When the ground first started to tremble under his feet, then 17-year-old Owen Spears thought maybe the shaking was normal in Haiti.
He had only been in the Caribbean country four hours, having just landed in Port-au-Prince as part of a group of B.C. high school students who came to volunteer. They planned to help build a wall on a goat farm.
“I remember looking into one local woman’s eyes, and she looked back at me with pure terror,” said the former University of Victoria student Saturday.
That’s when he realized this was serious. Outside, he saw that a building next door was in bad shape. It had lost a wall and there were massive cracks in the remaining structure.
Unaware of the extent of the country’s damage, the group crammed into a van and drove back toward the capital. Retracing their drive through the countryside, Spears noticed how things had changed.
Houses had been levelled, people were afraid and a child lay motionless outside.
It was Jan. 12, 2010, and a magnitude 7.0 earthquake had devastated the country.
The death toll wouldn’t be known for days. Estimates have put the number of dead at between 200,000 to 300,000. At least 300,000 more were injured and more than a million were left homeless. Ten years later, the country still hasn’t recovered.
Bob Beckett, Langford’s former fire chief, has made 17 trips to Haiti since his first visit just a couple weeks after the earthquake hit.
“Ten years later, they still don’t have potable water in many of the neighbourhoods. If they do have it, it’s intermittent. Hydro is non-existent at night,” Beckett said.
“I would like to have thought 10 years later you’d see some of those fundamental infrastructure things taken care of.”
After the earthquake, Beckett and a group of volunteers travelled to Haiti to find a project that the Langford community could support. They raised almost $250,000 from the Greater Victoria community to completely rebuild a destroyed orphanage in the country’s capital.
Beckett and about a half dozen others continue to make regular trips to the country to support the Baby Jesus of Prague Orphanage. Through the West Shore Rotary Club, the group also started supporting the Divine Hand Orphanage a few years ago.
“I describe it as the forgotten children. We have so much to do down there as a global community,” Beckett said.
He said some blame the government for mishandling international aid in the aftermath of the disaster.
Years without basic amenities like potable water and reliable electricity have sparked political unrest, Beckett said. Last year was the first since the earthquake hit that Greater Victoria volunteers haven’t felt safe enough to travel to the country.
Anti-government protests shut down schools, businesses and roads in October. Children at the Baby Jesus orphanage couldn’t go to school for over a month. The orphanage’s food supply was down to two bags of rice and a bag of red beans, with no fuel to cook.
“The needs continue. The challenge still continues,” Beckett said.
Despite putting their trips on pause temporarily, Beckett is in regular contact with the orphanages and the group continues to send money to pay for medical care and other costs.
Anyone interested in donating to the orphanages can visit helpforhaiti.ca.
Spears is also collecting donations for the charity he originally went to Haiti to support. Last week, he self-published a book -- Hour Four: Surviving the Earthquake in Haiti — recounting the six days he spent in the country before his group was moved out. Five dollars from every copy sold will go to Haiti Arise, which runs two schools and a medical clinic.
