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At 5 a.m. the minutes and miles began clicking off as we made our way on the four-hour drive to the northwestern port town of Gonaives to visit CARE's regional office and two food warehouses. Leaving the city was a real obstacle course. I was glad I wasn't driving. There were many turns, but no markers indicating which way to go to reach the only road out of town.
We passed the Club Med resort, recently closed down due to lack of tourism. There was an eerie silence, heavy with heat, as we drove through valleys surrounded by barren mountains. Other parts of the passing landscape were more exotic, with 13-foot-tall cactus and yellow-bark thorn trees scattered across the flatlands, all painted grey by dust.
 | | The road to Gonaives.
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Twenty miles outside of Gonaives, erosion has washed precious topsoil down treeless slopes into the sea, collapsing parts of the road and carving ravines into the hills. It all looked like a wasteland.
Once Haiti was a lush country with 60 percent tree cover. Today, less than 3 percent of Haiti's 10,714 square miles, an area slightly larger than Maryland, is covered by forest. Early colonizers destroyed tens of thousands of acres of virgin forest to plant the cane that made Haiti the world's largest sugar producer. More wood was cut to fuel the sugar mills. And entire forests were shipped to Europe to make furniture of mahogany.
Without trees, which "breathe" water vapor into the air, less rain falls on Haiti, causing riverbeds to dry up. Unfortunately, Haitians have been left with no other economically viable alternative but to cut down the few remaining forests, chopping out the roots to make charcoal to sell to buy food, or to join the exodus to the cities and abroad.
 | | Inside the warehouse in Gonaives, CARE staff prepare to deliver food to local schools.
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In Gonaives, hundreds of Honda motor scooters, used as taxis and for private transport, zipped by us as we made our way to the CARE office. In the northwest, CARE is the larger of two agencies providing food aid. We toured the two food warehouses supporting this program. They were immense -- the size of football stadiums. Boxes and sacks filled with vegetable oil, lentils, black beans and pinto beans were stacked almost to the roofs.
Every couple of months, nearly 6,000 tons of food is trucked from these warehouses to villages. It ends up in the mouths of hundreds of thousands of men, women, elderly and young children who participate in CARE's food-for-work and school feeding projects. These are relief programs designed to provide food to hungry people, but they also are geared toward longer-term improvements in infrastructure and investment in youth and education.
In Haiti, the average worker earns roughly $250 per year, the average farmer half of that. People cannot afford food. Sixty-one percent of Haiti's total population is undernourished. About half the children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition.
"The situation is bad. People fear starvation," said Matt Anderson, who oversees office administration and serves as CARE's liaison with the local government in Gonaives. "If CARE weren't here, more people would die from hunger and sickness. In this area, CARE has grown into the most important provider of health care, food, trees and irrigation systems."
Continue to Day 3.
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