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NEWS > EVERYONE ELSE > HAITI QUAKE RESCUE OVER, EVERYONE GOING HOME
HAITI QUAKE RESCUE OVER, EVERYONE GOING HOME
January 24 2010
Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Eleven days after an earthquake devastated the capital city of Haiti, killing up to two hundred thousand people and flattening virtually every building in the city the rescue workers who rushed to the scene have finally been freed of their
obligation and are now starting to return home. Personnel from the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Russia, China, and dozens more countries have spent a long, hard week and a half in the collapsed city and will now be returning home to their loved ones.
A luck few though will be making a stop in neighbouring Dominican Republic, determined to shed the layers of grime and bodily fluids that have covered their bodies and seeped into their skin with a long relaxing swim in the crystal clear waters of the nation’s many resorts. The news of the withdrawal comes just two days after the last survivor was pulled from the rubble, marking 132 people rescued from the ruins of the city. Rescuers could find no further evidence of life in the ruined houses, prompting the pull-out and the obligation for clean-up now placed squarely on the shoulders of the Haitian government. Reportedly, some earth moving equipment and vehicles will be left behind after extracting a promise from officials that they will be returned clean and in working order.
“It’s been a long and hard week and half, well more specifically nine days, and frankly I’m glad to be getting out of here. I was happy to help and the people out but now I’m just really glad to be leaving. It’s so sad here, people are yelling and screaming at each other, and the place is just a huge mess. So glad to be leaving,” said a rescue worker from Israel. “I can tell you too that I’m really looking forward to the Dominican. This place is a wreck, it's like the third world or something. All I’ve been thinking about for the last few days is sinking my feet into that white sand and jumping into the water. Club Med here I come.”
Various resorts have been in the quake zone trying to secure reservations from the hundreds of workers who have flooded into the region following the quake.
“It’s been very hard for the last few weeks. A lot of the ports have been taken up, 
flights have been cancelled or delayed, and there have been more than a few cancellations as a result of the quake, mostly out of fears that we could be hit as well. When we saw the attention the quake was getting and the number of foreigners coming into Haiti we knew we had an opportunity to make up some of those dollars,” said Jim Stern, managing director of ‘Excellence Punta Cana’. “We’ve already been hit pretty hard by the recession and something like this could have been a disaster but luckily we’ve been able to turn it around. We did offer discounts to the workers but we are still going to come out with a win from all of this.
Excellence offers no-reservation dining at a choice of 7 restaurants, 24-hour room service, two pools, outdoor jacuzzis, a jogging course, lighted tennis courts and a squash court, and a casino.
“These people have been working very, very hard so it’s good that they will be able to finally go home. Sure the people of Haiti still have a lot of work ahead of them and it’s going to take weeks at least to get the city back to where it was before the quake. It’ll be hard, but they’ll probably make it back,” said Scrape TV Disaster analyst Walter Lim. “The good thing too is that now people realize that Haiti is still a country which will likely mean a lot more tourism in the future. God knows they have the space now.”
One country, Belgium, refused to leave the shovels and pickaxes they brought to the country out of fears that they would not be returned.
Emil Uliya, International Correspondent
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