Rainy Season: Haiti-Then and Now »

Amy Wilentz is an award-winning former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation magazine. She has written for The New Yorker and The Nation, as well as for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Conde Nast Traveler. She is the author of a novel and a book about life in California. She is a professor in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine.

The earthquake has unleashed a desperation I recognize from my long education in Haiti as the desperation of extreme poverty. A few blocks away, I heard an elderly Haitian arguing with an officer of the 82nd over a piece of rope or bungee cord the man needed to tie up a bundle of stuff. The man had no teeth and gray sprouts of hair and he held the cord in his hand and was trying to get back to his bundle. But the officer stopped him. The man spoke no English, the officer no Creole—but the officer knew that all scavenging had to stop now (as he said repeatedly), because the bulldozers were coming in and the Army did not want to bulldoze any scavengers. Finally though, the officer—rolling his eyes and shaking his head slightly, and looking up to the heavens in a combined gesture of impatience and resignation not uncommon among people new to Haiti—let the old man leave with his piece of rope."

—From the new introduction, "After the Earthquake