Someone told me that today people are throwing stones at vehicles carrying the dead. Victims of cholera, evidently. Throwing stones at the dead ...

You have to understand that here in Haiti, more than 11 months after the earthquake, people live in the midst of a string of bad news and catastrophes. Floods, elections, cholera, the earthquake – those are, in truth, only some of the curses that have hit the country in 2010. The rise in price of basic staples (rice, oil, peas, etc.), of gas (and therefore of transportation in certain situations); the absence of any clear or precise plan on the part of the government for getting out of this quagmire and moving toward the rebuilding everyone is awaiting; the recommencement of classes for thousands of young people in Port-au-Prince—so many things are accumulating, and they all add to the bitterness that’s in the air, to the resentment people feel.

M-P asked me on the phone just now if I believed that the country is going to explode. Frankly, I only have one worry—and that’s when things are going to implode, not explode. The growing isolation of individuals in this society, the way that the year 2010 has deepened the divide between citizens and their neighbours. Most people are closing themselves up around the little they have: trying to survive, to move forward, to get out if possible. If there is one thing that frightens me, it’s the loss of the feeling of citizenship that can be generated in a society. People stop thinking of themselves as citizens of Port-au-Prince, Leogane, of Haiti, so that they don’t have to think about anything other than themselves. That’s when the implosions—which to the outside world look like explosions—occur.

Then the media seize on these things and the picture of the country is reinforced yet again. They mean well, incidentally.

And today people are throwing stones at dead people. Maybe because it hurts less than throwing them at the living. ...

J