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project jacmel

The scale of aid can't go unnoticed as I travel around Jacmel. White air-conditioned SUVs carrying foreigners and marked with the acronym of one international agency or another are a constant presence on the roads. On the ground though, it's was the local efforts that caught my attention.

From a picnic table in the shade of a tree in the courtyard of Jacmel's library, which has replaced the condemned city hall as the centre of local government, a group of Haitian university students sprung from classes in Port-au-Prince due to the quake are putting their education to good use.

Within days of the destruction shutting down their campuses, a small group that had returned to their hometown here organized themselves as MESS, Mouvement de Etudiants de Sud-Est pout le Soutien (Southeast Students' Support Movement), drawing in more than 235 students, among them prospective doctors, nurses, economists, agronomists, engineers, lawyers, information technologists, international development specialists and other professionals.









Divided into working groups based on their education, they've run mobile medical clinics vaccinating 1,720 people, conducted a feasibility study on reopening the local schools and undertaken other initiatives with only ad hoc support from outside.

Along a stretch of road strewn with debris, teams of green t-shirted men and women previously unemployed given pick-axes, shovels, rakes and wheelbarrows by the city set about cleaning rubble.

Atop the remains of on flattened building, another group was busy demolishing what was left with nothing more than hand tools. And at the library, steps from where the table headquarters of MESS, more were clamouring to join in.

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