"Everybody's lost somebody."

Mairi McGilvrie, EvCC student and frequent visitor to Haiti, sums up the loss of more than 200,000 lives in one catastrophic event in three words.

She began a series of trips to Haiti in 2007 to help her best friend, Jamie Kriegel, fight through the bureaucracy that was holding up Kriegel's adoption request. Orphanages overflow in Haiti, an impoverished land where "you can buy a child for $50, and a sack of rice costs $70," says McGilvrie.

The time-consuming, paperwork-filled process led McGilvrie to make seven trips to Haiti between 2007 and 2009, and to establish a network of adoptive parents, orphanage staff and Haitian families.

McGilvrie says Haitian parents told her "Please take our children to America. Even if we had money to feed them, we cannot keep them safe. Someone will kidnap them or kill them." McGilvrie states, "At night at the orphanage, we could hear gunfire all around." The children could not even be sent to a nearby school for fear of kidnapping, according to McGilvrie.

McGilvrie's friend was eventually able to adopt two brothers, leaving behind an older sister, Christlydde Devilas, who McGilvrie became friends with. Devilas, who recently turned 18, also wanted to go to college in America.

As soon as the earthquake occurred McGilvrie began making calls, and spent several days trying to reach Devilas and other contacts. After five days, she found out from Devilas' father the reason her friend's cell phone had gone unanswered. It was buried under the wreckage of a collapsed building, next to its owner.

While she grieves for her friend and the difficulties everyone she knows in Haiti is facing, her concerns go much deeper than the Jan. 12 disaster.

McGilvrie describes a Haiti that was devastated long before the earthquake. She witnessed extreme poverty, starvation, rubbish-strewn, unpaved roads, rampant crime, a lack of medical care and a "crazy-making bureaucracy (and) lack of infrastructure" that made these problems nearly impossible to solve.

Even in wealthier neighborhoods, residents' best defense was to build stone walls around their homes and line them with glass or razor wire, says McGilvrie; a makeshift defense against desperate criminals.

Although Haiti is only 750 miles southeast of Florida, it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and has suffered from decades of political instability and a chronic lack of resources. Despite the dedication of numerous organizations, relief has been slow to reach all who need it: as of Feb. 4, McGilvrie's friends in Petit Goave, a town near the capital, Port-au-Prince, had not received any aid at all.

"Whole neighborhoods in tent cities are banding together to help each other... [though] it's not so much reported in the mainstream media," says McGilvrie.

McGilvrie is in the process of trying to connect the Devilas family with a nearby missionary group who can at least ensure they have food, and she has high hopes for long-term, comprehensive aid.
McGilvrie has heard from Haitian friends that the disaster has actually brought them a small measure of hope: with the whole world taking notice of the desperate state of the nation, this may mark the beginning of change.

Above all, McGilvrie stresses her high regard for the Haitians she has befriended over the years. "They wear their best, they smile, they stand up tall. And when everything has fallen down around them, they shoulder on... they are an amazing people."