NEW YORK — "Did you see this?" My colleague asked me in a hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, in 2005.
Regrettably, I had seen it — a dead child covered with a sheet, flies buzzing around it, seemingly abandoned in a hospital hallway. For days afterward that sight haunted me. It also was proof of the desperate state of Haiti's hospitals.
I went to Haiti twice, first in 1993 as head of a U.N. mission to determine the effects of the U.N. embargo on the population, and again in 2005 to assess the Pan American Health Organization's efforts in the area.