Avril flies to Taipei and comes home with nothing

After fourteen months in power Prosper Avril still could not get foreign aid flowing again, so he played Haiti's China card. Earlier governments had worked the rivalry between Beijing and Taipei, each of which paid for recognition. Taiwan was rich in foreign exchange and generous to countries that kept its embassies open. By 1990 it had stopped losing partners to Beijing and had lost interest in buying them. Avril flew across the Pacific expecting about forty million dollars. He arrived in a cold Taipei to find that opposition leaders in Port-au-Prince had sent a telex while he was in the air, informing his hosts that the Haitian people would not consider any agreement he signed binding. The Taiwanese received him as a head of state, then offered him behind closed doors a vague promise of undefined assistance in exchange for his signature on a declaration pledging democratic elections in Haiti. He cancelled his press conference and flew home. A general strike called to keep him out failed on 12 January 1990.

Before building Haiti Global Village, Henri Deschamps and his assistants studied what a Haitian internet would have to look like. Their conclusion was that its first language would be English, with French second and a small amount of Kreyol. The reasoning was demographic. The heaviest users would be Haitians living in English speaking countries, above all the United States, along with their children born abroad. Deschamps described the project as a bridge home for people who had left because they had to and who meant to return one day. The site was laid out as a town, with a central square named for Toussaint Louverture, a bulletin, a poll and a set of small squares called anba tonel, after the shelters put up in the Haitian countryside where people sit and talk. The choice had a cost. Users writing from Europe objected, and the exchange revealed that many of the American born posters could read neither French nor Kreyol.

In 1986 the Save the Children Federation, financed by the United States Agency for International Development, began a watershed project at Maissade on Haiti's central plateau. It formed peasant groups and promoted tree planting and soil conservation on individual plots. Two years in it started treating small degraded watersheds, each averaging nine hectares. After two more years across twenty two of them, farmers had built 590 check dams, about twenty seven to a watershed. The main ravine was completely treated in ten watersheds, partly in seven and barely in five. Fifty four per cent of landholders contributed labour. The striking figure is who else turned up. People who owned no land at all inside a watershed supplied fifty seven per cent of every recorded work event, and ninety per cent of them belonged to a groupman, a peasant labour group, although the project had never tried to recruit through those groups. Surveys taken in August, September and December 1990 covered 268 people.

The 1987 constitution sent the presidency to a member of the Cour de Cassation, and the judge next in line, Gilbert Austin, was thought too close to the departing general to be able to govern. Austin removed himself. The post went instead to Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, at forty six the youngest judge on the court, appointed to it by a liberal justice minister during the years of the military council. Prosper Avril had agreed to leave office while refusing to leave the country, where he would have served as a rallying point for the right. American pressure settled that too, and on Monday at dawn a United States Air Force plane carried him and his family to Florida. Pascal-Trouillot was sworn in on 13 March 1990 as the first woman to head the Haitian state. General Herard Abraham handed her the blue and red sash and said that the army awaited her orders. In a white linen suit she told a cheering crowd that she wanted nothing except to serve the country. Elections were set for December.