In some disturbing news, the 7.0 Earthquake which Rocked Haiti and was felt in neighboring Dominican Republic may have caused the deaths of 500,000 people. I called my relatives in Dominican Republic and they felt it. Imagine what the Haitians experienced. The nation, which is the poorest in the Hemisphere, was already barely functioning as a State. Many Haitians have moved to the Dominican Republic or America for a better life. Now the expatriates are trying to communicate with their homeland and are having difficulty due to the bad communication systems that nation had before the tragedy.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) – Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after a powerful earthquake flattened the president’s palace, the cathedral, hospitals, schools, the main prison and whole neighborhoods. Officials feared hundreds of thousands may have perished but there was no firm count. Death was everywhere in Port-au-Prince. Bodies of tiny children were piled next to schools. Corpses of women lay on the street with stunned expressions frozen on their faces as flies began to gather. Bodies of men were covered with plastic tarps or cotton sheets.

He believes thousands were killed in Tuesday afternoon’s magnitude-7.0 quake, and the scope of the destruction prompted other officials to give even higher estimates. Leading Sen. Youri Latortue told The Associated Press that 500,000 could be dead, although he acknowledged that nobody really knows.

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Our prayers and hopes go out to the Haitian people. It is incidents like this that make one realize the fragility of humanity. Please donate if you can to a charity.