but are living in their yards because they are afraid of further collapses. Meanwhile, 95 percent of Haitian children who were going to school before the quake have returned to their classrooms.