PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The air was choked with memory Wednesday in this city where everyone lost a brother, a child, a cousin or a friend. One year after the earthquake, Haitians marched down empty, rubble-lined streets singing hymns and climbed broken buildings to hang wreaths of flowers.
The landscape is much as the quake left it, due to a reconstruction effort that has yet to begin addressing the intense need. But the 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 joined other mourners at a soccer stadium that served as an open-air morgue after the quake and later housed a tent camp.
Thousands gathered around the city to be with loved ones and pray. They flocked to the ruins of the once-towering national cathedral, to the soccer stadium, to parks, hillsides and the 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 still live, unable to afford new homes.
“God blessed me by taking only one of my cousins that day. Our house collapsed but we have health and life,” said Terez Benitot, a 56-year-old woman whose husband, a mason, can not find work amid a reconstruction all are waiting to begin.
The magnitude-7 earthquake ripped the ground open at 4:53 p.m. Jan. 12, 2010. The government raised its death-toll estimate Wednesday to more than 316,000, but it did not explain how it arrived at that number.
The earthquake exploded in a previously undiscovered fault, just 8.1 miles below the surface and 15 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the capital and home to a third of the country’s population.
The United Nations lost 102 staffers in the disaster — the largest single loss of life in its history. At U.N. headquarters in New York on Wednesday, U.N. staff observed solemn silence for 47 seconds — the duration of the quake.
“Every day, I see the faces of our fallen colleagues. I hear their voices,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said.
At the same time, the Haitian government had scheduled a nationwide minute of silence, but with few people to organize it, it went ignored in many areas.
There were scattered protests Wednesday in Port-au-Prince, but the anniversary was not about politics to many of the marchers who crisscrossed the central Champ de Mars Plaza. Most were members of prayer groups giving thanks to God to sparing them from the earthquake.
“It is a grand day for us that we are able to give thanks to God that we are still here,” Acsonne Frederique, 54, said as a preacher exhorted him and others in the cheering crowd to pray.
“Others are here to repair our country. We are here to repair our souls.”
