Progress in Haiti ‘painfully slow’
A year after Haiti’s deadly earthquake, nearly a million people still live in temporary tent cities, plagued by sexual violence and hopelessness. In downtown Port-au-Prince, large sections of the city remain rubble-strewn, as if the quake happened days, not months, ago. Harvard faculty members working to improve Haitians’ lot expressed impatience with the pace of recovery this week even as they pointed to milestones that show slow progress being made — such as groundbreaking for a major teaching hospital. “The progress has been really slow; it’s been painfully slow,” said Instructor in Medicine David Walton, a physician with Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the nonprofit Partners In Health (PIH), which has worked to improve health care in Haiti for decades. “If you drive through Port-au-Prince, it looks like the earthquake happened last week, not 12 months ago.” Associate Professor of Medicine Joia Mukherjee, another Brigham physician who serves as Partners In Health’s...