Ten years and an earthquake: the changing face of Haiti

This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the Caribbean republic had changed after the terrible earthquake of 12 January 2010. This time, I would not be travelling by jitney, lorry or fishing boat, but in taxis and air-conditioned tourist coaches. Port-au-Prince, the capital, was as exhilarating and exhausting as I remembered it. The streets, thronged with pack animals and porters were a human ant heap. The smells I knew so well from earlier visits — sewage, burning rubbish — hit me forcefully and it was as though I had never been away.

I made a bee-line for the Hotel Oloffson, a magnificent gingerbread mansion made famous by Graham Greene in his Haitian novel The Comedians. Illuminated at night, the hotel was a folly of spires and fretwork. Hurricane lamps flickered yellow, showing white rattan furniture. I had not seen the Haitian-American owner, Richard Morse, since I proposed to my wife here in 1990 (I went down on two knees to Laura after a burst of machine-gun fire startled me).