PROVO, Utah --PROVO, Utah (AP) Imagine living in a place where a toddler can die of a cold, or a place where thousands of people are afraid to sleep in their own homes. Imagine being a single mother who has lost one arm to amputation or a young woman in need of heart surgery but not being able to find a heart surgeon anywhere in your country. Imagine being a mother or father watching your child dying or an orphan who, on one devastating day, lost everyone who cares about him.
This is the reality in Haiti. Infant mortality was high, jobs were scarce and education was almost nonexistent in the tiny, poverty-stricken Third World country and that was before Jan. 12, when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake ravaged the capital city of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. The damage was catastrophic, the international response almost immediate. Reporters and volunteers converged on Haiti. Organizations gathered millions of dollars from willing donors; many came from $10 add-ons to cell phone bills. The world's eyes and hearts, hands, feet and pocketbooks were on Haiti.
That was then. Six months later, the world has moved on while the people of Haiti have made do.
"I guess the thing I notice the most is the utter destruction, but life trying to go on all around it," said Jan Groves, a volunteer with Healing Hands for Haiti who recently returned from her 12th trip to the Caribbean nation.
In some ways, the situation in Haiti is even more dire today.
"The situation is just as bad as back in January, if not worse," said Nadmid Namgur, a BYU graduate student who helped found Sustain Haiti, which has been sending volunteers to Haiti since the end of April. "People forget about it, but the issue is still there."
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been a major contributor and continues to provide aid. The church has sent medical teams, engineers, employment specialists and roughly 55 truckloads of supplies including food, blankets and tents.
A few other Utah organizations are still raising money and in-kind donations and are sending groups down to the Caribbean nation.
The Utah Hospital Task Force, which in January chartered a plane and shipped 125 volunteers and 13,000 pounds of supplies to Haiti, became Americans Helping Haiti, and the group's goal is to build a hospital in Haiti, said founder Steve Studdert of Alpine.
An assessment team was in Haiti recently to look at two other hospitals that they'll take over management of as well, he said.
They are raising money and working with the Haitian government to find land for the American Hospital of Haiti and have found a number of volunteers who can do hospital design, medical training and more. The problem they're running up against is that Haiti is still a mess. A third of its parliament was killed and hasn't been replaced because there's no infrastructure to have an election; there still are bodies that have yet to be recovered; less than 5 percent of the debris from the earthquake has been taken care of; and the unemployment rate is 98 percent.
"Things there are exceptionally difficult and worsening," he said. "Our highest priority is obviously medical care for those who are suffering, and how do we do it fastest and best and most economically and hopefully save lives in the process."
Healing Hands for Haiti, which was founded in Utah, has been sending groups of health care providers to Haiti for years. They have a compound with a clinic and a guest house in Port-au-Prince. All but the guest house was destroyed in the earthquake, so in addition to gathering more volunteers to keep the trips going, they're raising money and designing a new compound, including a hospital.
"Everywhere you look, there's need," Groves said. "It doesn't matter what you mention."
Namgur, a founding member of Sustain Haiti, is a Mongolian graduate student who wanted to promote self-sufficiency. He said he and his classmates felt like many needs were being met by other organizations, but they wanted to focus on rebuilding, not just crisis management. Since April 28, the group has had a constant presence in Haiti with a mission to promote self-sufficiency among the Haitians by providing education and resources.
"We realized that not many organizations had long-term sustainable solutions to the very big issues," he said.
Every Monday a few graduate and undergraduate students leave for Haiti and spend two to three weeks teaching clean water solutions, square-foot gardening, microlending and hygiene and sanitation. They work mostly in Leogane, a small town west of Port-au-Prince. The volunteers spend much of their time in orphanages playing with the children, teaching them songs and reading to them, as well as teaching about hygiene.
"Those kids in the orphanage are so adorable, the cutest kids you can find," Namgur said. "You can tell they're just so hungry for a little affection and just being hugged and being played with."
No one would argue that the two Haitian 2-year-olds at a Lehi day care are, in fact, some of the cutest kids you could find. Collin and Nathan were in an orphanage in Petionville outside of Port-au-Prince, more than 2,000 miles away from their adoptive parents, when the earthquake struck. For days, Tia Simpson and Brent and Lori Rosenlof didn't know if their children had survived, then they waited in limbo for another couple of weeks before finding out the children were being taken out of Haiti on the same plane that brought the Utah Hospital Task Force into Haiti.
For the Rosenlofs, who had known Nathan since he was only a few months old, bringing him home was one of their greatest days.
"He's just growing in leaps and bounds," Brent said of Nathan. "I think he's going to be 6 foot tall by the time he's 3."
Tia is officially the mother of the toddler she's considered her son for the last year; Collin's adoption was finalized on June 23. She went to Haiti a year ago with the Rosenlofs with no intention of adopting a child; that resolve wilted about five minutes after Collin fell asleep in her arms. The adoption process that normally takes many years took her only one because of the earthquake.
"I am completely overwhelmed, but I love every second of it," she said.
