It’s almost impossible to comprehend the devastation in Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake.

But then, unless you’ve been there, it’s almost impossible to conceive conditions in Haiti, long the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, before that day.

“The squalor in (Haiti’s capital) Port au Prince was overwhelming,” says Vicki Compton, director of Springfield Catholic Diocese’s Office for the Missions. Compton lived in the Haitian coastal town of Jérémie from 2001–2003, working for a non-governmental agency, Aid to Artisans. “What it must be like now…I just can’t imagine….” her voice trails off as she shakes her head.

The statistics are grim. More than 200,000 killed in a country the size of Maryland. The Washington, D.C.-based Inter-American Development Bank recently upped its estimate of the damages from $5 billion to between $7 and $13 billion, making it possibly the worst natural disaster in history – and in an already desperately poor country. “This has never happened to a country before,” says Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive in the 2/22/10 issue of Time magazine. “Forty percent of our GDP was destroyed in 30 seconds.” Now the rainy season has begun, and only approximately a quarter of the 1.2 million made homeless by the quake have received tents or even plastic sheeting to use as shelter. Sanitation, woefully inadequate before the quake, is potentially an even bigger problem than housing.

Woefully inadequate before the quake, it’s now nonexistent in much of Haiti; experts fear disease will run rampant as a consequence.

Some food markets are back in business, not least because of relief organizations bringing in edibles. But even before the earthquake, Haiti imported 75 percent of its food. One of Bellerive’s priorities in solving Haiti’s mountain of problems is to seek international aid to begin a “massive resuscitation” of local agriculture.

Just what do Haitians eat? The vast majority – those living in extreme poverty, many of whom are malnourished – subsist primarily on rice and kidney beans, with much more rice than beans. Or, says Compton, boiled (dried) corn with a few beans thrown in. Haiti does have a cuisine that’s similar to that of other Caribbean Central American nations. Almost all feature some sort of rice and legume preparation. Jérémie had a daily market, with those dried beans, corn and rice, as well as such things as potatoes, carrots, onions, and cabbage, and seasonal fruits such as bananas, plantains, avocados, mangoes, papaya and breadfruit. There were many different kinds of hot peppers.

Of course, food at markets must be bought; those with little or no money often must just take whatever food they can wherever they can find it (although that’s difficult to impossible in overcrowded Port-au-Prince). For example, Compton says, “We had a huge mango tree just outside our house [which was next to a free health clinic]. There were way too many mangoes for us to eat, and people coming to the clinic would pick them up off the ground. Coconuts were everywhere. There was lots of citrus: key limes, green-skinned oranges, and even sour oranges – nobody ate those; they were used as a cleaner. There were always chickens, pigs and goats wandering around. They all belonged to somebody, and everyone always knew who owned what. People fished a lot – you’d always see them standing in the water with nets. But sanitation was so bad – everything just drained into the ocean which was really polluted around the shoreline.”