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Click here to find out how you can support Haiti as the nation continues to recover from the devastating earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince early this year. – NewsOne Staff

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — More than 100 long days after the earthquake, Ginette Lemazor, her husband and their impish 5-year-old boy are still living in a filthy mechanics’ lot on Avenue Poupelard.

At least, Ms. Lemazor said, they are no longer sleeping in a junked car, but in a flimsy structure fashioned from plastic sheeting and salvaged wood. They have a bed — “Please, make yourself at home,” she said, pointing to it — and a chair. Yet their yard remains a jumble of rusty wrecks and their future a question mark.

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“The owner wants to evict us,” Ms. Lemazor said of the 100 post-quake squatters who remain, out of 300, in the Union Garage lot. “But he knows we have nowhere to go. Really, who would stay here if they did?”

If Avenue Poupelard bustled with a desperate, survivalist energy two weeks after the earthquake, it now emits a low-level hum as residents, vendors and business owners adjust to the snail-like pace of this shattered city’s recovery.

On this centrally located street, the state of emergency is clearly over: the corpses have disappeared, the stench of death has lifted and the foreign doctors who took over the community clinic have gone home. Louis Fils, a 66-year-old coffin maker who churned out wooden boxes for premium prices right after the quake, is holding a liquidation sale.

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