A student posts to a Haitian forum and gets no reply at first

In the spring of 1999 a Haitian student in Florida, posting under the name Yvette, wrote to a discussion board on the Haiti Global Village website. The board was called Men Anpil, after the Kreyol saying that with many hands the load is not heavy, and it had been set up for Haitian students at universities outside the country. Her first message asked readers to consider what could be done for Haiti and drew no answers at all. She wrote again to say that a reform was already under way in every little street where a Haitian lived, that waiting for the government to act was finished, and that the thing she wanted help with was the future of the country. This time the board answered for days. Participants argued about whether the fault lay with politicians or with ordinary citizens who had stopped taking part, and they kept it civil with nobody moderating.

Jean Dominique was shot dead by gunmen on the morning of 3 April 2000 as he arrived at his radio station. He was born on 30 July 1930 and founded Radio Haiti Inter in 1968, the first station in the country to broadcast news in Kreyol. That decision changed who counted as an audience. Until then the press addressed the French-reading tenth of the population, and Dominique put the other nine tenths inside the national conversation by speaking to them in the language they actually used. He was driven out of Haiti twice, once under the Duvaliers and once under the Cedras junta, and came back both times. He supported Aristide and criticised him, which widened rather than narrowed the field of people with a motive. The case was never solved. Jonathan Demme filmed his life and released The Agronomist in 2003. Dominique had trained as an agronomist before he took up broadcasting, and he treated a radio station the way he treated soil, as something that had to be worked every day.

Average daily calorie intake in Haiti stood at 1869 in 1997, about eighty percent of the standard recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization, and below the figures estimated for the 1960s, which were 2140 in 1962 and 2000 in 1966. Life expectancy at birth was a little under fifty four years in 1998, an improvement on the figure below forty eight in 1970, and the gain came from sharp reductions in infant and under five mortality. The share of fifteen year olds who would die before reaching sixty rose for both sexes in the late 1990s and was the highest in the Western Hemisphere, at 340 per thousand for women and 432 for men. There were 0.2 physicians per thousand people in 1995, up from 0.1 in 1990, a figure that had been flat since the early 1970s and was barely above the level reported in 1952.

At a CARICOM summit in Montego Bay attended by president René Préval, the Jamaican prime minister P. J. Patterson announced that Haiti would be granted full membership. The application had been lodged on 10 May of the same year. Patterson called the decision historic and argued it would help build democratic structure inside Haiti through contact with sister nations. Others were sceptical. Jerry Tardieu described it as a dramatic break from twenty years of subregional integration built almost entirely on historical and political homogeneity and judged it more politically motivated than economically justified. Smith notes that Haitian membership raised the combined population from roughly six million to fourteen million, which made the single market proposal more attractive, and that Haitian intellectuals complained that the Préval administration had done almost nothing to explain CARICOM to Haitians. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that describing Haiti as a French-speaking country, as CARICOM's accession debate did, misstates the case, since fewer than fifteen percent of the population speak or comprehend French and proper integration would require formal recognition of Kreyòl as a CARICOM language.