NOT EVERY PART IS A SLUM OR RUINS... This is what CNN, Nat Geo, Movies, or others never showed you guys before or after the quake. All we see is ugly! A lot is, but a lot isn't. Yes Haiti is very poor, and it just got leveled by the earthquake, it will take many years to even get back close to normal. Although it is poor, what cant be taken away is its rich culture, and strength. If you saw the coverage you saw people who already had nothing, got that leveled, and still praise God, they still chant, they still have hope, they still move on. Our culture has great sounding music, great tasting food (not mud pies that you see the kids with nothing eat on tv), nice dancing, and hard working family oriented people. It's hard to find Haitian American scum in the US... They come here and do great things. Port au Prince should have never been that poor and overcrowded, but with Haiti now all over the news and awareness is everywhere, people forget that its a whole country and not just Port au Prince. People can invest time, money and effort outside that crowded city. Many Haitians can relocate to the other provinces. Life can be restored somehow...
Its hard to make some/little forward progress and then have to deal with natural disasters that the country cant handle at this point...(hurricanes, mudslides, and now an earthquake)
Many reasons as to why Haiti is the way it is after 200 years of freedom... Yes there has been corruption, but interference has devastated the place. We have all contributed to Haiti's misfortunes, but the former colonial power France and the current colonial power the US, bear most responsibility. They punished the former slaves for their temerity in throwing off both slavery and French colonial rule: the US could forgive them for kicking out the French, but to abolish slavery was unforgivable. Washington refused to recognise its neighbouring republic for 60 years.
By then, the French had virtually bankrupted Haiti through its demands for exorbitant reparations. Haiti was in the grip of a chronic political instability that was exacerbated by foreign interests keen to exploit both its weakness and its resources. In 1915 the US finally occupied the country, in part to remove the influence of rival European powers, and ran it like a colony for nearly 20 years. Haiti has rarely been free of US interference since.
The long-running dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier was supported by the US, as was the succession of his son, Baby Doc. After Baby Doc's departure, in 1986, the US attempted to fix the first elections, a policy that led directly to the election day violence in November 1987. Undeterred, Washington continued to meddle. When Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the hugely popular former priest, was finally elected president in 1991, he was ousted in a coup before the end of the year. President Clinton negotiated his return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti's economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush's administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.