Preval becomes the only Haitian to finish two presidential terms

Rene Preval was inaugurated a second time on 14 May 2006, having won the February election. He is the only person in Haitian history to serve two full presidential terms and to hand power over peacefully on both occasions. The record is worth stating because of what it is measured against. Since 1804 Haiti had produced emperors, kings, presidents for life, a long roll of heads of state removed by force, and a family dictatorship that held the country for twenty-nine years. Preval's second government leaned on MINUSTAH, whose nine thousand soldiers, mostly Latin American, supplied the security the abolished army no longer could. He put effort into relations with the Dominican Republic and the United States, the two countries whose decisions set the limits of what Haiti can attempt. The stability was rented, it rested on foreign troops, and every force that had wrecked earlier Haitian governments was still in the room. It lasted long enough to matter.

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.

In 2007 the Dominican electoral board created a separate civil register for foreigners, known as the Book of Foreigners or the pink registers. A child born in a Dominican hospital to parents who cannot show legal status is given a pink birth certificate and entered in that book. It is a document, and it is not citizenship: people registered in it cannot vote. In the same year the board issued a circular, also called Resolution 12, instructing registry officers to stop issuing identity papers to children of foreign parents whose births had been recorded irregularly. Adults who needed their own birth certificates to enrol at a university found them refused. Whether a father had used a ficha, the identity card handed out by a sugar mill, to register a birth years earlier became the mark that flagged a family. Thousands of people born in the country were left stateless while officials audited their papers.

After independence most African governments put money into schools, primary enrolment rose sharply, and there was deliberate effort to get girls into classrooms. The gains were uneven and then partly reversed. Adult illiteracy south of the Sahara is higher than in any other region of the world, the economic crisis that began in the 1970s cut state education budgets, and the gap between boys and girls is widest in the countryside. Health followed a similar curve. Malaria remains the heaviest disease burden on the continent and sleeping sickness was spreading again by the 1990s. More than two thirds of the world's HIV cases are African, with about 34 million people infected since the early 1980s and over 11 million dead, concentrated in the east and the south. Illness tracks poverty, thin food, bad sanitation and dirty water. Clinics decayed and trained staff left for better pay abroad. Vaccination programmes still cut infant mortality sharply after the 1960s and life expectancy rose, which shows what small sums can buy.