Little Has Changed Since Haiti Quake, Except Now There's Cholera

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti Nov. 12, 2010— -- Port au Prince is a city frozen in Jan 12, 2010. Haitians refer to the earthquake as "the 12th." No other description is necessary. How could something so blatantly evident everywhere you look be forgotten? Incredibly, life goes on: children go to school, markets are packed, there's even evidence of a few repaired homes. But if there's a pervading architectural theme, it remains: destruction.

Life goes on, but the city looks the same. That rubble and that rusted rebar are like a geological formation in the city's landscape. An elderly woman rests on a giant clump of concrete as she makes her way up a hill balancing a huge bundle on her head. Kids in tattered clothes play tag amidst the new ruins. Where rubble spills out into the street, imperturbable pedestrians and cars detour around it, as if it were a downed limb or a pothole.

These days the destruction seems invisible to Haitians, but screams out to visitors.

Bacteria, wind and time have carted off that stench of rotting bodies, but no one's taken away all that debris. The presidential palace remains a sandwich of roof and ground floor -- everything in between now mashed inside.

There has been little progress. The UN has built fewer than 18,000 temporary shelters, and about 150 permanent structures since the quake. That's about one home for each 2000 people that died in the quake. The saddest part: some of the 1.3 million living in tent cities partly administered by the U.N., live better now than before. They now have access to clean water, latrines and often some sort of medical care. Those who live in the fetid slum called Cite Soleil, have little or no clean water, little food, almost no access to medical care, and essentially live in sewage every time the canal overflows. Many eat a single meal every day or two.

Why so little progress? Off the record, international aid workers blame Haiti's red tape and the scattering of those with experience and corruption. It takes an act of God, or a sizeable bribe to get aid and supplies out of the port. Many government bureaucrats were killed in the quake, many of the survivors who could afford to do so, left the country, and others who stayed took much more lucrative jobs with the non-government organizations.