The first anniversary of the calamity that struck Haiti is finding Dr. Chantal Baril, a pediatrician with almost 30 years of practice in New York, getting ready to return to her birth place. She lived to tell the tale and pick up pieces of life in a broken country, left with least 230,000 dead and 1.5 million left homeless.

"I remember the vibrations vividly," she said while winding up a visit to her mother's home-away-from home. "I was in the bedroom on the computer when I felt the first vibrations and I said to my mother; 'It's the earthquake' and we have to act quickly and we did."

Dr. Baril, who practices her medical craft that saves many lives at the General Hospital in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, had heard quite a lot about an impending earthquake in the two years preceding the disaster. But when it struck she wasn't quite prepared for the devastation it left in its wake.

"We went under the frame of the door and then we felt the second vibration, a powerful one," she recalled. "There was movement back and forth and I said to my mother 'Lord Jesus save me.' The Almighty heard our prayer. For two years we had heard warnings on the radio and elsewhere about the impending earthquake and so we knew what was happening. Although the vibrations each lasted for a few seconds it felt like a lifetime." 

The fore-warnings had prepared her for the act of nature but not for its aftermath.

Dr. Baril, who lived in the hills of Thomassin several miles away from the earthquake's epicenter in Port-au-Prince, fared better than almost two million Haitians.

She didn't suffer any serious damage to her property and no loss of life among her immediate family. But the deaths and destruction she saw in the capital has left her with memories that will never be erased.

"The Lord was with us on January 12th, but the extent of widespread destruction and deaths in the City was heart-breaking," she said in New York after participating in a day-long seminar on Haiti organized by the Caribbean-American Medical and Scientific Association at the Kingsbrook Medical Center, in the heart of Central Brooklyn. "It left the country devastated and it may take us several years to get back to some semblance of normalcy."

The shockingly high figure of fatalities and damage told and appalling story: more than 230.000 lives lost, some say the actual toll was more like 300,000 killed; 1.5 million homeless in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country, many of them now living in tent cities that dot the landscape; $10 billion in infrastructural damage, most of it yet to be cleared up.

"The earthquake killed many of my colleagues, their friends and relatives," Dr. Baril, who was trained in Haiti but learned much of her specialty in pediatrics in Paris. "In one case, a colleague and friend lost five members of his family. Others lost less but death and destruction were everywhere. Some friends were killed in a church when it collapsed.

Another friend lost a son in Miami who suffered a fatal heart attack when he saw the reports of deaths and the damage on television. Port-au-Prince was left in shambles and the hospital where I work was closed."

Within days, she joined thousands who crossed Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic where she remained for weeks, but returned to help her country pick up the pieces.

"Haiti is now a disaster area," she said. "Most of the rubble remains in the streets, not cleared; unemployment is terribly high; the economic conditions are abysmal; and there is little hope. I voted in the November election, hoping and praying for a new government that would take us out of the miserable conditions in which we find ourselves, but up to now we don't know who won or lost the election."

But that's not all.

"We now have cholera, a disease Haitians didn't know much about and it has taken thousands of lives," she said. "Many people died quickly and out of ignorance of the disease. Then, there was the hurricane (Tomas) that added to the horrible conditions. We need dramatic change in Haiti. We need everything."

The mother of a teenage daughter and an adult son, who just ended eight years of services in the U.S. Army, is returning home tomorrow after her brief New York visit during which she stayed with her mother.