Wayland Town Crier 1/10/11: Volunteers cling to hope for Haiti. As he drove through the capital of his native Haiti in May, Whitinsville resident Marc Booz noticed a brick wall scrawled with simple red graffiti: "We are tired." "It basically summarized the country," he said, translating the message from Creole. One year ago Wednesday, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, killing an estimated 250,000 people, injuring many more and displacing a million and a half residents in a struggling country already ranked as the Western hemisphere's poorest. As the first anniversary of the tragedy approaches, removal of the rubble – enough to fill a line of shipping containers from New York City to Las Vegas – has only recently begun, starting downtown. "Progress there is very slow," said Joe Sapienza, the pastor of Celebration International Church in Wayland and director of Bread of Compassion, a town nonprofit that sends volunteer construction and medical teams to Haiti. "You step around a corner and see these villages of 500 people, a 1,000 people. And they all live under tents."