Where will it all end?

Driving around Port au Prince, walking its neighborhoods, dining with locals, you can't help but wonder where life is headed in a post-earthquake Haiti.

Haiti is a land of extremes, offering cool rugged mountains spotted with lush green pines and palms, baked white sand beaches greeting turquoise ocean, embracing gracious people saying hello in Creole behind gleaming eyes and wide smiles. Even in Haiti's much maligned urban areas an oasis of gardens and stately homes can be found.

However even during its pre-earthquake days, Haiti was offered by her fouled capital city Port au Prince as shrouded in gritty smog and floating atop the lung choking stench of human and animal waste. People lived atop each other in ramshackle huts of sticks and tin surrounded by piles of smouldering mounds of raw garbage. Open sewers in which children play and pigs forage are wash basins and drinking fountains. Imagine, three million people living in an area the size of small cities like Gresham, OR or Brockton, MA.

Add to its being the catastrophic January 12 earthquake. Streets and displacement camps are over run by gangs that prey of the young, feeble and female. Medical care and medicine is scarce. There is little law, less governance and no political will fcr change only to maintain the status quo.

Survivors of the quake, with lives shattered, remain surrounded by toppled buildings, rubble filled streets, broken families, the homeless, destitute, and orphans. There are few jobs in a land where minimum pay if $5 per day. The rich get richer off the misery of fellow Haitians while the poor; well they just continue to be poor.

Last week there were organized protests. This week, there is a call for strikes.

There is a saying and attitude in Haiti that goes something like this: If it needs to be fixed, Missionaries will come to fix it; If something is needed, Missionaries will come and give it; If it needs to be built, Missionaries will come and build it. Missionaries, in the present vernacular, pretty much means anyone or any group bearing aid; the US, UN, NGO's and even traditional Church Groups. Haiti has become a child of the world.

But even the billions of aid money flowing into the Western Hemisphere's poorest country isn't received without protest as calls of ABA OKIPASYON (Down with the Occupation in reference to the UN armed presence) have sprung up throughout Port au Prince. Apparently, there is a price for Haiti's history and culture of co-dependency.

With the mandate for elections this fall, political graffiti dots the urban landscape with spray can painted calls of ABA PREVAL, Creole for "Down with Preval", Haiti's current President. Others tag walls with Bon Retour JC Claude Duvalier calling for the return of the brutal former Haitian President Baby Doc Duvalier. The same is written as a return of former priest turned president Jean-Bertrand Aristide is hoped for. Both were forced from office and currently live in exile, Duvalier in France, Aristide in South Africa.

Apparently when one is unable to see hope in the future, they look to a past made desirable by the passage of time.

So just where do you think life headed in a post-earthquake Haiti;