A Francophone country in the Caribbean

First royalties donated from Carla Bruni’s third album. Earthquake children met at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport (December 2008 and January 2010).

The Caribbean country of Haiti, on a fault line between two tectonic plates, has been struck by a series of natural disasters throughout its history. Cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, rains and ferocious storms have unhappily been regular seasonal fixtures in a country where daily hardships (food and water shortages, banana plantations destroyed…) have been compounded by political instability ever since this French-speaking country in the Greater Antilles won its independence in the early 19th century. More recently, in May 2004, heavy rains caused the death of around a thousand people, while a few months later, Hurricane Jeanne left more than 1,160 dead and 1,250 missing.

How to begin to tackle such a situation? In December 2008, after the terrible cyclones of August and September, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy decided to donate a portion of the royalties from her latest album to two organisations working for children in need in Haiti. €82,000 was granted to to the Association of Friends of Salesian Missions to rehabilitate Saint-Jean L’Évangeliste aux Gonaives school, to the west of the country. A second grant of €78,000 was made to the organisation TIMKATEC, whose name means “children who want to seize their chance” in Creole. Since it was founded in October 1994, TIMKATEC has been running facilities providing food, shelter and education for street children in the capital, Port-au-Prince. €47,000 of the grant has already been used to build a new shelter, with the remaining funds to be released soon. Since then of course, another earthquake has wreaked havoc. On January 12, 2010, the country’s biggest ever earthquake caused up to 200,000 deaths and made millions homeless. According to UNICEF, nearly two million children have been directly or indirectly affected by the disaster.

The international community has taken action to address the crisis. In France, for example, donations collected by the Fondation de France have amounted to nearly €23 million. From a French perspective, another effect of the disaster has been the anguish experienced by families waiting to adopt children. The Haitian justice system has in principle cleared 394 local children for adoption by French families. On Friday, January 22, 2010, at around 8 p.m., the first of these children landed at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The 1 to 6 year-olds were greeted by their “new” families, in the presence of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. The emergency services and the Red Cross were also on hand to deal with any psychological trauma. These were the first children to arrive after the events of 12 January 2010, but others will follow…