One of the many refugee camps set up around Haiti. (Submitted by Julian Donald)

Bio: Julian Donald, based in Toronto, has been an international aid and development worker since 2005 and has assisted relief efforts in Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea, and Haiti. He spent seven months in Haiti after the earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010 with Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, as a logistician and project co-ordinator. Ahead of the first anniversary of Haiti's earthquake, the CBCNews.ca Community team asked him to share his most enduring memories of his time there.

My story: I arrived in Haiti with MSF about a month after the earthquake. I still find it impossible to convey the scale of the disaster. It was simply shocking. I could see it from the air as I flew in to Port-au-Prince. Looking down at the city, I could see entire neighbourhoods that had collapsed or had only a few walls still standing here and there.

I was put to work as soon as I got off the plane, of course, and ended up working with the non-food item distribution team handing out emergency relief supplies to displaced people. There were more than a million people left homeless by the earthquake, or about a third of the population of the city. To put that in perspective, try to imagine what it would be like if the entire city of Calgary suddenly found itself without shelter. All of our teams were working non-stop. If there had been time to think about it, it would have been overwhelming. But as it was, we just kept going, doing what we could.

In the six weeks or so of our distribution program, our team alone handed out over 140,000 items -- things like tents, soap, blankets, jerry cans, buckets, and more -- in 45 locations to about 11,000 families. At the same time we were doing that, other MSF teams were operating 26 health facilities across the area, including building four new hospitals.

When you're that overwhelmed, it helps to have amazing people around you. As in all of MSF's interventions around the world, most of the people working with us in Haiti are local, and I couldn't help but be inspired by my Haitian colleagues. The first night the heavy rains started, a friend of mine and his family lost what few possessions they had managed to rescue from the ruins of their house when their temporary shelter flooded and collapsed. I found out about it when he showed up for work the next morning -- an hour early as always.

The next big project I had was to turn an old school bus into a mobile clinic. We took out all the seats, cut a couple of new doors in the side, built in some soundproofed partitions, and added a few solar-powered fans to help keep things cool inside. "Emeline," as the bus was named, and a team of doctors and nurses provided medical care to a big camp of about 45,000 displaced people in Port-au-Prince.

One of the last things I worked on before I came home was a shelter-building program to help families move from temporary shelter (often made of cardboard and plastic sheets) to more adequate housing. A family of five or six people living in the camps typically has five or six square metres of space in their shelter. We helped them build much bigger shelters (up to 25 square metres) that had steel frames to provide solid protection against wind and rain.

This shelter program left me with some of my most poignant memories of working in Haiti. In particular, I will never forget the sight of one family moving into their new shelter, the inside of which they had carefully divided into two bedrooms, kitchen/dining room, and living room. Outside their new shelter, their old one -- rotten cardboard, dirty sheets, and rubble -- was burning in the street.

Do you have stories to share about Haiti? Email us at yournews@cbc.ca.