Every branch of society was affected by the earthquake, and it is only now that the enormity of this catastrophe is coming to light.  Downtown Port- au- Prince is still like a warzone; banks, businesses, and religious institutions have been hit hard, or in some cases mortally wounded.  For the first few weeks with Team Rubicon I had an inside look at the challenges faced by the health system and by those who had immediate needs of food and shelter.   Now, working with the Foi et Joie School network, I am able to see the long-term damage done to the educational system.  The Ministry of Education is at a loss.  Currently, there are 4,774 schools on record that have been affected by the earthquake.  The truth is that there are many more than that, but they do not appear in the records because they are not registered.  Each school needs to be professionally evaluated before students can be allowed to return to their classrooms. For the last three days, I have been a translator for a team of architects and engineers from the Dominican Republic.  In that time we evaluated 31 schools.  Some we condemned, some were untouched, and some were given guidelines on how to make repairs.  In this time I was struck by the randomness of the damage, how time seems to have stopped with the earthquake, and the previous conditions of the schools.

No one will ever be able to fully comprehend the extent of this earthquake, nor how some survived after days under rubble, or how others died from a simple infection after being only slightly wounded.  In visiting the schools it was amazing to me how one building remained unscathed, while its neighbor was completely destroyed.  The Gospel image of one woman surviving while her neighbor perishes comes to mind. The other image that struck me hard was seeing the blackboard in almost every classroom of each of the 31 schools we visited.  There are unfinished lessons, homework assignments that will never be turned in, and most striking is the ever-present “January 12, 2010” still there as a silent reminder of when life ceased as it was known.

Finally, in visiting the schools we were able to see the problems that existed well before the earthquake.  While some of the schools were beautiful buildings with well-lighted and spacious classrooms, the majority of what we saw was stifling rooms with no lighting or ventilation, and schools that had no electricity, water, or sanitary bathrooms.  In short, this earthquake only served to expose an educational environment that is sadly lacking.  Currently children are out of school, in the camps, and with nothing to do. Their educational future is affected, and therefore so is Haiti’s future.  Yet given the pre-existing   state of education, I cannot imagine that it was too bright to begin with.  My hope is that our Foi et Joie schools will help play a major role in Haiti’s educational system.  Education is the key to change a mentality of poverty, and start to create a better today and tomorrow.