The public may forget images on the news, but for Haitians the reality of the January earthquake cannot be avoided.
Thursday night, the Penn Newman Catholic Center hosted “Plight in Haiti,” in which Father Patrick Samway and Tina Cerin, a junior at St. Joseph’s University, challenged Penn students to consider Haitian reconstruction in the long-term.
Acknowledging the need to provide assistance, people around the world have reached out in many ways to Haitians. Nursing sophomore Karly Wirth was one such person. She organized Thursday’s event to educate students about Haiti before the earthquake and help them to organize relief efforts.
It would be difficult to overstate the effect that the earthquake had on Haitian society, Cerin explained. Cerin is a Haitian native who was in her home country when disaster struck.
“In a matter of 38 seconds everything I knew was flat,” Cerin recalled. “It’s hard to see the whole place you call home collapse.”
Although Cerin was lucky not to lose any family members, she is well aware of how devastating the disaster was both in terms of the hundreds of thousands of casualties and in regards to the national mood.
Samway, an English professor at St. Joseph’s University, has over 25 years of missionary experience in Haiti and spoke of how the earthquake would affect society as a whole. Despite its tumultuous past, he believed that before the disaster the climate was changing and looking increasingly positive.
Cerin agreed and remarked, “My time at home before the earthquake was the best Christmas break I can remember.”
Samway believed that the devastation goes beyond the physical. The aftershocks extend to national attitudes as well, he said.
“I know Haiti wasn’t the bomb before, but we were striving to make something of ourselves. All of that hope is gone,” Cerin said, reiterating Samway’s belief.
Not content to sit back and watch as events unfold, Cerin pledged to make a difference in the long-term Haitian environment. Cerin’s organization, Hawks for Haiti, hopes to raise $40,000 by the end of the semester.
Cerin and Samway both said they hope that the memory of the Haitian disaster does not fade.
Engineering junior Andrew Barr echoed this sentiment: “We have to invest in [Haiti’s] future. As imaginative students we can impact real change. We just have to put our hearts and minds to it.”
