To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.

Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.

On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.