Return to Haiti after the world's eyes have turned away

At last, my only pair of boots has dried out. The sultry tropical sweat, combined with three days of rain had left them awash.

Easy for me in a rudimentary but comfortable hotel off the Presidential Square in Port-au-Prince. From my window, I can hear, but not quite see, the hubbub from the tented encampment in front of the earthquake-crazed Palace – the tell-tale stark division between those who have in Haiti, and those who have not.

This is a society riven with the inequalities of minority super-wealth and majority abject poverty. You see it wherever you go. The 30 seconds of world-shattering thundering of earth’s inner core of 12 January have only served to exacerbate the divisions further. The moneyed links of the middle classes to their diaspora of relatives in America have seen to it that they have survived.

Our own meagre collective efforts in the North, to aid Haiti’s poor through collecting buckets, have so far born less fruit for those poor.

I am here to try to find out why. A big part of the answer lies in the strange place that was Haiti even before the quake.

I am also monitoring what the UN regards as an inevitable spike in the cholera epidemic. There are estimates for the first time of between 90 and 120 unconfirmed new cases in Port-au-Prince itself in the dense slums of Cite de Soleil. The battle is no longer to contain the outbreak in six departments here, but to reduce deaths with instant re-hydration efforts.

So I am returned to this strange and beguiling place that is Haiti.

When I attended mass beyond the rubble of the Cathedral here in Port-au-Prince on Sunday I noticed the “Magic Men” doing their ablutions mingled inside the crowd. They come up to you – the womenfolk too – in their strange dark garb, their tassled dusty hair, ringed fingers and small chains. They gabble in Creole and await a response.

Then there are the smack heads who rule great sections of wrecked street frontages. One who took vague exception to our white presence flashed a gun. There are apparently many guns here. There are places, especially around the docks, that it is especially unwise to venture. Indeed our local guides don’t like you hanging around anywhere for very long.

But one does not sense that the gangs will sort the country out any faster than the often-compromised Ministerial elite, or the huge UN and NGO community here itself. This is a country whose development stalled a century or more before the blast.

“We are not talking re-construction,” the head of the UN humanitarian effort here – Nigel Fisher – tells me. “We are talking construction…from the ground up and for the first time. This will take more than a generation.”

I’ve been on the ground here for five days. I have met again some of the survivors that I met when I came in the immediate aftermath of the quake. One, nine months pregnant when I met her, has had a miracle baby – Bama – after masonry fell on her during the quake that crushed her home. Another – Marizeta – with a desperately-infected, battered eye, has now lost that eye, but is well. A third – the pastor whose church fell in, traumatically wounding him – died two days after we left him.

I marvel, in all this rubble, that we have found them, or word of them. We also talk to the UN’s Nigel Fisher about the whys, and why nots.