Despite its sunny name, Haiti's Sun City is a maze of squalor and utter wretchedness.
(ABCNEWS.com)

maze: n.
something made up of many confused or conflicting elements; a tangle
eg: a maze of government regulations 纷乱的政府条例

squalor: n.
a filthy and wretched condition or quality

wretched: adj.
characterized by or attended with misery or woe
eg: a wretched life

C I T É   S O L E I L: [法]太阳城

Haiti: n.海地

Port-au-Prince: [法]王子之港

patchwork: n.
a collection of miscellaneous or incongruous parts; a jumble
eg: From the aircraft we could see a patchwork of fields of different shapes and colours.

slum: n.贫民区
a heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor. Often used in the plural

fetid: adj.
having an offensive odor

residue: n.残渣
matter remaining after completion of an abstractive chemical or physical process, such as evaporation, combustion, distillation, or filtration; residuum

semblance: n.表象
an appearance; outward form or seeming likeness
eg: Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for eternal fact.

shack: n.
a small, crudely built cabin; a shanty

rust: v.使生锈
to corrode or subject (a metal) to rust formation

rutted: adj.有车辙的

chaplain: n.(附属小教堂的)牧师
a member of the clergy attached to a chapel

missionary: n.传教士
one who is sent on a mission, especially one sent to do religious or charitable work in a territory or foreign country

humility: n.谦逊
the quality or condition of being humble

hackneyed: adj.
overfamiliar through overuse; trite
eg: a hackneyed phrase陈腐之词

Creole: n.克里奥尔人
a person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America

stucco: n.（粉刷墙壁用的）灰泥
a plaster or cement finish for interior walls

stench: n.
a strong, foul odor; a stink

scrounge: v.
to obtain (something) by begging or borrowing with no intention of reparation
eg: He scrounged a cigarette from his roommate.

clay: n.粘土
a fine-grained, firm earthy material that is plastic when wet and hardens when heated, consisting primarily of hydrated silicates of aluminum and widely used in making bricks, tiles, and pottery

pottery: n.陶器
ware, such as vases, pots, bowls, or plates, shaped from moist clay and hardened by heat

plaintive: adj.
expressing sorrow; mournful or melancholy
eg: a plaintive cry

bureaucracy: n.官僚制度
an administrative system in which the need or inclination to follow complex procedures impedes effective action

perfunctory: adj.敷衍塞责的
acting with indifference; showing little interest or care

thug: n.暴徒
a cutthroat or ruffian; a hoodlum

gang: n.帮派
a group of criminals or hoodlums who band together for mutual protection and profit

extort: v.
to obtain from another by coercion or intimidation
eg: He extorted a fortune from the lady.

mortality rate: 死亡率

jot：v.
to write down briefly or hastily
eg: The policeman jotted down my address.

squat: v.蹲
to sit in a crouching position with knees bent and the hams resting on or near the heels

dangle: v.悬荡
to hang loosely and swing or sway to and fro
eg: The leaves dangled in the wind.

stifle: v.
to keep in or hold back; repress
eg: to stifle one's indignation

condom: n.避孕套

plea: n.
an earnest request; an appeal
eg: spoke out in a plea for greater tolerance

But hell is in a league of its own. You enter it along a paved street covered in a thick layer of trash — not just litter, but the fetid residue of a sewage canal that overflows every time it rains.

Then the pavement ends. And so does any semblance of a city as we know it.

It is Cité Soleil — or Sun City — which despite its sunny name is the darkest of places imaginable: 27 square miles of unspeakable squalor, home to close to a million people — although that number is at best an estimate.

Shacks of rusted tin, plastic and cardboard line rutted dirt paths barely wide enough for a vehicle to squeeze through. There is no electricity or plumbing — just open canals clogged with sewage, trash and industrial waste. Mud-encrusted pigs rut their way through, destined to be some family's disease-infested dinner. Most of the faces — young and old — share a vacant look.

When my film crew and I show up at a medical clinic run by a U.S. charity, dozens of children flock to see the foreign visitors with the expensive-looking television gear.

We are the guests of Father Tom Hagan, a former chaplain at Princeton University who now runs a nonprofit aid group called Hands Together. Despite his Catholic background, Hagan insists he is not a missionary, but an aid worker who has dedicated his life and his organization to the people of Cité Soleil.

For Hagan and most aid workers here, the objective is not free handouts. It is instead to give the people of Haiti the means to improve their own lives: education, health care and self-sufficiency. In this country of 8 million — in which two-thirds live below the poverty line, most on less than $1 a day — it is a staggering challenge.

Hagan tells me the only way to approach it is with humility.

"It sounds hackneyed," he says, "but you really do have to approach this one individual at a time. If you think too big, it will defeat you."

As the ABCNEWS crew takes pictures of the misery, I chat with a few of the children.

Bed Is the Floor Under the Table

One of them, 13-year-old MacKendy Jerome, is tall and desperately thin. Flesh hangs from his arms. But his eyes are alert and he is quick to offer answers to my questions, as a Haitian aid worker translates from Creole.

He offers to show us his home, just a few hundred yards away. We squeeze through narrow alleyways, scraping against tin walls and crude stucco, holding our breath to block the stench. The maze of wretchedness is bewildering by day. It must be terrifying by night.

MacKendy's house is one of the more solid structures, with concrete-block walls and a solid floor. It looks no bigger than a prison cell — perhaps 10 feet by 10 feet. Inside there is barely room for a double bed, a single bed and a kitchen table. MacKendy lives here with his five sisters and his parents — eight people in all. Some of them sleep on beds. MacKendy sleeps on the floor, under the table.

"Have you eaten anything today?" I ask.

"No," he says. "We have no food."

He normally eats one meal a day: a pancake of sorts made of cornmeal. If his father makes a few pennies at the market today, MacKendy will eat. If not, he will go hungry. The current crisis has made it even harder to scrounge a living. It has also sent prices for food soaring. A few pennies do not go as far as they used to.

Perhaps a mile across Cité Soleil, two young women are spreading out wet discs of clay in the sunlight. This is not pottery. It is the closest many here will get to food today. Clay may not have much nutritional value, but it fills empty stomachs.

Each disc sells for 2.5 cents. They say it goes down better with a little cooking oil or butter.

I do not ask MacKendy if he has ever eaten the clay.

'Take Me With You'

As we leave MacKendy's home, he comes over to me and says something in Creole, looking me straight in the eye.

I ask our translator what he is saying.

"Please take me with you," were his plaintive words.

My heart sinks.

MacKendy knows that his life has no future here in hell. We cannot, of course, simply take MacKendy from his family. Or the tens of thousands of other children like him.

A Failed Nation

The line connecting MacKendy and Cité Soleil to the current chaos at Haiti's National Palace is as direct as the road between them is twisted and broken.

This failed nation has no real government, no effective justice system, a bureaucracy dedicated to its own greed, a public education system that charges tuition beyond the reach of 70 percent of the people. Police are a perfunctory presence. The slums like Cité Soleil are controlled by thugs and gangs who extort and terrorize even the poorest of the poor.

When academics talk about the need to construct the institutions of a "civil society," this is what they are talking about: security on the streets, an effective justice system, an honest bureaucracy, a parliament that holds these institutions accountable and in check.

With the best of intentions, it would take a generation. One U.S. missionary who has lived here for many years tells me she believes it will take three generations to create such a world here in Haiti.

MacKendy doesn't have that kind of time. Haiti has the worst mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere. The statistics say that here in Haiti, MacKendy will die at 49.

Probably exactly where he was born.

How to Find the Words

Before we leave Cité Soleil, I need to shoot a brief on-camera conclusion. It's a struggle to know what to say and how to say it. I jot down thoughts and scratch them out. Then I finally come up with two lines that seem to summarize my sense of the place and the challenge.

I squat by the sewage canal, slums stretching behind me into the horizon. Some of the children who have been following us pose behind me. I start talking to the camera. ABCNEWS producer Gitika Ahuja notices one of the young girls — perhaps 8 or 10 years old — chewing and pulling intently on something that dangles horrifically from her mouth. Gitika stops me so we can ask the girl to remove the object.

I turn around. When the object registers in my eyes, I have to stifle the urge to throw up. The girl is chewing on a condom. In this country with the one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, that's the toy she has found to play with.

The moment knocks me. Like MacKendy's heart-wrenching plea, the girl chewing the condom seems to capture the despair of this place better than any statistics or profound insights.

From www.abcnews.com

Edited by Stephanie, 2004.3.11