ARTICLE - HAITI PAUSES FOR PRAYER

HAITI PAUSES FOR PRAYER
(Winston-Salem Journal) -

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- The air was choked with memory Wednesday in this city where everyone lost a brother, a child, a cousin or a friend one year ago in the earthquake. Haitians marched down empty, rubble-lined streets singing hymns and climbed broken buildings to hang wreaths.

The landscape is much as the quake left it, but voices were filled with hope for having survived a year that seemed to get worse at every turn.

"We've had an earthquake, hurricane, cholera, but we are still here, and we are still together," said Charlemagne Sintia, 19, who stood at the Silvio Cator soccer stadium.

The nation observed a minute of silence at 4:53 p.m., the moment when the earthquake ripped the ground open exactly one year earlier. The government raised its death toll estimate Wednesday to more than 316,000, but it did not explain how it arrived at that number.

Thousands gathered in the city to be with loved ones and pray. They flocked to the ruins of the once-towering national cathedral, to a soccer stadium that served as an open-air morgue and later housed a tent camp, to parks, hillsides and neighborhood centers.

Businesses were closed. Instead of traffic, streets were filled with people dressed in white, the color of prayer and mourning. They waved their hands, cheered and called out to God as they wound down roads beset by ruins. Astride the unrepaired buildings are camps where an estimated 1 million people live, unable to afford new homes.

"It is a grand day for us that we are able to give thanks to God that we are still here," 54-year-old Acsonne Frederique said as a preacher exhorted him and others in the cheering crowd at the central Champ de Mars Plaza to pray.

"Others are here to repair our country. We are here to repair our souls."