Content about Disaster

Cap Haïtien – I landed here in Haiti’s second-biggest city, land of my ancestors, on a hot day wearing Chuck Taylors and aviator Ray-Bans. I was home away from home.

I hadn’t been here since a few months before the 2010 earthquake. Since then, I had been scratching to come back for many reasons, but mostly because my memories of Haiti had nothing to do with the images of desperation and crumbled monuments that we all saw after that catastrophe.

The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund continues to nurture economic opportunities for Haiti, today announcing a grant to a unique Haitian microfinance institution. The $850,000 grant to Fonds Haïtien d’Aide à la Femme (FHAF) will help put this institution on a path to financial recovery, and allow it to continue to provide loans to women throughout Haiti.

Shortly after he was sworn in as Haiti’s newest President, Michel Martelly offered the international community a promise that doubled as a challenge: “Haiti is open for business,” he said.

The provocative performer vaulted to political power on vows to transform Haiti’s basket-case economy into a beacon for trade. “We cannot continue with this humiliation of having to extend our hand for help all of the time,” he said in his inaugural speech earlier this month.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Like a small-town booster, Randall Perkins proudly shows off his base camp: air-conditioned bedrooms and offices for 120 managers, a mess hall that can serve 1,000 meals a day, a gym and an infirmary alongside his bulldozers and dump trucks.

Pompano Beach, Florida-based AshBritt Inc. so far has invested $25 million in its Haitian reconstruction operation covering a soccer field.

Now all Perkins needs is a government contract to make his investment pay off.

Haiti’s President went to the White House yesterday with a vision of a Caribbean paradise waiting to be rebuilt after January’s catastrophic earthquake — and a price tag that could rise to $14 billion (£9 billion).

President Préval and his Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, are in Washington with a sales pitch on which their country depends — but which depends, in turn, on persuading recession-hit donors that the corruption that has bedevilled Haiti for generations can at last be overcome.

Haiti's rice farmers are dismayed. It's nearly harvest time in this fertile valley where the bulk of Haiti's food is grown, and they're competing once again with cheap U.S. imported rice. Just down the road, vendors are undercutting them, selling the far less expensive grain. Subsidized U.S. rice has flooded Haiti for decades. Now, after the Jan. 12 quake, 15,000 metric tons of donated U.S. rice have arrived. "I can't make any money off my rice with all the foreign rice there is now," said Renan Reynold, a 37-year-old farmer who makes an average of about $600 a year.

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- The team included women in skirts shoveling for all it's worth, but it barely made a dent in the mountain of debris that was once a shopping center in Haiti's quake-devastated capital.

While it may not seem so, judging from the absence of heavy equipment at the site, removing rubble is an urgent matter, and not only because of the many bodies still trapped under buildings in ruin throughout Port-au-Prince.

France's national anthem blared across the tarmac on Wednesday as Nicolas Sarkozy made the first visit ever by a French president to Haiti, once his nation's richest colony — offering aid to a country prostrate after a catastrophic earthquake.

Haitian President Rene Preval greeted Sarkozy as a brass band played the Marseillaise to start a quick tour of the earthquake ravaged capital and a French field hospital.

The two, both in dark suits, boarded an olive-drab helicopter and peered out of an open side door for an aerial tour of the devastated capital.