New Jersey residents are frantically trying to contact loved ones and friends from Haiti in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the country that may have left thousands dead.
Communications with the devastated country have been limited, leaving church members, relatives, and others to rely on news reports, scrambled voice mails, and, for some, prayer.
“It’s impossible to get through,” said Georgette Delinois, president of the Haitian Solidarity Network of the Northeast. “I have cousins throughout the country, my brother-in-law, my uncle who’s nearly 100 years old. It’s just heart-wrenching not to know.”
Roughly 32,000 Haitians live in New Jersey, the fourth-largest concentration in the country, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.
Delinois, a Teaneck resident who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s, said a brief e-mail from a volunteer in Port-au-Prince was her only contact with a homeland. It described an apocalyptic scene: houses reduced to rubble and bloodied survivors filling a soccer field in search for medical attention.
The earthquake reportedly devastated the country’s capital, a teeming city of nearly 3 million people that struggled in recent years with rampant crime and poverty. Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital today after the powerful earthquake crushed thousands of structures, from schools and shacks to the National Palace and the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped.
Staff at a Lawrenceville church struggled to contact a group of volunteers traveling in Haiti when the earthquake struck Tuesday afternoon.
The volunteers, part of a mission from the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville, should have been in Thoman, a mountain town 50 miles south of Port-au-Prince, according to an update on the church’s website.
The church, which has not been able to reach the group, is working with the U.S. State Department, the update said.
Absolutely sole destroying, each time I hear an update on the radio, it gets worse and worse. I pray that the people will find peace and find eachother in this horrible event!
