daniel splittgerber - what I read online

It is a broiling November day, and John and I are driving through the wreckage of what used to be Port-au-Prince. Two-thirds the size of Manhattan, Haiti’s capital is still buried under some 8 million cubic meters of rubble — enough, according to one expert, to build a road from Port-au-Prince across the ocean to Los Angeles and back again. …

“There are things in this country you just can’t believe,” one exhausted aid worker tells me. “I’m at this river the other day, and here’s what I see: three men washing some Land Rovers in the water, two pigs having sex, a group of children gutting some pigs and cleaning their intestines right next to the pigs having sex, and a few women washing clothes and bathing — all in the same tiny part of the river. And next to all of that was a hand-washing poster put up by some NGO to teach people good hygiene.”