A few days ago someone asked how long ago the earthquake struck Haiti. My instinctive response was to say that it was 8 months ago – it just seems like a small eternity since we saw those pictures. But I was wrong. Yesterday it was exactly 6 months.

What’s been amazing in those six months is the outpouring of human kindness as individuals, organisations and governments have reached out to respond to the crisis.  On Sunday, someone from my local church told us she was off to Haiti to “get her hands dirty.”  Only a few days before Ian Hamilton, CEO of Compassion UK, told us that he and a small company of friends had raised £300K climbing Kilimanjaro to support a clinic in Haiti.

But yesterday the world commemorated the 6 month landmark with the information that 1 million people are still in make-shift camps and many thousands are still without basic amenities. There is a metallic despair weighing on people who thought that help would have already arrived. Disillusionment with government is setting in and people are praying for God to do what agencies and the authorities had promised to do.

The news reports reminded me of my World Vision visit to India a year after the Tsunami hit.  What shocked me was the fact that everything seemed so slow. People were still living in make-shift accommodations and infrastructure was often shambolic.  Aid agencies were castigated for wasteful and clumsy lack of coordination.   But I did see shoots of hope and I had to believe the people who told me that you had to develop things slowly in order to build better. There was an awful tension between swift response and responsible rebuilding.  And in the meantime people live in tents and under the open sky.

I suspect that tension is with us again.  But in the meantime, Haitians have a right to ask why the pain of loss is being replaced by numbing despair.