After the quake: a Haitian teen on helping her country's earthquake victims and her hopes for Haiti's future.

• Author: Estime, Danae Victoria
• Position: VOICES - Essay

January 12, 2010, started like any other day. I left for school in the morning and returned in the afternoon, chatting with my morn in our living room. But around 5 p.m., our house started to shake. Our ceramic wall hangings shattered on the floor, and our TV fell from its stand. I could hear my grandmother and cousin screaming in the other room and people crying outside. At first I thought a truck had crashed into our house, but I quickly learned what had happened: A 7.0-magnitude earthquake had shaken Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital.

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Mostly because of poor building construction, a bad earthquake had catastrophic results. More than 250,000 people were killed and 300,000 more were injured. Hundreds of thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed, and more than a million people (in a population of 9 million) lost their homes. Most have since been living in hastily erected tent cities. I was lucky: Though some of my family's belongings were damaged, our house remained intact, and none of my relatives were injured.

But my high school, in the capital's Christ-Roi district, was among the 4,000 schools destroyed. Thankfully, none of my schoolmates were in the building at the time. But even now, I'm not sure whether all my friends are safe. Our junior year had come to an abrupt halt, and damaged telecommunication lines made it impossible to call or e-mail. Unable to find my friends and with no school to attend, I decided to use my time by helping those around me. I started working with an organization called World Vision, one of 3,000 nongovernmental organizations providing aid to Haiti.

For two weeks, I helped administer first aid in hospitals. I heard patients moaning in pain, and I tended to patients with horrible injuries, like a woman who had lost both her hands. Some patients waited days for treatment because there weren't enough doctors to handle so many victims. And the doctors who were there worked under very tough conditions: They had to use flashlights because the earthquake had knocked out the city's electricity, and they lacked basic medical supplies...