 and in the School of Humanities and she went to Harvard. She's writing a book on this topic that she's going to be talking about today. Hey, she has written a number of books, won all kinds of awards, been up for others, was a winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the Penn Martha Outland Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Writers Rosenthal Award, and a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, as well as another of my disease publications. She often writes on travel too, so we're very fortunate that she's with us today, Amy Willins. Thanks so much, I'm so glad to be here. I want to talk about Haiti and my engagement with Haiti, which is now a quarter of a century long. I realized this for various facts, which I was wondering about for various reasons. First of all, I think Haiti is a big mystery to everybody. It's so close to the United States. It's really a drop cake off the coast of Florida. It takes about an hour and you have to get there by plane from Miami. Yet it's really, really far away from the United States. If you've spent time there, you know that you can go into Mountain Village. It is where they don't really know who's the President of the United States. They barely know who's their President if they don't have a radio. It can be very, very removed from all of modern life and seem, in fact, like it's still in the post-slavery era in Haiti. I think to understand Haiti, you have to understand its history. One of the questions I get all the time as a journalist with an expertise on Haiti is, why is it like that? What they mean is, why is it the poorest country in the hemisphere? For us, we do report on Haiti. We always say, let's make sure not to include that in our stores because it's become a cliché that Haiti doesn't really mean that much, the poorest country in the hemisphere. Why is it like that? I'll try to give you a couple of reasons why it's like that before I go on to talk a little bit about what Haiti is like there today. Haiti was a huge sugar-producing slave colony for France. It was really the backbone of the French Empire. It produced a huge amount of sugar for the world. All of this was based on African slavery, like the United States in certain ways, but even more intense. During the period of the French Revolution, when all sorts of ideas were trickling out of Paris to Haiti, the Haitian slaves and also their mulatto brothers and sisters heard about the rights of man. They decided to take matters into their own hands after generations of brutality. Not always generations, by the way, the French were just, it was cheaper to work them to death than it was to raise up a new crop of slaves from their original slaves. So they kept shipping and shipping and shipping new people over, which is why when the Revolution began to boil, so many of the slaves were born in Africa, hundreds of thousands of them actually. So there is this famous thing in Haitian history called Bois Caignan. Bois Caignan is a wooded area in the middle of the country. This is where slaves from various plantations in the area gathered in 1791 and had a ceremony, as we say in Haitian Creole, a voodoo ceremony, slaughter of animals and libations to the gods, and began, they inaugurated in this way their Revolution. And it was a really, really bloody revolution. As you can imagine, a revolution by slaves against their cruel masters would be there was burning down of plantations, there was rave, there was decapitation. The slogan of one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution was Bois Caignan, which means burn down the hazes and cut off their heads. But they won against Napoleon's army. I can't even think of what the equivalent would be today, really. It wouldn't be the people of Egypt victorious against Mubarak. It would be the tribal people of Kenya against the United States military. Something like that would be the equivalent. So they won, and they gained their independence from France in 1804. And I think this is one of the things you have to think about when you wonder why he's the way it is. It led the Third Revolution. There was the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. And many people argue that these three revolutions shaped the modern world we live in today. Changed utterly the way geopolitics was manifested, and also changed the way the global economy worked. It began to shift from slave labor to actual paid labor in the empires that were then important in the world. So history made Haiti, and its failures are not what's implied in that question. Why is Haiti the way it is? I always say take race out of it. It's about history. But of course the history is racial, and was racialized from the beginning. So that when the Haitians became free of France, the Americans thought, oh my, because we were still a slave state. So we looked at Haiti and we said, okay, we're not recognizing this, the first black republic in the history of mankind. No way. It was too risky for us. And it wasn't until 1862 when the southern states seceded that we then recognized Haiti. And Saint Frederick Douglass is our first ambassador to Haiti. At the same time, while the U.S. was not recognizing or trading with Haiti because of its status as a free black republic, France also was, as you can imagine, quite irritating. And France then said to the Haitians, I think it was in 1826, they said, you know what, you have to cast. You won this war. It's probably the only country in the world that won the war and then paid reparations. But that was a racially based thing the French felt they could ask. And the reason the French felt justified in asking for reparations from the Haitians was they destroyed French property and they stole French property. And what French property was it that they stole? Themselves. They stole themselves from the French. And they did agree to pay those reparations because they needed desperately to be a part of the world economy. And France demanded 120 million gold fronts from the Haitians. And the Haitians didn't finish paying until 1947. So imagine a country with that kind of debt. It was crippling. It is estimated that the value of those 120 million gold fronts in today's dollars would be 20 to 22 billion dollars for a baby nation of illiterate slaves trying to run themselves in an economy. You can imagine how destructive this was. So I think that therein lies explanation enough of the problems for Haiti and the problems that it still experiences. In fact, Aristide, if you know who that is, Jean Gatron Aristide, who was the first really freely and fairly elected president of Haiti in 1990, right before he was ousted for the second time, demanded that France pay back those reparations. And the French then were part of the cabal that greenlighted his aster in 2004. I wanted to tell you a little bit about how I got involved in Haiti. First of all, because I'm a literary type, I read Graham Green's novel, The Comedians, which I recommend to all of you. It's a really great novel. And it's about Haiti under Papa Doc, who was the dictator elected in an unfair and unfree election in 1957. I spoke French already, so it wasn't hard for me to take the lead to speak Haitian Creole, which I do speak now and learn then. And also I was partly raised by a beloved babysitter who was an African-American, so I felt very comfortable and very close to the idea of an African-American country, and Haiti is African-American in the broader sense. I wanted to see Papa Doc and the Ton Ton Ma Koo, well, not Papa Doc, Baby Doc. Papa Doc is François de la Lille, and Baby Doc is his son, who took over when he died in 1971. And I realized from reading the Haitian Exile newspapers that soon Baby Doc was going to fall. And I better get there and see him and his reign and the Ton Ton Ma Koo, which were the secret police of the Duvaliers, and very evil with sunglasses and civilian clothes. And then they branded up people at night and burned down people's houses. And I wanted to see them operating, because they were an essential part of this Graham Green novel. I was very, very romantic when I first got to Baby. So I did arrive, and I got there five days before Baby Doc fell. So I didn't have long to share the turf of Haiti with him. I got there, I saw him leave from the airport, and he drove to the airport with his elegant wife, and she's smoking a cigarette. They had coffers in the trunk of their car. They're being silver BMW in the middle of the night, and they drove the car and the coffers and the wife and the children up into a US military plane and made little a way to France. Back to the slave owners. And it was wild. And I think when you see such a thing, you never really recover. People have written about seeing these gigantic historical moments and how it's so emotional. And this public emotion is really shattering. I remember seeing a French photographer who had reported on every war. He'd been in Indochina. He was very silent when guns were firing. But he was crying in the streets of Haiti when the people were celebrating the fall of July. So it was a very exciting time. And I never wanted to leave. There's a joke about Baby Doc just to show you what it was like in Haiti for people and how they felt about this regime. There's a story about Baby Doc. He gets in a car. He wants to visit his countryside home. And he's driving in his big, big car on an SUV. And he's driving through the countryside. And he gets to a river. And as he's driving through the river, thinking, you know, he's untouchable by anything, the river rises and his car gets stuck. And then a big Haitian peasant comes out of the under rush and he sees this guy in a car stuck in the river and he goes over with some friends he organizes. And he gets Baby Doc and the car out of the river and brings it to the shore and Baby Doc goes, oh, how can I ever repay you? You've saved my life. You've saved my car. All my friends. You're an incredible person. And the guy looks at him. And he goes, don't you know who I am? And the guy looks at him and says, I'm Jean-Claude Duvallier. I'm the president of your country. The guy looks at him with wide eyes and Baby Doc goes, so what would you like from me? I can give you anything. I can give you a house. I can give you a house. You want a car. I can give you a car. You want to go to the United States. I can get you a visa. What do you want? And the guy looks at him and he goes, I want a state funeral. And Duvallier looks at him and he says, you want a state funeral? You're a young man. You just rescued me from the river. You have years and years to live. He said, no, no, no, you don't understand excellence. When I go back to the village and tell them who I rescued, I'm going to be dead. So that's how they stopped at our neighborhood. And so I stayed on at home. I got a book contract. And I met Jean-Britain Aristide before he became president. He was just a little priest in a parish, but he was extremely eloquent and the people really followed him even in those early days. And I started to interview him and write about him and watch him, and I got to know him pretty well. Now, the United States attitude toward Aristide was never very positive. George Bush Sr., the first, or as I think of him, Papa Bush. He didn't love Aristide and neither did certain senators. Jesse Hems had friends in Haiti who were part of the elite. And, you know, the Haitian Revolution was not entirely successful in that it didn't really liberate the Haitian masses, as we call them on the left. So that the population still was impoverished and still worked for slave wages. And there was this elite class that ran the country, and they had friends in Washington. And there was kind of an echo between those people and the Bush administration. And I used to drive around with Aristide, him driving his little car, and he's sitting next to him. And he had all these orphan boys around him whom he helped out and put in school. It was very Dickensian kind of a situation. Not that he was, like, fading, but he was running all these little boys. And it was a very interesting social experiment. And one of them, particularly, became my friend. His name was Waldeck, and he was kind of a wild little boy who always used to say, And me, give me five dollars. He would be this big. Really. Now he's big. But when he was even that little. Give me five dollars. And we got to be friends. And I realized it was with Waldeck that I learned how to speak Creole slowly. So he was my teacher. And I followed Aristide around and got to know him. He had, you know, this police force, the Tonton Makut, with their sunglasses and their denim outfits and the gun in their back, sort of belt area. He had a big dummy of what Tonton Makut in his office, Aristide. And everyone used to say that people hated him. They used to say that he had personally ordered this particular guy to be killed. And these were the clothes of the guy that were on the dummy now. I didn't believe it. And I still don't believe it. But it was interesting. But I used to say to him, you know, I prefer for you not to run for president because I think you serve that your country better in prison even than in the palace. And he would look at me. It's called the presidential palace. It's just a white house. He would look at me like I was out of my mind. Like I want to go to prison instead of being in the presidential palace. And I realized that look that he used to give me was like the way Haitian people would be when I would say, I love your country. And they would say, good. So you give me your passport. And you stay here. I'll go there. Because there wasn't that much kind of pure patriotic feeling. There was too much poverty. Anyway, he became president, indeed, in 1990. And I got married. Then eight months later in a coup green-lighted against him by Papa Bush, he was sent into exile. And I had my first baby. And he then went and he lived in Washington in a hotel suite lobbying the American government to get put back into power. And I had a second baby. Then I went with my two babies and visited him in Washington, D.C., which is another story entirely. But it was fun. And that was right before he was reinstated by the Clinton administration. So it was asked by Papa Bush, put back into power by Clinton. And I went down in the plane with him and I saw that happen. And it was, again, it was very exciting. But he was very changed. And I think he was a different kind of character after having been asked in a coup. It's very, I mean, if you think about it personally as opposed to in grandiose geopolitical terms, personally, you're taken out of your office and you're marched in front of a gun and you think you might die at any moment. So he was determined that this would not happen again. And I think the nature of his leadership changed a lot. He both spoke more gently but acted more ferociously to protect his power. But he served as president only until 1996, which was the end of his constitutional term if he had managed to serve at the whole term. It's a five-year term. So as I count, he served two years and eight months during that term of his five-year term. And then the presidential relay began between him and his protege, who is president right now, René Préval. Préval is an agronomist by training and if you don't know what that is, figure it out. But it's someone who specializes in agricultural policy. And he was a baker by trade and he had also been a waiter in New York. Préval. So Préval then was elected with Aristide sort of okaying it with the people. So he won by a huge margin. And then Aristide came to power again after Préval's term was finished in another election. And then he was asked it four years later by Baby Bush. So this was the story of Aristide. He never could get on with the Bush family. But there is a joke told in Haiti. And actually this joke is not just told in Haiti and you'll understand it's also told all through Latin America. And the joke goes like this in Haiti. How come there are no coups in the United States? There's never a coup in the United States. The answer is simple. There is no American embassy in the United States. In case that's hard to understand that there are the ones who do the coup. So going on with it, Aristide then was asked it and he was taken first to the Central African Republic where he absolutely put down his foot and said now this is unacceptable because it was so awful there. He was virtually under house arrest. He hadn't committed a crime that anyone was citing and Duvallier he was thinking. Duvallier went to the South of France. I go to the Central African Republic he didn't think it was fair. So anyway he ended up under the protection of the South African government in Pretoria and now I think he lives in Johannesburg. In late 2008 I went down to Haiti after an absence of some time to do a travel piece. It was funny to me because it was for Condé Nast Traveler for whom I'd written many times and as I always say about my relationship to them I am their armpit traveler. I go to the worst places I can barely submit an expensive account for a day and it's more than $15. That's what I like to do, that's what I do but I thought Haiti was stretching it and I told them that. I had been begging them for years to let me do like a little atmospheric essay about what used to be great about Haiti or something you know just very personal and literary travel piece and they wouldn't even let me do that. And now all of a sudden they were letting me go do a big travel piece on Haiti and the reason why was well it seemed a little more stable in Haiti so that was good. But also because two things had happened in travel writing. One was celebrity travel writing and this guy Whitecliff Jean who I really had barely heard of but who's a hip-hop singer and a member of the Fuji band and also a Haitian and also now a former presidential candidate Whitecliff was all excited about a travel piece on Haiti so they were excited they could put a celebrity into the piece and then there's something that I now call poorism which is not like tourism it's poorism and even the Haitian travel minister said to me sometimes people don't want to just go on the beach and have a drink and they stay at the 5-star hotel sometimes they want to see some Pavoti you know, sit under a palm tree and see the people who go around and so I thought ok well if he sang it then I'll write it so it was a kind of poorism they combined those two things celebrity and poorism to make it attractive to my editors and I would call them seriously from my cell phone on the road in Haiti and I would say we can't do this how am I going to tell your readers to come to Haiti because I would just go like there's garbage right next to me and say you know I'm on the main road there's a huge pile of garbage just write it she said so I did write it and it was really fun and it was a great piece about Haiti and how it was inching toward a little bit of a recovery and when I say inching and Haitians would come up to me with the piece and they would say this is a really funny statistic and it would be like a .02 rise in the household income or something like that over 10 years but it was for the adventurous traveler and I did something at that time that I'm really glad I did now in retrospect but I really was reluctant to do it I always say that this kind of gingerbread-y falling down hotel and I was in Haiti if I wasn't staying with friends but this time I went to the gingerbread-y hotel and I guess maybe it had gotten too old and I had gotten too old and I just didn't like falling over the front step and the fluorescent light that would only go on if I screwed it in and would only go off if I unscrewed it and I just was sick of it and it didn't have internet and I went to stay at what I considered when I was at first in Haiti to be the bourgeois pig disgusting Yankee American running dog at the Capitalist Republic hotel which was called the Montana and it was this great big white hotel and Whitecliffe would stay there and he told me how great it was and I thought okay I'll go and I'll drop his name subtly maybe I'll get some good treatment and it was okay and I liked it a lot it was pretty good and it was good for reporting what I was reporting but so anyway a year later the earthquake came and in that same hotel 300 people died just one there's a story of these people who were staying in a crappy hotel and their god said to them that day this is your last line in Haiti stay at the Montana it costs more stay there it's fabulous you'll have a great time so they went these Americans they stayed there they got there one of them was at his computer in his room we thought you know I want a beer went downstairs went outside got his beer and the hotel collapsed with all his friends in there so I've been back and there's like they've opened it again there's some rooms in the back the pool is there the tree by the pool is there the bar is there the restaurants there and then there's this great big empty vacuum of death it's really very weird and sort of awesome to be there now but so the earthquake did come and it's called kudu kudu in Haitian kudu the name of it kudu kudu like the sound it made and so powerful to me and 200,000 to 300,000 people were dead nobody can really quantify it because the camp was never made and the reason so many people died I think again it's kind of historical more recent history but it's about the failure of the Haitian state so it's about there being no zoning and if you saw I mean you know the favelas of Rio you've seen the pictures of the favelas of Rio just on the side of a hill just shanty town that's what that's what Port of France is like still to this day and no standards of construction no earthquake forget what you call it in English paracés mique no bolting nothing no foundations basically and heavy concrete roofs so that what you see is still it's still there's a lot of the rubble as you drive along are these roofs that fell down and now they look like blankets they're kind of curved it's just very very disturbing so there were no standards no zoning and there was a huge population shift so that when I came back to write that travel piece it was an unrecognizable city to me I would say now where are we and they would say in the name of a place my driver and I would say no that's in the countryside and they would say not anymore not anymore the place where our Steve built his house outside of town the town has come to me so it had grown by at least a million people in the decade where I wasn't really there very much and so I wanted to just say also why that was true why so many people did come to Port of France to seek their fortune they came because the countryside wasn't giving anymore now this is an agricultural society but what happened was that a lot of Haitian produce in particular Haitian rice which employed a lot of people in the bread basket of the country was undercut by U.S. subsidized rice being dumped onto the Haitian market helping out American farmers but destroying Haitian prices destroying the Haitian market so that's why so many people had to leave the countryside to come to Port of France in hopes that they would find something in Port of France or get out of the country and President Clinton who was responsible for the Miami rice policy has apologized to the Haitian government in recent days after the earthquake for that policy a little late so I said before the Haitian revolution never really succeeded in gaining the freedom and independence for avatizations that they deserved at the time and what happened is the mulatto elite among whom I count many friends by the way they remained powerful and they are powerful to this day and just like the masters they live in small enclaves at the tops of hills while below them the huge masses of people live in terrible poverty and the elite they have fabulous restaurants they have American educated children and they themselves now are American educated there's an import-export class also that's a little newer a lot of them are Middle Easterners but they're Haitian now they've lived in Haiti for many generations and then there are foreign entities like USAID the World Bank the United Nations which has an armed force of about 12,000 peacekeepers on the ground right now in Haiti it's grown much larger since the earthquake because there were international fears of insecurity and there are lots and lots of non-governmental organizations or NGOs in Haiti like the Red Cross Catholic Relief Services World Vision Partners in Health giant, giant groups that are trying to help some of them were there beforehand some of them came for relief there are now it's estimated that there are 15,000 non-governmental organizations operating in Haiti they've always had too many non-governmental organizations there's a reason the government didn't do anything but of course it becomes a vicious circle because the government doesn't do anything the NGOs come in then the government has no reason to do anything so it continues extracting money from wherever it can and not performing its public duty and now adding insult to injury Duvalier is back in the country for me this was really outstanding because my relationship to Haiti began with his departure so I feel first of all I feel like he and I just can't be there at the same time I left the day before he came back little did I know so we don't like to share the country an election a further election is coming in Haiti there was one election now there's going to be a room off hotly contested very fraudulent very complicated lots of forces at work behind this election and now Aristide yesterday got his passport which has been denied him for all these years and it wasn't clear that he wanted it at first but now he sees Duvalier's back and he's safe why should Aristide not wanted for the kinds of crimes Duvalier has wanted for in Haiti why should he not get to go back and the president of Haiti has always said prevail of course he can come back whenever he wants so we'll see if Aristide really has the guts to go back and what that would mean in Haiti which is a little nerve-racking meanwhile the slums have moved up to the elite because the slums were all down in the main part of town it's been shattered by the earthquake so slowly the people are sort of rising up to where the rich people live and the rich people are going further up the map so now when you visit people they're often some woody area whereas before they were in a little town up above the capital I'd like to say that I've noticed relief organizations have gone down to Haiti to help with people's post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the earthquake and of course everyone was traumatized but I say in Haiti there is no post-traumatic stress disorder there's only traumatic stress disorder because everybody is still in trauma trauma is a natural way of life in Haiti the reason people don't get it together in Haiti is because they have so little that they cannot plan if you think about why it is that you can plan tomorrow you'll realize that you can plan tomorrow because there's a road because you have a car because the gas station will be open because you know where you're going because that person will be there where they've always lived they won't be kicked out they won't be searching for water five miles from their house when you get to their house you have a lot of things that you know will be in place and the Haitians have none of them so that's another response to why it is the way it is it's a cycle of poverty that has gone on since before the revolution I would say I would like to just say that I think that there can possibly be hope for Haiti because I don't want to present a totally bleak portrait of this incredible country I mean I do go back I love it there and I love it there partly it's you know everybody says the spirit of the people their resilience and I always say to Haitians don't be so resilient you know don't put up with it stop putting up with it it's too horrible what they're putting up with now is unbelievable there are more than a million people still in refugee camps I mean it is only a year after a devastating earthquake but still there should be more movement and there isn't but there are little signs of things that could change and could be meaningful as they will Lord the country really has cell phones now and this is happening in Africa too and throughout the third world and cell phones are good and bad but the great thing about cell phones is that the farmer who has a little patch of land in the mountains if he goes with his cell phone first he has to get it charged if he goes with his cell phone to a place on the mountain where everybody in the village knows you get service kind of like those places on the 401 then he can call the guy he knows in the provincial capitol and he can say you know bring your truck out because my mangoes are ripe and then the guy will come with the truck he can organize something instead of just waiting hoping that the truck will come by on the road and having to go all the way down to the road and everything he can know he can make a date that's a big deal on him of course cell phones also mean that certain types of insecurity work better like kidnapping it's much easier to kidnap if you can call your assistance on your cell phone and operating that way throughout the city so it's got its pluses and its minuses but that's one thing another thing is that outsiders with a lot of experience now because of the earthquake are coming in and trying to work with Haitians to design new places for Haitians to live I myself am consulting with these designers in LA it's very weird to go into like an architect's office in LA and talk about Haitian villagers it's just a disconnect but they really mean well and they're trying to do a good thing and they profit from it and theoretically so will the Haitians who will live in these design spaces I hope and then there's a move to decentralize Port-au-Prince it's always been called the Republic of Port-au-Prince because that's what Haiti really is to the outside world that's all we know is what comes out of Port-au-Prince but the earthquake showed people that it was bad to have all that population and all that focus on Port-au-Prince so they're trying now to make provincial capitals and really put schools and services into the provinces not just in Port-au-Prince and Partners in Health has been one of the really great forces for doing that over the past 25 years there have been some groups that have really led the way many groups however want to be in Port-au-Prince especially post earthquake groups because in Port-au-Prince you have hotels and restaurants which outsiders like you can have fun in Port-au-Prince if you're a person with some money whereas you go into the countryside you have to live a very harsh life it can be fun too but you have to learn to know it and experience it in a decent way so it's hard to decentralize Port-au-Prince but I think that's one of the things that people are hoping will help the country move forward in the coming decades it's gonna take a while though so that's what I have to say I can take questions I wanted to show you a couple of slides from Haiti just because I think it's interesting and instructive does that sound good? yes it is everybody likes the video let's see if I can do this I just had my lesson so that's a picture I took right after the earthquake should we turn off the light? will that help or not? I mean you get the idea anyway excuse me while I walk in front of you that's one of the main streets downtown I'm behind you again that's seven months after taking on my I-Home this is, remember I talked about Boacaimont this is an artist's rendering of the voodoo ceremony that began the revolution and I can tell you from personal experience this is what a voodoo ceremony is like only the people here look fatter and better dressed than people are today that's Toussaint Mouverture he was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in his military government that's Jean-Jacques Tessaline the one who said Kouquetet Bouletkai he's a beloved figure in Haiti now because he stands for Haitian patriotism and sovereignty and upstanding black power he was assassinated by the way this is Aizan Petion he was the mulatto who helped in the revolution that's Napoleon Bonaparte we defeated him just so you can see how these guys live in the minds of the Haitian people still today on the left is Tessaline in the middle is Toussaint that's Petion this is after the earthquake the building fell down maybe it was a school that's the only management thing but I don't think so I think it was a bar that's what Port-au-Prince used to look like at the beginning of the 1800s this is in the early 1900s very different that's the customs house that's Papa Doc Duvalier Francois he was a simple country doctor who spearheaded the anti-yaws campaign that was successful on the Haitian countryside and then he became a brutal bloody dictator that's him with Baby Doc Baby Doc was known as Panier Head basket head because his head looks gigantic and empty and could easily support a basket like a Haitian lady that's Papa Doc naming him his successor in front of the Haitian flag Papa Doc died soon after that's Baby Doc today upon his return to Haiti he's not entirely well my son did a photo shop and put Papa Doc's glasses on Baby Doc it was very interesting I wish I had that that's Aristide and his friend Bill Clinton Aristide used to call Clinton his twin but you can see they look very different that's Rene Prevelle the simple baker who has been president of Haiti for a long time that's the palace built by the American Marines during the 30 year occupation in Haiti that's the palace now someone said to me it looks like it's drunk a lot of Haitian rum those are the Marines landing on the grounds of the palace this did not sit well with Haitians this was right after the earthquake obviously they stopped landing on the palace grounds at that these are some more pictures from after the earthquake this is a guy quote looting he's taking a tin to put on a roof of a new house because his head fell down this is the moor sorry this is a little sign by the side of the road notice who it's directed at not Haitians see that red sign there that's from the Ministry of Public Works and they stamped every building after the earthquake every building in Port-au-Prince they had a red stamp, a yellow stamp, a green stamp if you had the red stamp it meant the building was no longer safe to dwell in as you can see this building is no longer safe to dwell in this is more people getting stuff out of the rubble that's what I was talking about how it looks almost like a blanket that fell in people dying there this is more this is by the photographer Baby Steeper she's an excellent photojournalist who's worked a lot in Haiti that's also by her that's downtown right after the earthquake now it doesn't look quite that bad really there's been a lot of personal rubble removal they don't have a lot of heavy equipment in Haiti and heavy equipment hasn't really been able to come in so people have removed that rubble piece by piece and then put it in the street occasionally a machine comes along and takes it away that's my hometown from above over in the left-hand corner that's my pool and that tree did remain and that one tree is still standing that big one on the left pretty horrible this is downtown at a pharmacy again that's a photo by Maggie Steeper it's a refugee camp in the early days it's another refugee camp see it behind the bars these are people soon after the earthquake lining up to get medicines and prescriptions from a clinic in the hospital there were a lot of tents inside the hospital for the doctors who came that happens to be my brother's little tent I guess he didn't want to be along the line of the other doctor's tents but this is Partners in Health their doctor's tents right after the earthquake that's a water tank that outsiders put in for the refugee camps this is a refugee camp built on the old airport grounds this is a papier-mache leg that is part of the decor at the Aldrich Schweitzer hospital where they've been doing prostheses for earthquake victims that's the USS Comfort which was the hospital of the redemptive earthquake there's Bill where he's talking to some Haitian fishermen that's the cathedral this is a year later in front of the cathedral at a commemoration for the dead of the earthquake that they worship in front of the cathedral wreckage they're there again I think it's this on the island of Tucson but this is the wreckage of a museum it's very sad these are Smithsonian people one of the museum owners talking about how to salvage things the Smithsonian's doing a great project that is the inside of the Episcopalian Cathedral it fell down it had the stations of the cross done by Haiti's greatest naive painters I took that picture fortunately I went there and took pictures of it I'm so glad I saw it really for that piece that I wrote for Travel Magazine those are the bricks of that cathedral this is the old iron market it was the most important market in Port-au-Prince and really in the country in terms of internal markets it fell down in the earthquake it was built in 1870 something or 1890 something I can't remember what you see in the next picture it was built in 1889 it has been restored not by the Haitian government but by the DigiCell Company which incidentally happens to use the same red color painted which is its original color so it's all very nicely historical that's Bill Clinton cutting the ribbon at the DigiCell opening of the iron market really you can't go anywhere in Haiti without his being there yet he only comes in occasionally and always by private jet I remember I was talking about the favelas this is one of the shanty-tans still in Haiti there's earthquake damage you can see it if you look carefully this is how people are still living a mudslide the next earthquake over this is an example of the new kind of building that could be done in Haiti that's both beautiful, it's earthquake resistant it's Haitian and it was done by foreigners I think it's the Allianz Française the new Allianz Française the old one fell down this is a mattress factory just so that you get an idea this is run by a very American man who really tries very hard to make a decent place for Haitians to work in Haiti and still this is what it looks like it's very late 1800s in most of its parts this is the DigiCell office the way Haiti could look these are just some atmospheric pictures from after the earthquake that's a full year later I took that picture recently this is a big problem in Haiti recycling if you go back you can see on the bottom see the plastic container at the bottom left all over the place in Haiti now when I first got there there was no plastic now we have this these are plastic bottles waiting to be recycled in China but I think they're going to be waiting a long time they were just sitting by the side of the road that's the back of the palace when you go in to interview the president still you come in through the back of the palace now and that's what you see he has a little bunker on the side this is Minousta that's the UN mission for the stabilization of Haiti that's when you come in to interview them that's what you see Haitian girl at the at the cemetery this is from the Archbishop's funeral right after the earthquake he was killed in the wreckage of the cathedral these are three guys going back after the countryside after the earthquake a lot of people moved out of Port-au-Prince in the wake of the earthquake because there was nothing for them there they all moved back in and they brought relatives from the countryside why? because of all the NGOs now operating in Port-au-Prince it was like a magnet for people to come back and they all came back that's what the Haitian countryside should look like in an artist's rendition sorry about the equality that's what it does look like not that different although the little boy seems a little bit angry at something I'm sure this other boy stole something of his I have four boys sorry people this is an ideal rendition of what the countryside should look like again I'm very interested in the ideal versus the real but that's real before the earthquake I believe that building has fallen down but that is classic Haitian gingerbread beauty that's a Haitian tap-tap it's a little jitney bus and it's so funny to me I show this to you because I think that they're great but really I don't even notice them anymore when I'm in Haiti they look like they could be an orange Los Angeles bus as far as I'm concerned those are two girls running through Haitian that's what Haiti looks like that's the ideal Haiti as an older man with his grandchildren around him that's right after the earthquake it's such a beautiful picture the kids are playing soccer and they have an inflated ball which is very rare that must have been brought in by outsiders because usually they're playing with a plastic bottle or a very deflated ball and the wreckage of the earthquake is still smoking but that's just not standing so far this is by an artist named Mathieu Marcelin and he this is called Still Alive he painted this after the earthquake this is also obviously and after the earthquake picture here you see the UN blue helmets on the left the Haitian national police on the right there was angels in the air the Haitian people by the bedside and that's Haiti in the bed the hospital bed and it says on her blanket which is made out of the Haitian flag it says Haiti will not perish this is a painting of a voodoo ritual by a very famous Haitian painter named Andre Pierre he had 32 children yes and that's the citadel that was built by the post-revolutionary former Haitian slaves to keep a mountaintop visual to make sure their country was never never again taken over by foreigners but they weren't ready for the earthquake in 2010 so there you go my country thank you