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As a press officer, I often visit countries to meet with CARE staff, the media and the people whom we serve in our self-help development projects. This day, I found myself on the plane to Haiti. After reading hundreds of stories and reports on Haiti, I arrived in Port-au-Prince, following a two-hour flight from Miami. Several times during the flight I heard it said that "Life has never been worse in Haiti than it is today." Now it was time to see for myself.
 | | A girl fills a water pail from a public faucet in Port-au-Prince.
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I spent my first afternoon walking around Port-au-Prince. The streets of the capital were teaming with people: beggars and men pulling huge, wooden handcarts. Women earning a few gourdes by selling meager supplies of pencils, old clothes, soap, charcoal or other goods. And scores of children elbowing their way to public faucets to get water to carry home in pails perched on their heads.
The streets also were strewn with rubble and clogged with fuming and rusted autos. Streams of waste seeped down into shallow open sewers. On just about every corner, you could spin around and see tens of thousands of shacks made of tarpaper, corrugated tin, cement, cardboard and sticks packed together on the hillsides.
 | | In the streets of Port-au-Prince, locals get around in the back of "tap-tap" trucks.
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"There is much misery in this country," Susan Ross, CARE's deputy director in Haiti, said to me before I went walking. "It is terrible, but the remarkable thing is that Haitians haven't lost hope in each other and we haven't lost hope in them. Haiti's problems are not insurmountable, but they require a lot of focus and a lot of support."
During the next few days, I would be visiting smaller towns, rural villages, farms and seaside slums where CARE is providing both glimmers of hope for development and immediate assistance through food-for-work and school feeding programs. Across Haiti, it's striking to note that CARE is directly helping roughly 10 percent of the total population.
Continue to Day 2.
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