If you were going to pick a spot for an earthquake, you would be hard pressed to select one worse than the Cite Soleil neighborhood of Port Au Prince. This is, perhaps, the poorest urban neighborhood, in the poorest city, in the poorest state in our hemisphere. It\u2019s effectively a settlement built on the trash dump southwest of the capital. Society\u2019s castoffs \u2013 material and human \u2013 all in a substantial pile on a hill just outside of town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve never actually been there. The closest I got was in 2006, when our driver decided to take a short-cut on the way out of town that would have cut across a corner of Cite Soleil. The other Haitians in the van started yelling at him and slapping him on the back of the head. \u201cLes Blancs!\u201d they were saying. I got the point that a van full of white folks was likely to be seen as a potentially lucrative target. We drove an extra half hour or so rather than cut that corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other people with whom I\u2019ve traveled described providing a medical clinic behind locked doors, and waiting at the end of the day for a quiet spell before boarding the van and hauling ass back to the safer parts of town. I\u2019ve heard stories of people eating clay to fill the aching in their bellies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2010\/01\/13\/blogs\/13haiti_lede\/blogSpan.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"