Angela Solis de Pena remembered the story that her parents told her of a Haitian man who tried to rape a Dominican woman; after the woman escaped the man chased her and hacked her to death.

“I was petrified of Haitians,” Solis de Pena said. “It made me think of them differently for a long time.”

Now a 34-year-old administrator of a preschool here in Santiago, Solis de Pena said she doesn’t know whether the story was true or not. What she does know is that it made her fear and loathe Haitians, and it was not until she went to college and began reading the Bible and interacting with Haitian students that she realised that perhaps that tale was stretched a bit.

Four months after the Jan. 12 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince, there are signs that the almost 200 years of tensions between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which share the island of Hispaniola, may be reaching a seminal moment for the better.

On that January day when the earthquake struck, the Dominican Republic rushed in tonnes of food, water and supplies to help Haitians. It also opened its borders to international aid workers coming into Haiti and gave university students with ties to Haiti conduits to go back and help their families without any penalty. In addition, the Dominican people and officials organised fundraisers and donated money to the Haiti relief effort.

That reaction surprised many who are all too familiar with the history of bad blood on both sides.

“I think that the Dominicans realised that we are people like them and that this could have happened to them,” said Chilet Regis, a chemist who has lived in Santiago for more than 10 years. “I know they will be compensated for helping Haiti.”

According to Dominican officials, the country has already benefited, with its Gross Domestic Product surging 6.0 percent these past three months, compared to the same period in 2009. More than ever, it now serves as a place where people shop for goods en route to provide aid to Haiti.

Beyond the recent thaw in relations, other more subtle changes have been occurring for the last 15 years. Haitian high school graduates with no social connection to enter the country’s prestigious State University system began to look at the universities in the Dominican Republic as an alternative.

The Haitian students excel despite limited Spanish in the beginning of their freshmen year. Dominicans, who had thought of Haitians as illiterate manual labourers, began to see Haitians in a different light.

“You know they really challenge us to excel in education,” said Solis de Pena. “People were amazed that Haitians could come here and in some instances are at the top and we had to work hard to keep up with them.”

Solis de Pena said she believes that about 70 percent of Dominicans have a positive view of Haitians and that number is expected to rise. Though her views are thoroughly unscientific, a score of Haitian university students here agreed; they report few humiliating experiences at the hands of Dominicans.

Many will quickly tell you that Dominicans are colour-conscious, but they respect people who have money and are educated.

But the majority of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic are not part of the Talented Tenth. Instead, they make up the bulk of the manual labour force of the country and their lot is far from good.

Many Dominicans complain that the “construction” workers have depressed local wages by accepting work for considerably lower salaries than Dominicans. Haitians working in the sugar cane camps or bateys also live in subhuman conditions, according to international human rights observers.

The animosity between the Dominican Republic and Haiti dates back to the 1800s when Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer invaded the Dominican Republic and ruled the eastern part of Hispaniola for more than 25 years. The reign was brutal and to this day, Dominicans have never forgotten that period.

Some Dominicans say that stories of Haitian atrocities are taught in school because officials don’t ever want them to forget that part of their history. Some say that Dominicans have an innate fear and resentment of Haitians because of that period. Even while the Dominican Republic has made strides that are the envy of Latin America, Dominicans feel a certain shame at having been ruled by Haiti, a country that has now earned the moniker of “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”.

For its part, the Dominican Republic, under the presidency of Rafael Trujillo, ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians and has still refused to give Dominican citizenship to children born of Haitian parents, some three generations removed.

Such a strained history will not be mended easily, but Haitians and Dominicans interviewed say that a change is coming.

During a recent conversation with a group of Haitian students in Santiago, all of them voiced frustration at the Haitian government for failing to lift the country out of its miseries. While they acknowledged that they receive fair treatment from Dominicans, they say that the other Haitians could be better treated.

They say that unless Haiti gets its act together, the relationship between the two countries, and above all, universal respect for Haitians will not be sustained.

“It’s impossible for improved relations,” said Wolf Perceval. “Haiti has to advance. Our basic problem is that we’re struggling for survival. That can’t be a good thing.”

For instance, the students harshly criticised the Haitian government’s rush to reopen schools, arguing that the government should have taken this time as a healing period for children who remain traumatised three months after the quake.

“They’re talking about opening schools,” said Judith Despiot, a nursing student. “This is not the time to study, this is a moment to recuperate our mental health, our mindset. People are still dying and they can’t concentrate on studying.”

It has always been young people at the vanguard of positive change. For Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the youth have taken the first steps toward reconciliation.

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

When the Jan. 12 earthquake struck this mountainous country, in less than a minute, it transformed it from one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere to the largest construction site this side of the Atlantic.

The 245,000 ruined or hopelessly damaged structures in Haiti will produce 30 million to 78 million cubic yards of rubble. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

As Haiti’s leaders unveiled a 14-billion-dollar reconstruction plan, international excavation, logistics, transportation and construction companies have lined up for contracts to rebuild the thousands of commercial and residential properties that were destroyed during the seismic shocks that left more than 200,000 dead and about a million people homeless.

Three model homes – two simple wood-frame structures with corrugated roofs and another with a steel frame – have been put on display by the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies near the airport. The groups say they are ready to start construction immediately, but have nowhere to build.

Another group, Danish People’s Aid, has put up four simple wooden houses in the hard-hit Carrefour area, where it hopes to build 500 more.

But before Haiti and international donors can rebuild this devastated city, they must first destroy it.

The task of knocking down, smashing apart and hauling away the mountain of rubble will take years and cost as much as one billion dollars, according to some estimates.

“I have heard the president say that based on what the engineers tell him, it will take 1,000 dump trucks working for 1,000 days to clear away the debris, and I am not sure even the experts know how big is the pile,” said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and diplomat who is a member of the reconstruction team.

What the experts do know is that the rubble is very heavy and very much in the way. U.N. rapid assessment teams estimate that the 245,000 ruined or hopelessly damaged structures in Haiti will produce 30 million to 78 million cubic yards of broken blocks, twisted metal and pulverised concrete – enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome, from playing field to roof, up to 17 times.

U.S. and other international contractors with experience clearing Baghdad after bombings and the U.S. city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina recognise that there is lots of money to be made carting off Haiti’s debris. They are scrambling to partner with local construction firms to secure access to workers and heavy equipment and to align themselves with the Haitian business leaders who have connections to the government and the international donor consortiums that will write the big cheques.

President René Préval might have been overly optimistic about the 1,000 days. If a Mack truck can haul about nine cubic yards of concrete debris, the cleanup could require as many as eight million trips – through the snarl of downtown Port-au-Prince’s narrow streets to the still-nonexistent dumps and recycling centers at the city’s edge.

“How long did it take to remove the twin towers after 9/11? It took them two years, and that was in New York City, and it cost a lot of money. We are Port-au-Prince, and our government doesn’t have any money,” said Philippe Cineas, director general of Haiti Blocs, a concrete-block maker and construction company that has cleared rubble from five sites, including a bank “where we had to work very slowly, very carefully, because they were looking for the vault.”

The Haitian government, using funds from the international community, has targeted only a handful of sites, beginning with schools, hospitals and public offices, where large numbers of people might still be buried. It has also begun to topple a few larger, listing buildings that are in danger of sudden collapse.

Some private companies and individuals have paid to have debris cleared in order to get back to work or to recover the dead. Only a few homeowners have started to dig out.

Dismantling a single large building can cost 20,000 to 80,000 dollars, said Reynold Bonnefil, president of Haytian Tractor, whose firm controls 90 percent of the Caterpillar excavator market.

Funding for the billion-dollar demolition will likely include the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. It is one of the crucial decisions that will be made leading up to a major U.N.-led donor conference at the end of this month.

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a U.N. consultant, said that typically, a tragedy such as this is followed by international pledges of billions of dollars, but then only a slow trickle of help. The government of Haiti, overwhelmed long before this earthquake, is in no position to pester 20 or more complicated donor agencies to follow up on designing projects and disbursing funds, Sachs said.

According to Sachs, the commercial and residential shelters must not be makeshift units that would be destroyed by Haiti’s frequent floods, landslides and hurricanes.

The country will need a revived and expanded construction industry to produce the brick, reinforced concrete and other vital materials. Private companies, domestic and international, should be contracted to set up operations.

Still, the demand for real estate and civil engineering expertise is only expected to increase in Haiti as the attention shifts towards permanent reconstruction, and some development agencies have been calling for care to be taken to avoid slapdash construction fuelled by the haste to house the homeless – such as happened after the disastrous Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

*Special to IPS from the Haitian Times

Marie Saintus sat regally on a wicker chair in the narrow alley by her makeshift home at the Anacaona Stadium, in the middle of this once bucolic city, as she teased her neighbours.

The UN World Food Programme and the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development jointly distribute food in Léogâne, Haiti. Credit: UN PHOTO/Sophia Paris

“Oh, don’t take pictures of food,” Saintus said jokingly. “We don’t want people to know that we have food. Here, take a picture of that little girl. She looks like she needs help.”

But life has not been amusing for Saintus and the roughly 130,000 people who live here, about 20 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the epicentre of the Jan. 12 earthquake.

For the last month or so, residents here have been busy finding relatives, burying the dead and settling into a new lifestyle. People here are proud that while the earthquake destroyed about 80 percent of the buildings, the loss of life was relatively small.

“We’re not like Port-au-Prince,” said Jean Montigene, a schoolteacher at the Lycee of Leogane, which was flattened during the earthquake. “We don’t live on top of each other so we were able to escape to safety.”

While the central government in Port-au-Prince has reported about 20,000 to 30,000 deaths here, people in Leogane put that number closer to 5,000 when all is said and done.

Still, the massive loss of lives and infrastructure in Haiti could have been prevented if earthquake-resistant designs and materials had been used, said a U.S .study released last week.

An on-ground inspection of the affected region showed that the earthquake was not triggered by a surface fault, meaning it was deeper tremors that caused buildings to collapse, leading to most of the deaths.

The five-member team of civil and environmental engineers from the University of Washington also found that many of the buildings that withstood the earthquake, but were damaged, will have to be brought down.

“A lot of the damaged structures will have to be destroyed,” said Professor Marc Eberhard, who led the team. “It’s not just 100 buildings or 1,000 buildings. It’s a huge number of buildings, which I can’t even estimate.”

The team said its study of the destroyed Port-au-Prince region showed no surface evidence of the fault that might have caused the earthquake on Jan. 12.

The Haitian capital suffered widespread destruction when the magnitude-7 earthquake hit.

“A main conclusion is that much of the loss of human life could have been prevented by using earthquake-resistant designs and construction, as well as improved quality control in concrete and masonry work,” the team said.

The team has installed a temporary system of instruments to measure aftershocks and help pinpoint the epicentre, in order to continue monitoring the situation.

But Eberhard said there was a strong need for several permanent monitoring stations close to the earthquake’s epicentre, in order to understand better what caused the earthquake and to forecast future quakes in the area.

The study, which was sponsored by the U.S .Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and U.S. Geological Survey, recommended that simple and cost-effective earthquake engineering be emphasised as the international effort to rebuild Port-au-Prince gets underway. The international community has made a 10-year commitment to the rebuilding process, which could cost 8 to 13 billion dollars.

Eberhard and his team studied the impact of the earthquake in some of the worst-hit areas, including the port of Port-au-Prince, national cathedral, National Palace, Hotel Montana and Union School attended by non-Haitian children. Other places studied by the team included hospitals, schools, bridges and key facilities in the capital.

The team studied 107 major buildings in the centre of the city, which were heavily damaged by the quake, and determined that 28 percent had collapsed and one-third required extensive repairs.

Before the earthquake Saintus was a civil servant working at City Hall. Her pay was uncertain, and she sometimes went a couple of months without receiving her paycheck. “Now I spend my time here wondering what to do and finding a way to feed my children,” said the mother for four. “Right now is not the best time to be looking for work because of all the destruction.”

Meanwhile, Saintus and the many people in Leogane and other parts of Haiti are relying on money sent from relatives in the United States and Canada.

“Without our relatives, we would have died. The government can’t help us. So our family overseas do,” she said.

Haiti has long been known as a Republic of NGOs, a nation of nearly 10 million people loosely held together by a network of more than 3,000 non-governmental organisations. Some argue this formula has done little to develop and inspire the people of Haiti.

“My dream is to see the country redevelops as soon as possible. But like everyone else, we’re sitting and watching,” Saintus said.

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

Seriously injured people continue to provide deep challenges to the city’s barely functioning hospitals, weeks after a massive earthquake overwhelmed medical staff.

A young earthquake victim is treated at an impromptu hospital established by the Jordanian battalion of the U.N. peacekeeping mission. Credit: UN Photo/Sophia Paris

“We try to do the best we can,” said Enid Paret, a nurse at the University Hospital, the city’s largest. “There are many things we do now that we wouldn’t do under normal circumstances.”

Then again, these are not normal times in Haiti, where the country’s health system is under serious strain, despite a daily influx of nurses and other medical professionals parachuted in to help deal with the more than 600,000 people who were severely injured in the 7.0 earthquake that struck this city and the southern provincial areas on Jan. 12.

The earthquake rattled the foundation of the Adventist Hospital in the city’s Diquini neighbourhood, forcing patients and staff into the courtyard and lawn where they remained throughout the weekend.

Nurses like Paret are in the forefront of the race to try to stave off an already astronomical body count. They rush patients to makeshift hospitals, perform triage and assist in providing care.

“We’re not trained to handle such volume of cases so fast,” Paret said. “But we have help coming from all over the world to help us deal with this tragedy.”

A skeleton crew of doctors and nurses, accustomed to a 70-bed hospital with modern operating suites, rushed among 400 patients who made their beds on concrete walkways, gravel roads and bare patches of lawn outside the Adventist hospital.

Receptionists and nurses triaged patients and filled out forms at a table beneath a tarp. A technician read X-rays on a folding table under a tree.

Nick Stevens, a nurse from the U.S. state of Nebraska, said he has run short of IV fluids, painkillers, antibiotics, numbing agents, sutures, gloves, gauze, masks, iodine and antiseptics. The generator is operating, but more diesel fuel is needed.

The hospital has water, but not enough. On a recent day last week, a water expert from Global Medic of Canada began setting up a water purification system to increase the supply of safe water.

“People are dying of infection and dehydration,” he said. “The patients are having to sleep outside. They don’t eat enough. And there’s nothing from the government, no help at all.”

Stevens, whose specialty is obstetrics and gynecology, set up an operating room in a tent of blue tarps in the hospital’s cement driveway. A few feet away, Jean Marvins Benjamin, an eight-day-old triplet born two months early, lay in an incubator with an oxygen tube in his nose as he has difficulty breathing.

In the makeshift operating tent, Yvrose Jeanty, an emergency room nurse who lost her father and two children from the quake, helped amputate the lower leg of a 38-year-old man who had been crushed by a falling building.

“In Canada or the U.S., this leg would be saved. In the U.S. they would put pin and plates and fixate the fracture,” said Jeanty, who was trained in Miami before moving back to Haiti five years ago. “But here, they don’t have the resources.”

“There are tens of thousands of people with orthopedic injuries who need treatment urgently. We have open fractures of every type. Many of them will lose their lives, limbs, live a life of disability,” she said. “We need orthopedic trauma surgeons who can come with their own instruments.”

A few yards away, Pierre Junior Le Riche, 25, lay in the concrete breezeway of the hospital with an IV hooked to his arm. He was on the second floor of a five-storey building that collapsed and spent two days trapped beneath the rubble.

The weight of the cement crushed his lower body. Gangrene crept slowly up his left leg, and his toes were already black. Doctors said they would have to amputate to his knee, if not higher.

At the University hospital, the same situation is repeated.

According to officials, staff there have performed more than 800 surgeries, including 200 amputations under the tent of the hospital, whose facility was destroyed.

“During the first two weeks, we received some traumatic cases; feet, legs, head and broken arms from debris falling on people’s chest or head,” said Alix Lasegue, the hospital’s executive director, adding that about 80 percent of the cases are traumatic, with 20 percent being acute.

According to Lasegue, the surgery unit is unusable, the waiting area has collapsed, and the pediatric department is useless. Like many of the other hospitals, the city’s largest is operating under tents where complex surgeries are performed under primitive conditions.

“Right now, you have the acute devastation – people dead, dying,” said Lasegue. “There’s no running water, there’s no sanitation, there’s no food, there’s no electricity.”

Doctors Without Borders runs three health-care facilities in Port-au-Prince. All of them were knocked out of commission by the earthquake. The group is treating patients in temporary outdoor facilities, but “the best we can offer … is first-aid care and stabilisation,” the group’s project manager for Haiti, who is based in Toronto, said on a press call.

Many patients have crushed limbs and other severe injuries that “cannot be dealt with” in the temporary facilities, he said.

In response, the U.S. is expediting the delivery of medical supplies, providing critical health services, and conducting assessments to help determine health priorities. The U. S. government also is helping to plan for Haiti’s long-term public health needs and harmonising health inputs with other donors and groups led by the government of Haiti and coordinated by the Pan American Health Organisation.

The U.S. government has more than 270 medical personnel in Port-au-Prince, including doctors, nurses, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and others.

With long waits for treatment, thousands living in close quarters at makeshift camps and severely disrupted water supplies, there is an immediate threat of tetanus and gangrene to those who are injured as well as a risk from measles, meningitis and other infections.

There is considerable variation in the official statistics surrounding the magnitude seven earthquake, but as many as 200,000 are thought to have been killed, 1.5 million left homeless and three million affected overall.

Jon Andrus of the Pan American Health Organisation, the Americas arm of the World Health Organisation, said that many survivors are suffering from multiple fractures and internal injuries.

In Haiti, where ailments like tuberculosis and malaria are rampant, children are malnourished and hygiene is already a challenge, the quake has added potentially lethal infections, broken bones, internal injuries and many other health complications.

“By any stretch of the imagination it is going to be incredibly difficult,” he said. “The population in Haiti was already vulnerable and faced enormous health threats.”

Health care experts are unable to say exactly how many amputations they have performed of hands, arms and legs but tens of thousands of patients have been through their hospital doors.

While most injuries occurred when buildings collapsed, officials say they are also seeing patients with gashes and other injuries caused by amateur rescuers who frantically dug survivors from rubble with whatever tools they could find.

“We have dozens and dozens of patients waiting for surgery, including dozens of amputations, and people are still coming in,” said Lasegue head of the University hospital.

At the Renaissance Hospital, which Cuban doctors founded for eye care in 2006 and have now converted into a trauma unit, 45 amputations have been performed in three days, according to Dr. Olga Maria Delgado.

Among their patients was Ticia Vital, a young woman who for two days refused to have her left leg amputated for fear it would disadvantage her in the post-quake country.

“What will I do? How will I manage to survive on my own with just one leg?” she said.

As her leg became increasingly gangrenous, her cousin Chantal Felix – with whom she works selling second-hand shoes in the Bel Air slum – persuaded her to have the operation.

“She had to accept it after the doctors told her the gangrene was spreading and that she would die,” Chantal said.

Unfortunately, Vital’s worries about the future could now be moot.

“She’s not been responding well to all the antibiotics we’re giving her,” said Raquel Garcia, a nurse at the hospital. “I think she has a 90 percent chance of dying.”

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

Astride Auguste was late for an exam at Quiskeya University on that fateful Tuesday, Jan. 12, when the earthquake – or “the event”, as Haitians have come to call it – struck this capital city.

Auguste, an undergraduate student in international affairs and management, was near the campus when she felt the earth shake beneath her. She bounced a few times and eventually regained her composure. A few miles away, many of her fellow students had died after most of the buildings collapsed.

“I can’t believe it,” said a visibly shaken Auguste, days after the disaster. “This is a nightmare. The year has been lost. I don’t know what I am going to do now.”

For Auguste and thousands of university students across this city, attending college was a big part of their dreams for a better life. In less than 45 seconds, their world literally turned upside down.

As the Haitian government and international community scramble to shelter and feed the homeless and the injured, higher education appears to be on the sidelines for now.

Quiskeya and scores of universities and colleges in the capital were destroyed during the earthquake. But none was affected more than that school, which had recently undergone a two-million-dollar physical upgrade.

The State University of Haiti enrolls a mere fraction of high school graduates. The system at one time was considered among the best in the Caribbean. It graduated a coterie of doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers.

But in recent years, amid political turmoil, the system has been lagging and private universities have mushroomed around the capital to serve students who can’t gain admission into the public colleges and professional schools.

“Higher education is one of the best investments Haiti can make right now – there is no greater bang for the buck for developing a country. Haiti needs to rebuild its educated class, the anchor of every stable economy and society,” said Conor Bohan, who runs a programme that provides merit-based scholarships for disadvantaged high school graduates.

Until 1986, the state university, founded at the turn of the century, was the only university licensed to operate in Haiti, controlled by whatever dictator was in power.

However, scores of places that call themselves universities have sprung up in the last 20 years. The most reputable are members of the association of francophone universities (www.auf.org). There are eight members including the state university, the Catholic university (Notre Dame d’Haiti – UNDH) and Quisqueya, the largest private university.

The number of students enrolled in these universities is difficult to pinpoint. But only one percent of Haitians between the ages of 18-24 are enrolled. That rate is the lowest in the hemisphere.

The state university is the largest but the administration is weak. Eleven faculties function quasi-independently, making for a fractured institution.

With about 80 percent of university buildings destroyed, the government held a meeting last week to plan a reconstruction strategy. Some of the ideas thrown around are prefab housing that can be put up in less than a week.

The Haitian Education and Leadership Programme, or HELP, a local university scholarship programme, is trying to use this opportunity to create partnerships between accredited Haitian universities and universities abroad, according to Bohan, its executive director and founder.

“First we’re looking for universities to accept students short-term while the local universities can rebuild, but also to establish long-term partnerships for technical support, professor and student exchanges, advanced degree possibilities for top Haitian graduates,” he said.

Universities that have thus far expressed an interest are Dillard University, a historically black U.S. college in New Orleans, Louisiana, whose students were displaced during Hurricane Katrina, Virginia Tech, Brown University & U. Polytechnique de Montreal.

According to various educators, Haiti’s public schools educate only 10 percent of the school age population.

Universal, free, state-sponsored education is essential to Haiti’s development. It is in the constitution but has been ignored by the government and donors alike.

“Eighty-five percent of Haitians with a university degree have emigrated, the result of Duvalierist anti-intellectual repression and 20 years of political instability,” Bohan said. “In short – Haiti’s educated class has left and is not being replaced.”

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

By Rachel Pratt and Garry Pierre-Pierre
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 21 2010 (IPS)

Marjorie Louis and her two small children are sleeping in the street. Their home is in complete ruins. And Louis has no way to let her mother in Les Cayes know that she survived the deadliest natural disaster to hit this country.

Busloads of people leave Port-au-Prince after a powerful earthquake caused countless fatalities and left the city virtually inoperable. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

“I lost everything and don’t know what to do,” Louis said, while waiting at a bus depot, en route to Les Cayes. “I have no place to live. My daughter has heart problems and I want to make sure she continues to get care. I don’t know when I will return here. But as soon as it gets better [I will].”

Louis and her children were part of an exodus out of the ravaged capital city that began as early as Jan. 13, one day after the 7.0 magnitude quake struck. As the death toll mounts every day, government officials are urging people to evacuate the city so that rescue workers can have unfettered access to those still buried alive.

They also want to remove the bodies of the dead to minimise the public health crisis that is sure to follow this catastrophe.

The survivors need little urging. Millions are seeking refuge from the horror and destruction engulfing Port-au-Prince. The entire city smells of rotting corpses and the formaldehyde – sprayed to neutralise the stench – gives it the aura of a giant funeral parlor.

Throughout the week, U.S. and Canadian citizens have been airlifted out of the city on chartered flights. People with residency in those countries have lined up outside the airport to be evacuated. Diplomats of various nations have allowed children of Haitian parents born in their respective countries to be accompanied to the embassies so they can be reunited with their parents abroad.

Jean Rousseau, a metal worker, was heading to Les Cayes as well, where an uncertain future awaits him. Like so many others, he talked of returning to the city that gave him a means of feeding his family.

“I have no electricity to keep working,” Rousseau said. “There is nothing. Plus I have to let my mother know I’m okay.”

“I hope that things will be fixed very soon so I can get back to work in Port-au-Prince,” he said.

At the U.S. Embassy

In the oppressive heat, more than 400 Haitians lined up outside of the United States Embassy for hours, hoping the Americans would rescue them, that America would be the hero.

U.S. officials told them to show their passport and get on the line. The Haitians with no prior authorisation to enter the U.S. wondered: “How long will this take? Can they really help me get out of the country? Where will I be dropped off?”

“We love our country, we saw it getting better,” said Joanne Gautierre, who owned a beverage warehouse. “[The year] 2009 showed promise and hope. But now after this happened I am really afraid of an epidemic. All of these dead bodies around us and not enough people to move them out. We don’t want to get sick and die.”

“Now I have nothing and I have to get my children out of Haiti,” Gautierre said. “As long as I am out of the country we will manage. I have my brother in law who lives in New York.”

Heading to Canada

Hundreds more people gathered outside the gates of the Canadian Embassy on Delmas, hoping to be put on a flight to Montreal. Many of them lost their passports and prayed that somehow they would be allowed to leave.

Like most people interviewed, many said that while they would like to leave Haiti, ultimately they want to return to their homeland.

“We don’t have a choice,” said one young man who did not want to give his name. “But if things get better, we want to come back. This is our home.”

At the Bus Stops

Haitian government officials, under pressure to clear the city, provided buses for free to people who want to join their families in the provinces. Blue and white school buses are stationed throughout the city and people scramble to obtain a seat.

Others who cannot wait for the free buses head to stations with buses bound to the provinces.

“Everybody is worried about me ” said Marie Petit-Homme, bound for Cap-Haitien. “I’m fine, but we lost everything.”

Petit-Homme, a mother of three, said the house collapsed just before she walked in with her children from school. It was 4:53 PM. She watched in horror as their home crumbled, turned away with her children, and has not returned to her Carrefour Feuilles neighbourhood since.

“It’s too much, so many people dead,” Petit-Homme said, clutching the youngest of her three children. “Oh, what has Haiti done to deserve this?”

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

Excerpt:

Last week, the price of a small can of rice was two dollars. On Tuesday, it cost Haitians 3.50 dollars. A gallon of cooking oil that cost 10 dollars only days ago now fetches 20 dollars.

Haitians displaced by the massive earthquake that devastated their country form a long line to wait for UN-distributed meals. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

What will they cost tomorrow? No one knows.

The price of food staples such as beans, flour, and pasta have skyrocketed since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti, leaving millions homeless and hungry.

And they are the lucky ones. Haitian government officials put the number of people they have buried at 70,000. Rushed burials by families saying “adieu” to loved ones continue to take place daily, adding untold numbers to the tally.

For the survivors, life here has become extremely difficult and tenuous. The economy is at a standstill. There is no electricity, no running water, and no functioning businesses in or near the capital. It is not known when banks and other businesses will reopen.

As the prices of goods continue to surge, tonnes of food aid remains in gridlock at the airport, victim of the Haitian government’s ineptness. Almost one week after the earthquake, the majority of people in dire need of food and water have not received any. As they await the distribution, prices skyrocket.

On a visit to several vending stands, merchants were hesitant to talk about the prices of goods a couple of days ago. Most of them would do so only if a reporter agreed to buy something.

“Who are you, C.I.A.?” asked one irate vendor. “Why do you want to know these things?”

The vendor then became somewhat defensive, saying that merchants were only passing down the prices that they had to pay to buy the goods. The dollar’s value has declined by at least 20 percent. Most gasoline stations are closed, selling their reserves with caution. As soon as word spreads that a station is open, a line nearly a mile long is created, choking traffic.

Some 800 U.S. Marines moved ashore Tuesday in Haiti, ferrying supplies on helicopters and Humvees as the U.S. military force swells to as many as 11,000.

The influx of troops comes as the military struggles to distribute aid throughout the country, without setting off street riots. Defence officials last week ruled out airdrops directly into unsecured populated areas to avoid a situation in which people would be scrambling for food.

But in some cases, large swarms of people have kept helicopters from landing, and troops were forced to drop water bottles into the populated areas instead of distributing them on the ground.

“If you’re trying to do it like this, you’re going to create chaos,” said Himler Rebu, a former Haitian Army colonel who ran unsuccessfully for president four years ago. “They have to establish a location and set up a distribution network.”

Still, many in Haiti fear that if the aid is not forthcoming and people can’t afford to buy the limited food available, then the population will become even more restless and violence could ensue.

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

On Tuesday, Jan. 12, a small story from the Associated Press came across the wires that an earthquake had hit Haiti. Almost instantly, phones began to ring as Haitian Americans started calling each other to find out if there was more to this story.

Facebook Haiti (above), with more than 277,000 members, is one of scores of online communities that have sprung up since the Jan. 12 earthquake. Credit: Facebook Haiti

While there was not much information available at the time, what was clear was that a magnitude 7.0 quake was not good. The aftermath, everyone feared, would be catastrophic.

So while people called each other on the phone and listened to Haitian radio, they began to circulate words through Facebook and other social networks.

The use of social networks as a major means of communication is a first for Haitians, who historically have relied on radio and word of mouth as the best source of information. But the earthquake knocked out all communications out of Haiti, and for a couple of days, Facebook, Twitter and Hi5 were the place for millions of Haitians to congregate.

Hours after the earthquake, scores of online communities had been created on Facebook supporting Haiti. They have names like “Together We Can Rebuild Haiti”, “California for Haiti” and “Earthquake Haiti”.

It was a way for people to vent their emotions, and to stay informed. They were also a source of comfort.

“We will pass the message but that is not true they are not only feeding American citizens. I have friends and family that have gotten food and they are not citizens,” wrote Andie Cassion on her Facebook wall.

“We need to start a large exodus and migrate two million people,” wrote Graffiki on Twitter.

Asie Woozy wrote: “My prayers go to the people of Haiti. To the rest of us, instead of making excuses, pointing fingers use the energy to help Haitians instead.”

On that Tuesday night, one Facebook poster urged every one of her friends to change their wall photo to a picture of the Haitian flag, and within hours, thousands of people had done so. Some, wishing to do so, didn’t know where to find a flag and the poster sent a link.

In the early days, there wasn’t much information coming out of Haiti and the tension and angst among people outside steadily increased. When posters found out that a team of journalists from The Haitian Times was going down to report on the earthquake, the reporters received more than 100 posts requesting that they look for relatives and friends.

The earthquake had knocked out power lines and communications in Haiti and almost a week later, only a handful of radio stations are operating in Port-au-Prince.

One station, Signal FM, has become the glue that has held people together in Haiti, where radio remains king. This is the place where everyone comes to share the latest news since information has become a premium. The station has received and broadcast thousands of announcements from listeners in the United States and Haiti seeking information about loved ones.

“This is part of our social mission,” said Michel Soukar, director of Signal FM. “We’re going to do whatever it takes.”

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

By Rachel Pratt and Garry Pierre-Pierre
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 18 2010 (IPS)

Marjorie Louis was sitting in her kitchen eating dinner when she felt the house shaking, but she didn’t get up.

With many of the city's structures left in ruins, including the presidential palace (background), residents pitch tents for temporary shelter. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

“I didn’t think it wasn’t going to be serious… and was waiting for it to stop. But I noticed it wasn’t stopping and finally tried to get up off the table but just couldn’t get up,” said Louis, a banker who lives in Delmas. “I looked outside the window and saw a large cloud of dust and started to hear my children screaming.”

Louis is considered among the lucky, having survived an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of her fellow Haitians. A few days after the seismic tremors, stories of survival, death and destruction continue to engulf this mountainous Caribbean nation of roughly nine million people.

Her story is similar to those of millions of others after Haiti’s capital was hit with the 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday. Thousands of people were killed and caught under the rubble for the same reason – they didn’t believe this was “the one” and were completely caught off guard.

Haitians explained how mini-earthquakes have become the norm in recent years. But they never imagined that this catastrophe would happen in their lifetimes.

“Now I know that not leaving the house and making my family leave was a mistake. I feel so empty and helpless,” Louis said. Six others in the house stayed as well. Fortunately, they eventually made it out alive.

According to a Haitian doctor, “There is a five-second rule. If you count to five and it keeps shaking, that’s when it’s serious.”

Unfortunately, this one lasted longer than five seconds. But by the time a person finished counting, it was too late to escape.

Lyvee Memon had just arrived home from a funeral at Sacred Heart Church, a historic landmark that was later completely destroyed. She was in her living room when the tremors began. She couldn’t believe it was the real thing and planned to wait for it to stop – until the walls fell all around her. She survived and was pinned under the rubble.

“I was able to find a small, little hole that only a child could fit through, to make it out,” Memon said days later.

Herold Guillaume was driving along Nazon Road when his green Toyota sedan began bouncing. He first thought that another driver had hit his car. He looked up to see buildings and debris falling all around him. The sky was quickly blotted out by a powdery dust.

“I left the car and walked home, all the while thinking about my father who was home alone,” Guillaume said.

Emmanuel Jean was on the top floor of his three-storey home and his father was in the study on the first floor. The robust building crumbled like matchsticks and Jean said he barely escaped.

“I ran downstairs and looked for my father and got him out,” said Jean, an electrical engineer. Since then, Jean has been living in his backyard while making arrangements to join his mother and sisters, who live in Long Island.

“I’m still in shock,” he said. “I never expected this would come. Now we have to start our lives from nothing. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

Excerpt:

Rosemarie Tintin’s black hat and veil barely concealed the sorrow on her face. She recently lost her entire family in Haiti’s devastating earthquake and the only place she could find solace was at her church.

Port-au-Prince residents retrieve the body of their relative from a pile outside the general hospital. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

But that too was hardly possible. Tintin was one of about 300 parishioners gathered in the courtyard of the Saint King of France Church wearing their Sunday best to attend Mass.

“Help me God,” she said. “Help me God.”

A hand-written note had replaced the glass marquee posting the time of the service. “The parish of Saint Louis advised all of its faithful that there will be a mass at 6:30 AM Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010. PS. There will be only one mass. Thanks and courage,” it read.

This was not just a regular church service. For one thing, Mass is usually celebrated in the church pews, not in the yard. So it was on the first Sunday after an earthquake destroyed this city, survivors struggled to keep to their routine, including attending Mass.

“If you can be here today, we have to thank God because those who died did not do so because God doesn’t love them,” said one of the three priests who gave the eulogies. “So let’s pray for them so their souls could rest in peace.”

Few houses of worship escaped the wrath of the tremor. Sacred Heart, the National Cathedral, the Church of Christ… They are all in ruins. At Sacred Heart, the crucifix stands erect surrounded by debris from the fallen roof and walls of one of the most popular churches in Haiti.

“God is telling us something,” Robert Thomas said to no one in particular, as he stood in front of the church.

On Sundays, Haitians usually gather at home with family members, eating pumpkin soup and patties for brunch. But this Sunday, few people were able to manage such luxuries.

Since the earthquake hit on Tuesday, the days have seem like a blur to everyone and the easiness that is associated with the holy day has been a continuation of the macabre task of digging people out who are stuck under buildings. The government has continued to bury bodies in mass graves, offending the sensibilities of many who feel that there should be a better way.

“Oh my God, look what’s going on,” said Gerard Thomas, as health officials removed a few bodies that were lined up along Canape Vert Road. “Look what we Haitians have become… some dogs are better than us.”

Prayer did not start on Sunday. Throughout the week, impromptu Masses have taken place, with people giving thanks to God. Most of them feel ashamed for having survived the calamity that took the lives of neighbours, relatives and friends. “My son was standing next to me and I tried to grab him,” said Thomas. “Then the building fell and I left. I got out and he’s dead.”

While some people found time for church, many simply were too shocked and dazed to remember that they should attend service in this deeply Catholic country.

“I forgot,” said Lionel Guillaume when asked whether he had gone to church Sunday morning. “I don’t know what to think.”

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

The sun had barely set and already, the residents of Rue Berne were making their beds. These bedrooms were makeshifts arranged neatly on one side of the street, away from shaky walls and fragile home frames that remain so dangerous.

A man sets up a shelter in Cité Soleil, Haiti. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

The men erected barricades, leaving enough room for a vehicle to navigate the tiny canyon. Soon they shared whatever they had – pasta, or rice with smoked herring. A few hours later, mothers tucked their children in near their bellies and started to listen to the news on battery-operated transistor radios. By eight p.m., some people had already begun falling asleep.

“You see what we’ve become,” said Herold Joseph, who was born and raised in this long-time middle class enclave. “The streets have become our home, no different from the stray dogs that we used to chase with sticks and stones.”

Joseph’s house, a squat tin-roof structure, now sits precariously like every other home in Rue Berne, victim of a fierce earthquake that almost totally destroyed this capital city. In its wake, millions have been displaced, their lives forever changed.

The known death toll so far has reached 50,000 people, but the misery index remains unmeasureable and will never be fully known. Millions of people completely lost their homes and other houses are too unsafe for people to venture inside, rendering this city a giant homeless shelter.

The scene at Rue Berne was similar to every block in every neighbourhood of the capital, which is ringed by gentle mountains. In many ways, those in Rue Berne are better off than many. Those who cannot sleep among friends in the streets have sought shelter in the courtyards of various government buildings such as the prime minister’s office and the National Television Network, known as by its French acronym, TNH.

In the TNH yard, people brought mattresses or rags to sleep on as the station produces live coverage of the calamity.

“We’ve been the best in terms of television coverage,” said Pradel Henriques, TNH general director. “You have to remember the rest of the country, particularly the area north of Port-au-Prince, does have electricity and we’re the only station that covers the entire nation.”

Henriques said that he was worried that he may not be able to continue his coverage because equipment was strained and breaking down, and he was running out of tape.

But unlike on Rue Berne, these dwellers are permanent, with nowhere to go during daytime. It is their home. As the few hospitals still functioning are overwhelmed with bodies, these government yards have been turned into makeshift health centres. Foreign doctors and their Haitian counterparts deliver babies – most of them born prematurely, induced from the shock their mothers suffered.

The doctors stitch wounds and make casts to mend broken bones.

“It’s very sad,” said Fernando Gomez, a Dominican physician who sought permission from Henriques to remove an expectant mother from the yard to the Dominican border to deliver the baby by Ceasarian section. “We’re just glad we can help our neighbours during this tragedy.”

Dr. Gomez said he has worked almost nonstop, going from government offices to health centres to treat the injured.

“We do the best we can,” he said.

Though this was a natural disaster, political and development problems have played a large role in the calamity. Over the last four decades, Port-au-Prince, once a bucolic town of professionals, has grown into a giant slum with haphazard construction and makeshift neighbourhoods.

The degradation began in the early 1960s, when dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier began bringing busloads of peasants from the countryside to come and sing his praises when the shunned leader had foreign dignitaries visiting his country. But the sinister Duvalier gave them a one-way ticket and seduced by the lights of the big city, the country dwellers stayed and abandoned their farms.

Once such creation is the infamous Cite Soleil.

Once there, they erected tin shacks using poorly mixed cement, with no sewer lines or electrical grid.

Over the years, Port-au-Prince, a city built to handle 200,000 residents, mushroomed to nearly two million. That number is an estimate because there hasn’t been a census taken in nearly three decades.

“I’ve been saying this for years,” said Dr. Mathurin, a geologist. “But I didn’t have the proper pedigree and so I wasn’t taken seriously.”

Dr. Mathurin, who was being interviewed on Radio Signal FM, said that a Purdue University study had pinpointed this earthquake within a week of its touchdown in Haiti.

He also said that in a way, Haiti was lucky because two earthquakes actually hit Haiti but their paths crossed, limiting the impact.

“We were lucky we got the aftershocks instead of the other earthquakes that were to follow,” he said.

As the dawn was settling in, residents gathered their makeshift bedrooms and quickly whisked them into the courtyards and cleared the streets. They bathe, brush their teeth and try to live a normal life.

“It’s going to be a long time,” said Joseph, when asked how long he was going to live on the streets. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He and a group of men headed off to survey the damage as if heading to work. But their task is to look at the debris and destruction that is what is left of their beloved city.

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

A group of Haitian American leaders, state and local officials met late Tuesday night to map out humanitarian relief efforts as the extent of the damage from a devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti became clearer.

The group will put a couple of people on the ground as early as Wednesday for a quick assessment. The goal is to get about 300 people, mostly health care professionals engineers to support foreign government’s efforts.

A command centre will be set up and then the volunteers will arrive after logistics are set up.

The group is hoping to have things in place by this weekend.

“Our goal is to do humanitarian work, and not first aid,” said Brooklyn physician, Jean Claude Compas during the conference of scores of people.

“The Cuban government, the American government, the Venezuelan government and the Dominican government are all doing rescue work.”

The group is calling on people or government to donate water and food supplies. The capital’s infrastructure, already precarious is in shambles. The most telling sign is the near collapse of the gleaming white palace, once a symbol of grandeur in a sea of poverty.

Communications were widely disrupted, making it impossible to get a full picture of damage as powerful aftershocks shook a desperately poor country where many buildings are flimsy.

Electricity was out in some places.

The earthquake was the strongest to rock Haiti in more than 200 years, collapsing a hospital where people screamed for help and heavily damaging the National Palace, U.N. peacekeeper headquarters and other buildings. U.S. officials reported bodies in the streets and an aid official described “total disaster and chaos”.

Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Port-au-Prince, told U.S. colleagues before phone service failed that “there must be thousands of people dead”, according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo.

“He reported that it was just total disaster and chaos, that there were clouds of dust surrounding Port-au-Prince,” Fajardo said from the group’s offices in Maryland.

In addition to the group’s effort, many people have started Facebook pages to help in the relief efforts. The entertainment community is planning several fundraising activities at night clubs throughout New York, Florida and the Boston area.

Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, said from his Washington office that he spoke to President Rene Preval’s chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp, just after the quake hit. He said Longchamp told him that “buildings were crumbling right and left” near the National Palace. The envoy said he had not been able to get back in contact with officials.

With phones down, some of the only communication came from social media such as Twitter. Richard Morse, a well-known musician who manages the famed Olafson Hotel, kept up a stream of dispatches on the aftershocks and damage reports.

The news, based mostly on second-hand reports and photos, was disturbing, with people screaming in fear and roads blocked with debris. Belair, a slum even in the best of times, was said to be “a broken mess”.

The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles (15 kilometres) west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of five miles (8 kilometres), the U.S. Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti. In 1946, a magnitude-8.1 quake struck the Dominican Republic and also shook Haiti, producing a tsunami that killed 1,790 people.

The temblor appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, said earthquake expert Tom Jordan at the University of Southern California.

The quake’s size and proximity to populated Port-au-Prince likely caused widespread casualties and structural damage, he said.

“It’s going to be a real killer,” he said. “Whenever something like this happens, you just hope for the best.”

Most of Haiti’s 9 million people are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards.

In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of the buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances.

Tuesday’s quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola, and some panicked residents in the capital of Santo Domingo fled from their shaking homes. But no major damage was reported there.

In eastern Cuba, houses shook but there were also no reports of significant damage.

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.

Since his appointment last spring as United Nations special envoy to Haiti, former U.S. President Bill Clinton has been called, half-seriously, “president of Haiti” and “viceroy”.

The lofty nicknames reflect Haitians’ belief that they have at last found a figure whose international prominence will open a new window of opportunity for this deeply troubled Caribbean nation of roughly nine million people, where the vast majority eke out a living on less than a dollar a day.

The former president brings star power and loads of contacts in the U.S. administration, along with multilateral donors and investors. But can he fix what really ails the hemisphere’s poorest country – its ineffectual, feckless government?

On Oct. 30, in a disturbing reprise of past events, the Senate unceremoniously dismissed the prime minister, Michèle Pierre-Louis, claiming that in a year in office she had done too little to solve Haiti’s miseries.

Pierre-Louis, who formerly ran a non-governmental organisation promoting education, was widely seen as honest and capable but lacked her own political base, and faced constant sniping in Congress.

While popular support for President Rene Préval’s Lespwa (Hope) party may be slipping, Bill Clinton as U.N. special envoy has been warmly embraced by Washington DC, in Port-au-Prince and among Haitians living overseas – the key stakeholders in Haiti’s future well-being.

But that Clinton was brought to the scene at all was a tacit admission that the U.N., which has had a force of 7,000 soldiers and more than 1,000 police personnel in Haiti since 2004, lacked the power to turn things around by itself.

The force, known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH, has withstood criticism from almost every quarter in Haiti for failing to curb violence and, in some instances, for abusing Haitians. Still, MINUSTAH’s work has been a catalyst for renewed optimism in Haiti and abroad.

It has, for instance, helped to transform the Haitian National Police into an institution that has won respect from the population at large. Around the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, police are ubiquitous, and there is a feeling that people are safer than they have been in a long time.

People stay out later, and a semblance of nightlife is returning to the bars and restaurants of Petion Ville – the middle class suburb perched on the hilltops overlooking Port-au-Prince. Kidnappings and other forms of violent crime are down throughout the country. Still, a recent U.N. report judged that the improvement is “extremely fragile”.

For his part, Clinton has narrowed his mission to a few basic but deeply important elements: disaster mitigation and prevention; ensuring that donors disburse pledges; supporting recovery programmes; and getting more private international investors to Haiti. All of these signal a plan to shake loose more money from donors and investors to shore up Haiti’s crippled economy and devastated infrastructure.

In effect, he’ll be spending more time outside Haiti than inside, where Haiti’s dysfunctional political system has been as much, if not more, a cause of the country’s economic woes than donor or investor recalcitrance.

Bad Government

Haiti’s problems – runaway population growth, acute shortages of food and basic necessities, environmental degradation – seem insurmountable when coupled with a weak and dysfunctional government.

Despite these problems, there is an air of optimism across this tiny nation – with good reason. Haiti has had its debt of roughly 1.2 billion dollars wiped out from the international lenders, thus saving the impoverished country about 50 million dollars in annual payments.

The U.S. and Canada have modified their earlier travel warnings, which kept many would-be tourists away. A slew of aid programmes, including road and market construction projects, are visible signs that Haiti is moving forward.

U.S. trade legislation, passed last year, HOPE II, throws open a huge window of opportunity. HOPE II offers Haiti duty-free, quota-free access to U.S. markets for the next nine years. No other nation enjoys a similar advantage.

At a recent buyers’ forum in Port-au-Prince, forum participants expressed “support and optimism that the ‘Hope II’ and Better Work Haiti – a unique partnership programme of the International Labour Organisation and the International Finance Corporation – could bring sustainable economic benefits to Haiti.”

Representatives from George Soros’ Open Society Institute told The Associated Press about a planned 50-million-dollar partnership with Haitian shipper Gregory Mevs to build a free-trade zone of clothing factories.

In his address to the forum participants, Clinton estimated that up to 100,000 garment industry jobs could be generated, although many are low-paid at two dollars a day.

Can Clinton fulfill the hopes that the stakeholders, as well as Haitians themselves, have for him? According to Robert Maguire, a political science professor at Trinity College in Washington and a leading expert on Haiti, the ex-president is well-equipped for the task.

“I think Clinton will draw tremendously on his approach to his work in Haiti from his two-year experience as Special U.N. Envoy to post-tsunami recovery [in Asia],” Maguire said.

Clinton also has a private agenda – namely, redressing a key foreign policy failure of his presidency. As a first-term president in 1994, Clinton put the White House behind an effort to return to power President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been forced into exile in 1991 following a bloody coup d’etat led by Army General Raoul Cédras.

Some 20,000 soldiers and police – most of them from the U.S. – were sent to Haiti, in what amounted to Clinton’s first foreign policy challenge.

Clinton took these steps despite deep reservations from the Haitian ruling classes, forever suspicious of Aristide’s motives. But under fierce attack from right-wingers in Congress for committing U.S. troops and resources to what they considered a perpetual failed state, Clinton pulled the soldiers out of Haiti and aborted the nation-building steps that were necessary for democracy and economic development to flourish in the hemisphere’s poorest country.

At the same time, the failure to effectively pressure President Aristide and his successors to pursue reforms and respect democratic institutions further polarised and paralysed the country.

A decade later, Haiti found itself plunged into political disarray once again. In 2004, the U.S., France and Canada sent troops to escort Aristide out of the country after the president faced an armed rebellion that was a whisker away from the gates of the National Palace.

Many Haitians and liberals in the U.S. believed that Clinton’s subsequent abandonment of Aristide left the Haitian leader with no real allies – and ended up reversing the gains achieved by pushing the army regime from power.

A Republic of NGOs

Haiti has come to resemble a “Republic of NGOs,” with some 3,000 organisations – large and small – undertaking what World Bank President Robert Zoellick called “flag-draped, feel-good projects”.

For many in Haiti, particularly the desperately poor, the most significant measure of success for Clinton’s mission will be the restoration of Aristide to power a second time.

Haiti’s poverty-stricken majority continue to have a visceral connection with the soft-spoken former priest, whose charisma still looms large even though he has been away for five years. Yet Aristide’s popularity continues to puzzle outsiders. By most measures, his presidency was a failure.

At Aristide’s former home in Tabarre, a banner celebrating the former president’s birthday hangs over the black gate. Graffiti scrawled on the fading walls of the building proclaim, “Aristide has to return soon.”

For the moment at least, Bill Clinton, who is no stranger to the art of charismatic leadership, will have to do.

*Special to IPS from The Haitian Times.