Diplomats call Haiti "a failed state," a nation done in by dictators and disasters.
What that means is a hungry life and an early death for 5 million people in Haiti's little villages, places like Plaine Danger, 800km from Florida and light-years from Port-au-Prince, the capital, where President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fell.
Aristide always promised to make life better in Haiti, where public health, education and the economy have been collapsing for decades. But he never did; no Haitian leader ever has, and many made life worse. Governments and juntas rise and fall, 15 in the last 18 years, doing nothing to stop Haiti from sliding into the sea.
Haiti is slowly disappearing. The soil slides away from its steep hills, where all the trees are turned to charcoal, the only thing people can sell for a profit.
"There are no trees to hold the land and when it rains, the earth washes away," into the river and down to the sea, said Didier Dipera, a farmer and a voodoo priest in Plaine Danger.
Then Christine Delille comes walking across the Grand'Anse River, and she is a force that can stop death itself, a slender thread connecting Plaine Danger to life.
The river runs through the most remote part of Haiti. Two roads connect Grand'Anse Province to the capital; one is impassable, the other impossible. Isolation provides some insulation from the armed politics of Port-au-Prince and the collapse of agriculture in Haiti's heart. But it provides no protection from 200 years of bad government, going back to slavery days.
Almost nothing works
Life goes on no matter who holds power, and "life is hard," and getting harder in Grand'Anse, said Delille, a barefoot nurse providing health care to 2,700 people, dispensing medicine and information, saving lives and bringing some small hope to Plaine Danger and surrounding hamlets.
"Many people are sick with fever, malaria, pneumonia," she said. Many children are malnourished, and the rains wash down waste from villages upstream, bringing sickness and death.
Delille covers Plaine Danger, her village, and its hamlets as a field worker for the Haitian Health Foundation, run by a handful of tough nuns in the provincial capital of Jeremie. In a country where almost nothing works, the group looks after 200,000 people.
Jeanne Bazard, pregnant with her sixth child, is one of the foundation's clients. This is how she lives: "When I put a dollar together I walk up the hill and buy a bag of charcoal and then walk into town to sell it," she said. "If I leave at dawn I arrive at 9. It might sell for twice as much there."
She buys roots, sometimes rice and beans. It adds up to one rudimentary meal a day for herself and her children.
"I only care about whether we can eat," she said. "It doesn't matter who's in power. We've never gotten anything from anyone in power. The least any leader could do would be to make jobs so we could buy an animal or two and find a way for my kids to go to school. It's not possible for my kids to have a better life than mine, because they can't go to school."
Never-ending failure
A generation ago, a family here could pay a child's tuition with a pig. But then a swine disease struck and the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier ordered all the pigs in Haiti killed. Few people have the money to buy school uniforms or books, much less shoes to walk to school, and illiteracy runs to 80 percent in the countryside.
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