I hope they can do better than "back to normal"
Everyday Life, Doubts Return
Jane Regan
GONAIVES, Mar 22 (IPS) - The flies hovering over the stinking, shining green open sewers here do not appear to notice any change. Nor do the naked children, their distended bellies and orange hair sure signs of malnutrition, worms or worse.
Still, life is different here, in Haiti's fourth-largest city, halfway up the coast, where some 200,000 people try to eke out a living fishing or buying and selling produce and other goods.
It is not just that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is no longer president and that Gerard Latortue, a native of this dusty and dilapidated port town, has taken over with a largely technocrat cabinet.
Nor is it the presence of 150 or so French Legionnaires, whose sorties turn into parades when they are inevitably followed by scores of men, women and children on foot and bicycle.
The real change is that after months under virtual siege, life in Gonaives is getting back to normal.
Businesses and schools are open. The streets hustle and bustle with street merchants hawking piles of eggplant, tomatoes, used blue jeans and shoes, toothpaste and tomato paste from the United States.
The dozens of huge barricades of refrigerators, car hulks and garbage that blocked ”National Highway Number 1”, a two-lane road that in many places is more a riverbed than a highway, have been cleared away. Buses and trucks roll through town on their way north or south, careening wildly, barely missing the motor scooter taxis, students and travellers clogging the narrow route.
And the heavily armed street gang-turned-rebel army that patrolled the streets after taking over the city Feb. 5 have put down their guns, at least for now.
