Rainy season in the Cité Soleil
Arrival in the Third World is always discombobulating, especially when the world in question is a mere hundred-minute flight from Miami. Across the turquoise, cloud-shadowed Caribbean; a quick descent over silted river mouths and sardine-packed tin-roof slums; and out into the sundrenched heat of Toussaint Louverture International, airport code PAP for Port-au-Prince, Haiti's sprawling, sweltering, seething capital, the poorest and most violent city in the entire Western Hemisphere. Arrival The streets of a new city are always alien and intimidating, and tenfold so here. Fortunately my friend L. was there to meet me at the airport with her on-loan driver Xavier, a courtly fortysomething man who piloted us in his seriously weathered Toyota Corolla through a city that at first was all slum. Potholed, mud-puddled streets; packs of feral dogs prowling waist-high mounds of trash; mangled, skeletal remains of ancient car crashes, thick with rust; stores set in rotting concrete buildings,