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Haitians continue to burn what is left of their trees. The deforestation is simply awful. I have not actually been there myself, but I have read a bit.

A few years ago, when I was in St Kitts, I saw a dead dog in the middle of a downtown road, (I forget the name of the city )and I realized then that the place where I grew up was unlike the rest of the world.

I never saw a dead dog laying in a street before. I mean that dog had been there for a while. It was surreal.

I expect to see more than just a dead dog in the streets of home in the not too far away future. I digress, but it is ever on my mind what we in the USA are headed toward a sort of perdition that is not unlike what might be found now in places such as Haiti.

And where can we go to when that sort of circumstance occurs here? Poverty, hunger, fascists all about, and dead dogs in the streets?

I flew into Port au Prince, and took National 1 (highway) along the sea coast and the interior to Cap-Haitien, then over to Fort Liberte and back. We made a stop at the border with the Dominican Republic, and there were no fences, but the mahogany trees were so thick you could barely walk through them, right across the border. I didn't have a point of reference, but the trees were over a hundred feet tall and six feet wide at the base. I asked how they kept the trees from being poached by the Haitians, and our guide told me they had guards that patrolled and would drop them on sight if they crossed the border. These trees used to cover the whole island, but the Haitians cut all theirs down. I don't know if most of the cutting was done by the French to clear for sugar cane fields, but I didn't see any trees over a couple of inches thick, unless they were inside a gate.

Life is very cheap, there. I was cautioned not to photograph anyone selling meat, although people selling fish and fruit were okay. The meat was quite possibly human, I was told, and they'd suspect me of gathering evidence.