On the wind-whipped hills north of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, Berthenid Dasny holds the keys to the gated memorial erected for Haiti’s earthquake victims. Thousands of bodies are buried here in a mass grave dug after a magnitude 7 earthquake shook the country on Jan. 12, 2010.

“They’ve forgotten about this place; it should look better than this,” Dasny says as she walks past the overgrown grass, rusted metal statues and brittle brush. For the past year, she has been the memorial’s groundskeeper, though she has never been paid.

“You must remember the humans buried here. They were just like us and should always be honored, not forgotten,” she says. Dasny believes some of her own relatives who were never found after the quake are buried in the grave.

The earthquake’s main shock lasted almost 30 seconds. A series of aftershocks soon followed. An estimated 220,000 died, though Haiti’s official estimates are higher. Some 1.5 million people were displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration. About 300,000 were injured, and large parts of the country were buried under tons of twisted metal and concrete.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

Donors from around the world swiftly pledged billions of dollars in aid and made promises to rebuild. But a decade on, Haitians who survived say they feel forgotten, as much of the goodwill and billions have been lost to waste, greed and corruption.

Elizabonne Casseus, 50, is trying to keep her family afloat. She lives with 17 relatives in a small shelter in Canaan, a slum north of Port-au-Prince inhabited by displaced earthquake survivors. Today, the sprawling array of concrete homes and wooden shacks is home to more than a quarter of a million people. There is no running water; there are no sewers and few roads.

Aid, Casseus says, “was good for the people that got it, but not for me.”

Her flimsy one-room shack is covered with a gray tarp, stamped with logos of the U.S. Agency for International Development. She bought the cover before coming to these windy hills after spending five years in a squalid tent camp near downtown Port-au-Prince. She had hoped the foreign aid would help her repair her home, destroyed in the quake.

Haiti has long been the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, and the earthquake only made things worse. In the first year after the quake, the economy contracted by more than 5 %.

Don’t see the graphic above? Click here.

Moved by the grisly images of the death and destruction, nations around the world pledged almost $10 billion to Haiti. In addition, $3 billion more was donated to worldwide charities that sent thousands of volunteers to the island. Promises were made for new roads, schools, government buildings and permanent, earthquake-proof housing. Haiti’s long-troubled economy was going to be revitalized.

While millions poured into Haiti in the first two years after the quake, giving the economy a boost, signs were emerging that reconstruction wouldn’t live up to those promises.

“There were so many opportunities after the earthquake that could have reduced so much poverty,” says Kesner Pharel, a Haitian economist. He calls the last 10 years a “lost decade.”

By 2012, millions of cubic feet of rubble still filled the streets. More than 500,000 people still lived in squalid tent camps, according to the International Organization for Migration.

High-profile groups created to help coordinate the flow of aid money stopped operating. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, set up to streamline and provide transparency for major aid projects and co-chaired by former President Bill Clinton, had already disbanded by the fall of 2011, and less than half of the $4.6 billion pledged to projects was spent.

A 2013 Government Accountability Office investigation found that USAID had underestimated the cost of infrastructure and housing projects, forcing it to substantially reduce the number of homes it originally planned to help build. The GAO also found that most USAID contracts went to non-Haitian companies, leaving local businesses out of any reconstruction boon.

And an NPR investigation five years after the quake found that the American Red Cross, which took in half a billion dollars from U.S. donors, had only built six permanent homes, not the 132,000 it had claimed. The Red Cross disputed NPR’s reports and objected to findings of opaque bookkeeping and exorbitant overhead costs.

Economist Pharel says that on top of the botched reconstruction effort, Haiti’s constant political turmoil, weak institutions and poor governance squandered international funds and goodwill. The United Nations has struggled in recent years to get donors to fulfill their aid commitments. Last year, it only met 30% of its funding goals to Haiti, according to the U.N.

In recent months, though, citizens have been demanding more accountability from their leaders, not only for the earthquake aid but also for billions of dollars provided to Haiti from an aid program sponsored by Venezuela, known as PetroCaribe. Opponents of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse accuse him of embezzling some of the PetroCaribe funds, and they’ve taken to the streets demanding he resign. Moïse denies all allegations.

This fall, demonstrations turned violent, leaving 50 people dead and more than 100 injured. Schools and businesses were shut down for weeks. Critical food aid, especially outside the capital, couldn’t reach much of the population as demonstrators blocked highways and roads. About a million Haitians suffer severe hunger. Human rights advocates say gangs have grown in the midst of the political turmoil.

But many Haitians are no longer waiting for government or aid groups to build them more permanent homes. Casseus, who relocated to the sprawling slum outside Port-au-Prince, buys sand and stone whenever she has a little extra money so that one day, she can build a more permanent structure on the land she bought.

She admits it is slow going for her and her husband, a car mechanic. “Sometimes he goes out all day long and comes back with no money,” she says.

Dasny, the earthquake memorial’s groundskeeper, also hopes for a better place to live. For now, she has cobbled together a two-room house on the dusty hillside where she lives by the mass grave. It is made of wooden slats and corrugated tin that rattles and roars with every gust of wind.

Like Casseus, she keeps a large pile of stone and sand outside her door. When she has work or sells one of her goats, she uses the money to buy stones. She breaks the rocks and adds to the piles, getting ever closer to her goal of building a new home.

Authorities say at least nine people have died in severe storms that are spreading across much of the United States, bringing dangerous winds across the South and blinding snow and ice to parts of the Great Plains and Midwest.

At least seven tornadoes have been confirmed in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the National Weather Service.

Three people were confirmed dead in Alabama near the town of Carrollton in Pickens County after “an embedded tornado within a long line of intense thunderstorms” ravaged the area, according to the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

In Lubbock, Texas, two first responders were struck and killed by a vehicle as they were attending to a traffic accident brought on by icy road conditions. A 27-year-old police officer died at the scene, the Associated Press reported, while a 39-year-old firefighter was pronounced dead at the hospital. A second firefighter injured at the scene was in critical condition.

A third person was reported dead in Texas when a car flipped into a creek in Dallas as severe thunderstorms swept through the city.

On the other side of the Texas border in the town of Benton in Bossier Parish, La., winds were so strong that they peeled the roof off an entire wing of a middle school, local TV station KSLA reported.

Firefighters in Bossier Parish recovered the bodies of an elderly couple on Saturday near their demolished trailer, the sheriff’s office wrote in a post on Facebook.

Another man died when a tree fell on his house in Oil City early Saturday morning, according to the Caddo Parish, La., coroner’s office, as reported by the AP.

The violent thunderstorms got underway in Texas and Oklahoma on Friday, dumping rain and bringing high winds as the storm system moved east and northeast. In Texas and Mississippi, meteorologists recorded winds as high as 80 miles per hour — the speed of winds in a Category 1 hurricane.

The National Weather Service reported an “enhanced risk” of severe storms in parts of the region, declaring “the greatest threat for tornadoes” in parts of Alabama, Georgia and the western Carolinas. Severe thunderstorms also passed through Arkansas on Friday night.

By Saturday, the destruction was widespread, with downed trees and power lines scattered across the streets, and many homes damaged or destroyed.

Parts of the region remained in a blackout on Saturday as storms continued to churn. More than 105,000 people in Georgia were without power, according to the website Poweroutage.us. Nearly 83,000 in Alabama and 35,000 people in Mississippi were also without power.

As the severe weather continued to move northeast on Saturday into colder climates, the Chicago area braced for ice and snow, cancelling some 1,000 flights, the AP reported. The National Weather Service in Chicago also warned of nearly 20-foot-high waves on the city’s lake shore, and freezing rain brought power outages to more than 5,000 structures in northern Illinois.

Snow also fell in other parts of the region on Saturday. In Kansas, the streets were coated with a 1-inch dusting, while much of Iowa was in whiteout conditions as four inches of snow fell on Des Moines.

East of the Mississippi River, the weather was much sunnier, with temperatures that were 20 to 30 degrees higher than normal for this time of year. Many areas were expected to set record highs, including a high of 70 degrees in Washington, D.C. and 67 degrees in New York City.

Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, has won a landslide victory in a hotly contested election, dealing a stinging rebuke to Beijing’s efforts to control the island’s democratic government.

“Democratic Taiwan and our democratically elected government will not concede to threats and intimidation,” Tsai declared to thousands of cheering supporters at an election rally outside her party’s campaign headquarters Saturday night. “The results of this election have made that answer crystal clear.”

A record 8.17 million voters cast their ballots for Tsai, according to Taiwan’s election commission, the most ever for a presidential candidate since the island began holding direct presidential elections in 1996.

Tsai’s vote total put her ahead of her opponent, the populist mayor Han Kuo-yu, by almost 20 percentage points in what has become one of the island’s most closely-watched presidential and legislative races in its short democratic history. Tsai’s party, the Democratic Progressive Party, also maintained its majority in Taiwan’s legislature, clearing a path for Tsai to push through a number of educational and health care reforms.

Tsai’s margin of victory — she garnered more than 57% of the popular vote — marked a stunning turnaround. More than half a year ago, she lagged behind the Kuomintang party’s Han in the polls. She staged a comeback in large part by taking an aggressive stance in support of Hong Kong residents protesting Beijing’s rule.

“Young people in Hong Kong have used their lives and shed their blood and tears to show us that ‘one country, two systems’ is not feasible,” Tsai said, referring to Beijing’s system of governance in Hong Kong, at a rally the night before the vote. “Tomorrow, it is the turn of young people of Taiwan to show Hong Kong that the values of democracy and freedom overcomes all difficulties.”

Han, by contrast, had welcomed closer economic ties with Beijing and promised repeatedly at political rallies to “make Taiwan safe,” an implicit criticism that Tsai’s policy toward China might provoke military action.

Han, who entered the race with deep pockets of support among Taiwan’s rural communities, was hurt by a series of rhetorical gaffes and a perceived unwillingness to confront Beijing over protests in Hong Kong in the months before the election.

Tsai’s victory is a sign that Beijing’s efforts to co-opt Taiwan’s political and commercial institutions through a mixture of sticks and carrots has had the opposite effect, mobilizing a younger, more pro-independence electorate to support Tsai.

“Demographics played in Tsai’s favor. Young people identify with Taiwan and the democratic values that Tsai’s platform promised to represent and protect to a greater degree than her competitor,” said Jonathan Sullivan, China program director at the University of Nottingham and a Taiwan studies specialist. “These same demographics ought to worry Beijing, because they only point in one direction, and it’s not unification.”

China has vowed to “reunify” Taiwan ever since the retreating Kuomintang party set up a government-in-exile on the island in 1949, and it considers Taiwan a Chinese province. In the decades since, Beijing has sought to isolate Taiwan, whittling down Taipei’s diplomatic allies. It has also refused to rule out military force against Taiwan for the sake of reunification.

But while China looms in the background of every Taiwanese election, this presidential race turned into an especially heated proxy vote on how Taiwan should engage with China, whose role in suppressing protests in nearby Hong Kong has cast a shadow over Taiwan’s own future.

Beijing had sought to co-opt Taiwan’s in the months leading up to Saturday’s vote. In July, Beijing banned Chinese citizens from traveling to Taiwan on their own, decimating Taiwanese businesses dependent on mainland tourism. China has sailed its new aircraft carrier, the Shandong, weeks ahead of the presidential election and circled Taiwanese airspace with its fighter jets. Taiwanese authorities also suspect Chinese state-backed agents are behind a wave of political disinformation that have plagued both its 2016 legislative election and this year’s presidential race.

On Saturday, Chinese state media published muted reports of Tsai’s win, criticizing her for what they saw as her deliberate antagonizing of Beijing.

“Taiwan’s DPP leader Tsai Ing-wen is expected to sweep a landslide victory in elections, and analysts from Chinese mainland forecast more obstacles in cross-Straits relations after her reelection, leading to some calling for a firm preparation for reunification,” Chinese state-run tabloid Global Times tweeted, just minutes after Tsai officially declared victory.

In her next four years in office, Sullivan said, Tsai will have to delicately balance growing calls for independence among her supporters with Beijing’s more pugnacious approach to cross-Strait relations.

“She will face pressure [from her own party] on one side and Beijing on the other,” said Sullivan. “I expect Beijing to continue to squeeze Taiwan internationally, go after more allies, invest in Taiwanese media, keep up its [political influence] activities and indulge in shows of military might and bellicose rhetoric.”

The perceived urgency of this year’s election spurred some voters to undertake extreme measures. Taiwan does not allow absentee voting, so thousands of Taiwanese living abroad flew back to Taiwan to cast their ballot. Twice the number of Taiwanese living abroad registered to vote this year than the number who did so in the last election.

Among those flying to Taipei specifically for the election: Hong Kong residents.

“We want to thank Taiwan for their support of Hong Kong,” said Gary Chiu, a Hong Konger who took a flight to Taiwan ahead of the vote.

Hong Kongers peppered political rallies in support of Tsai throughout the week, eager to witness direct democracy.

“This is only the country with a Chinese community that enjoy real democracy and real freedom,” said Samantha Lu, another Hong Kong resident who was in Taipei for the vote. “Once you lose your freedom, it’s not easy to get it back.”