I WONDERED whether the American Baptist missionaries who filled several rows of my flight from Miami had read the latest travel warning.
“The Department of State strongly urges US citizens to avoid travel to Haiti,” it begins. It refers to “violent crime, including armed robbery, homicide and kidnapping” but it was the mention of two Americans being robbed, shot and killed on the airport road that got my imagination going. Oh well, I relativised the information; 55 people were shot during a recent weekend in Chicago, a city the size of Port-au-Prince.
As I walked out of the airport, a ragged old man reached a gnarled hand through the chain-link fence, begging. Haiti didn’t feel dangerous, just desperate. Two of the urchins who clean windscreens in traffic spied me in the back of a “tap-tap” – a pick-up truck that serves as a taxi – and risked their lives trying to jump in, crying, “Give me dollar. Give me dollar.” Port-au-Prince was always a city that lived in the street but never more so than since the earthquake.
The blue plastic tarpaulins that were distributed by aid organisations last January are reaching the end of their lives.
You see them everywhere, holed and frayed, anchored with ropes to the sides of buildings as lean-tos, pitched as tents in the middle of busy streets, because there is nowhere else to sleep. Televisions blare from inside them.
Every pavement is a shopping centre, where the “ti-marchands” hawk sugar cane, fruit and vegetables, soft drinks, calls from mobile phones, shoes, clothing, cigarettes, DVDs and tape recordings. Uniformed school children mingle with the vendors.
Electricity – back to pre-quake levels – is one of the few things that has improved. Rumour has it that Wyclef Jean, the country’s best-loved singer, who lives in the US, paid for the power to come back on so Haitians could watch the World Cup. They’re losing interest now that the South American and African teams have been eliminated.
The stench of rotting garbage has replaced the stench of bodies. One thing hasn’t changed: the spectacle of tens of thousands of buildings, shaken off their foundations, leaning, collapsing and crumbling into heaps of rubble.
Near the Champs de Mars, I saw men and women in bright yellow T-shirts, emblazoned with the words “Let us stand up”, hack away at the concrete with sledge hammers, then shovel the broken pieces into wheelbarrows. Discouraged by the stultifying heat, half of them sat in the shadow of a wall. The government pays them $5 a day.