A couple sitting on the rubble that was once their home. Reuters
Zoanger, Haiti: With a perch above a white Caribbean shore lapped by azure waters, the Edouard family was doing all right by Haitian standards.
But then Hurricane Matthew struck last week, pile-driving unimaginably ferocious winds into their home in Zoange, a village on the touristy southwest coast of Haiti's southern peninsula, smashing it to pieces.
Now, they still live over the glittering tropical vista, but their five-bedroom house is a mound of rubble where they sleep exposed to the elements.
"We have nothing at all," said Mika Edouard, a 42-year-old mother of five children with her 50-year-old husband Alphonse Francois Edouard.
Around them, some salvaged books dry in the sun. The headboard of what used to be a bed pokes out of the crumbled concrete blocks that had once been walls.
Their kitchen is now a pot surrounded by plates shielded from the scorching sun by palm fronds.
The main coastal road passing by just a few meters (yards) away is their only lifeline.
"Some people passing give us food sometimes," Mika said. Their meager diet now consists of bananas cooked in flour.
'Everything is finished'
The family had tried to ride out the storm in their home, hoping its concrete and brick walls could withstand its fury.
But when the roof blew away the walls started to crack, they ran to a neighbor's home.
"Thanks to God we're all alive," said Mika, her younger children, aged 9, 12 and 13, around her.
But hopes of rebuilding their house are remote.
They had built the home themselves eight years ago with material bought with Alphonse Francois's earnings of $2 a day scraped together from his work as a sheep and goat-herder and sometime carpenter.
It cost them a total of around $1,500 -- nearly twice the per-capita GDP in Haiti, the Americas' poorest nation.
"We can do nothing," Mika said. "We can't rebuild, we have no money."
"Everything is finished," Alphonse Francois added.
The storm swept away almost all his 21 goats and sheep, leaving just two wounded animals, he said.
Fruit trees on which they had relied were toppled or stripped.
And their neighbors were too preoccupied by their own storm distress to offer any help.
Mika's only hope was for the government or aid groups to help them survive.
"We're in a desperate state," she said.
"I pray to God for my house and my family," she added, before leaving to help her husband haul a long piece of wood with which they hoped to make a shelter.
It would not stand up a strong wind, let alone another of the Caribbean's regular storms and hurricanes.
