Haitian youth in Boston clinics stop after one session

Researchers pulled 252 outpatient mental health charts from five community clinics in the Boston area covering treatment that began between 2000 and 2005. Eighty one of the children were Haitian, eighty two African American and eighty nine white. Twenty nine percent of the Haitian children attended exactly one session, close to the twenty eight percent among African American children and far above the eight percent among white children. Among children who met the study's threshold for clinical need, Haitian patients averaged 5.7 visits in six months where white patients averaged 8.0. Twenty seven percent of the Haitian children were uninsured or covered by the state pool for the uninsured, against nine percent of African American children and four and a half percent of white children. Adjustment disorder was the diagnosis most often recorded for Haitian children. Treatment meeting national guidelines for attention deficit disorder reached eighty eight percent of white children and thirty eight percent of Haitian children.

An armed rebellion moved through Haiti in February 2004, and on the twenty-ninth Jean-Bertrand Aristide left the country aboard a United States aircraft. It was the second time he had been put out of the presidency. In 1991 the army did it and he spent three years in Washington. By 2004 there was no army, since he had abolished it, and the work was done instead by former soldiers and gang leaders who crossed in from the Dominican side and took town after town while the police stood aside. Girard places the departure inside a period of deep political division, which is the polite way of recording that Aristide had by then lost the students, the business class, the church hierarchy, most foreign donors and a large part of the movement that elected him. The plane carried him to the Central African Republic and eventually to South Africa. Haiti had produced another president whose exit was arranged in a foreign capital.

At meetings in Kingston with CARICOM officials, Aristide appeared calm and tried to convince the regional leaders that the opposition was weak and posed no real challenge to his presidency. He willingly accepted the confidence-building measures the leaders proposed to break the stalemate, agreeing to disarm gangs and permit political demonstrations. The opposition, led by elite businessmen but drawing on a wide cross-section of Haitians, remained unwilling to accept any negotiation short of the president's immediate removal, and CARICOM's attempt to broker talks in the Bahamas failed. Smith argues that the resulting Kingston Accord drew severe criticism inside Haiti from people who had expected CARICOM to force a resignation, and hardened a local view that Aristide had manipulated the organisation to preserve the Lavalas hold on the state. He doubts earlier intervention could have changed the outcome.

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.