Haiti's recovery from a devastating quake is "very slow" and has not yet reached down to the Haitian population, Dominican President Leonel Fernandez said Tuesday in Washington according to dpa. The Dominican Republic shares with Haiti the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, although it was largely unaffected by the January 12 quake that killed more than 200,000 people in Haiti. Fernandez said in a lecture at George Washington University that Haiti will need at least 10 years to recover from the quake. He met with US President Barack Obama on Monday. Fernandez called the situation in the troubled nation a "tragedy" even before the quake, and he noted how the disaster "only aggravated" the plight of the poorest country in the Americas. Fernandez said recovery has been so slow for two reasons. First, Haitian authorities were "overwhelmed by the impact of this tragedy." "They were in a state of confusion, there were no institutional channels to deal with the beginning of this tragedy," he noted. In recent weeks, a bipartisan commission has been created that could change that, Fernandez said.
