Late afternoon, Tuesday 12 January, the Caribbean. The sun is subsiding in the west, and, for some, it's lazy time. On his terrace in Santiago de Cuba, Eduardo Machin is sitting on a lounger, and down at the United States base on Guantanamo Bay, it's towards the end of a nothing-special kind of day.
Some 160 miles across the sea, soldiers are patrolling more purposefully. They're part of the 11,000-strong United Nations force whose task is to bring some semblance of stability to Haiti, the land of voodoo, gang-law dictators and poverty so dire that three-quarters of these, the poorest people in the Western hemisphere, live on less than £1.30 a day. Yet, street by street, bit by corrupted bit, small victories are being won by the UN and aid agencies. And that's why, as the sun dips a little lower, and the clocks in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, nudge round to 4.30, it has the feel, even here, of just another Tuesday.
At a college in the Morne Hercule area, Alex Georges is in a meeting with 30 other students and their professor. At an orphanage outside the capital, Susan Westwood, a nurse from Stirling, is tending children. Over at Notre Dame Cathedral, the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Mgr Joseph Serge Miot, is in his office, working at his papers. Jillian Thorp, an American aid worker, is at home in the capital, looking forward to her husband's return from a trip up country. In Haiti's parliament building, Senate President Kelly Bastien is at his post; the white presidential palace, looking like a Brighton Pavilion that's just come out of the wash, gleams across its watered lawns; US reporter Jonathan M Katz potters at home – after all, there's nothing much happening in Haiti at the moment. And, at the 12-storey UN headquarters, the head of the mission, Hedi Annabi, and more than a hundred of his staff are coming to the end of the working day. They have authority here. But not as much, it's about to turn out, as the geology on which Haiti sits
0 comments:
Post a Comment