AG百家乐在线官网

Six months on from the Haiti earthquake, it might seem that very little has changed - but there is much that has been achieved.

At precisely 5pm on January 12, 2010, I was sitting at my desk in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, where I was working as the country director for international aid agency .

We were at the end of another working day and I was preparing a report for our team in head office in Dublin outlining the progress that we had made on several issues that week.

At the same time - and just a few short hours away from my office - Haiti was being rocked by a massive earthquake. In just 35 seconds, the capital city of Port-au-Prince was almost completely flattened.

The quake left 220,000 people dead and another 300,000 lay crushed and injured by the falling debris.

About 10 minutes after the event I received a call from a colleague informing me that "something big" had happened in Haiti.

In less than one hour a decision was made that Goal should respond and seven hours later I was making my way by private plane to the Haitian capital.

Goal had no presence in Haiti at the time but within days a 15-strong disaster response team had already begun to establish what was to become one of the agency's biggest ever post-disaster operations.

Much has been written and documented about the desperation, the smell of death, the loss and the suffering in those initial weeks following the quake.

Despite this, I found no words were able to express the overwhelming sense of shock and disbelief in the faces of the survivors as I walked through the rubble-filled streets the day after the disaster.

I watched loved ones desperately digging for signs of life, others wandering aimlessly around what was once their home and, perhaps most sadly of all, the pain and anguish in the faces of those carrying away the crushed bodies of their family.

Six months on from the disaster and Goal is now firmly established in Haiti. The organisation has achieved a lot and there is a lot more that we intend to do.

To the untrained eye, it might seem that very little has changed over the past six months. Port-au-Prince is still lying in ruins and the vulnerability of the people remains palpable.

So far, however, the emergency response has been a success.

Enough plastic sheeting has been distributed to protect the hundreds of thousands of homeless people against the rains. Food has been distributed throughout the community.

For its part, Goal has managed to feed almost 500,000 people. Clean water is accessible for the vast majority and cash is being injected into the community through cash-to-work programmes that are being used to take away the rubble.

Most importantly - and the ultimate reason why we consider the response to be a success thus far - there has been no major outbreak of disease.

The task now is to rebuild the city. This is the major challenge and we must accept that it will take years.

The Haitian government's capacity to manage the response has been badly weakened by the earthquake that destroyed most of the government buildings and killed many key staff that would have been involved in managing the reconstruction.

Without clear direction, without a rebuilding policy and without leadership, the reconstruction will be haphazard.

The international community needs to focus on this area now and a more holistic urban planning approach needs to be adopted if we are to maximise the opportunity that the funding for reconstruction affords us.