Traffic jam, in a remote corner of the city, right near the American Embassy, on the route de Tabarrre. Barely two minutes earlier I was cool, windows down, hair blowing in the wind, tearing along a deserted road. And now, everything stops.

There are only the red lights of worn brakes; only voices, shouting. Only shadows running toward something. I don’t know what’s going on, as usual. I find that I’m sometimes slow to understand life in this beautiful country. Then, the shadow of a doubt passes before my eyes. A young man, running, four boxes on his head. In this country of rumours, of werewolves and witch doctors, I don’t usually pay too much attention to idle gossip, but ...

But then, everything.

Because of the traffic, I am moving slowly through the scene, preparing myself with every metre that passes. Here in Haiti, the urban myth is that the distribution trucks are off-loaded during the night. Which would explain perhaps the how and the why - like how and why it is that we never see concrete results, real rebuilding of Haitian society, from all this international aid....

The fact is that the shadows, now illuminated by car headlights, are transformed into young people – men and women – sweating from head to toe, muscles tensed, a smile on their lips, and not a gentle smile. They are helping themselves to the contents of four gigantic trucks that have come from the Dominican Republic. Helping themselves the way I would help myself from a buffet serving French cheese and Danish biscuits. Helping themselves without the shadow of a police officer to stop them. And sitting in the shadows amidst all this racket are GI Joes, American soldiers, armed for war, handsome in their camouflage uniforms and tied hands.

The air is cool, but I’m hot. Hot from frustration perhaps, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s 25 degrees in the shadow of the sun that has already set. What is all this posturing, this rhetoric about so-called humanitarian aid...? No controls, no restraints. There are nights when my adopted country tries really hard, one way or another, to make me crazy. But I’ve already told you this – mwen pa fou.

The problem that defies belief in this system of distribution is the same problem I saw in Gonaïves in 2008 after the hurricanes: It’s the inconsistency, the incongruity of aid. We want to help, but it’s those who are young and healthy, who are able to run, to hide, to carry two bags of rice on their shoulders, who take everything. Here, if you want something - well, you’d better not be old, or too young, or ill or have a disability, or be timid or generous. Given such a system of distribution, it is now foreign countries that are creating rejection and neglect – of Haitians by Haitians - in Haitian society. Certainly, those who are weaker can wait in lines in the noonday sun. But if the myth is that every night the trucks are emptied in this way, I now have to believe it, with the faith of a doubting St. Thomas. And because of it, every night we impress a little more deeply upon people’s minds the notion that only the strong and the “normal” have the right to aid, aid that is often re-sold in the streets to these others, to people impoverished both in relation to intelligence and to the means of sustaining life.

Is there a system in place for the most vulnerable? Is any thought given to the weakest? How can one remain stoic in the face of this incongruity? We want to help, first and foremost because it’s good - and expedient - to do so, but on the ground, in the face of the size of the urgent need and the size of the gap between the disabled and the “normal,” what can we do?

Yes, I admit it; there is something like a shadow hovering over my words tonight. It’s the shadow of doubt. Doubt that we realise just how easy it is to reject the weak. That rejection is clearly how forgetting and neglect begin. That being forgotten is the easiest way for someone to die in silence. And that this silence is accepted, without question, by other countries.

Tonight, beyond the shadow of a doubt, I saw it concretely – the difficulty and the enormous challenge of integrating or re-integrating people with disabilities, including intellectual disabilities, into Haitian society.