After a military coup overthrew Aristide in 1991, international aid all but ceased. Haiti's factories and industries crumbled. Taxing, spending and services broke down. No Haitian government has fixed a road in a generation.
Aid resumed with the American-led restoration of Aristide in 1994. But so did a flood of imported food that undercut farmers; many thousands gave up.
In the end, the aid delivered to Haiti's government by the World Bank had "no impact," the World Bank concluded two years ago, though aid delivered by small nongovernment groups like the Haitian Health Foundation did some good.
The US and other nations cut off most aid to Haiti by the time the second Aristide government took power in February 2001. The newly inaugurated Bush administration was hostile to the leftist slum priest who ran Haiti. As Vice President Dick Cheney said last week, "We're glad to see him go."
Now that he is gone, the US Agency for International Development and the UN plan to spend millions more for Haiti -- but there is a sense that it comes with the weariness attached to large-scale, long-running failure.
It takes a generation
A smaller scale may work. The Agency for International Development provides roughly 30 percent of the Haitian Health Foundation's US$1.2 million operating budget, covering the salaries of three managers and 80 workers like Delille, who makes US$100 a month.
Two agency officials met Tuesday with Sister Maryann Berard, a Franciscan nun who runs the foundation, which also builds houses and latrines and runs the only home for expectant mothers in Haiti.
They may have absorbed a lesson Sister Berard says she learned from her 15 years in Haiti: Aid works when it flows from the ground up, not the top down.
"A lot may have changed in Port-au-Prince," Sister Berard said, "but very little has changed in the villages," where nearly two-thirds of Haiti's 8 million people live.
"You know that saying, `It takes a village?'" said Bette Gebrian, a medical anthropologist who works with the foundation. "It takes a generation."
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