Children are taken out of Haiti in the weeks after the quake

In the weeks after the earthquake there were repeated attempts to move Haitian children out of the country, by adoption, by abduction and by other means. Laura Silsby of the New Life group in Idaho was arrested by Haitian authorities and accused of trafficking, possibly for sale of the children in the United States. She explained herself by saying she had been sent by the Lord to rescue them and would succeed if that was in his plan. Bellegarde-Smith writes that thousands of Haitian children were taken abroad by other groups working in the same conditions, and that in Canada in May 2010 he was told that quake babies were the fashion, the assumption being that white families would raise out of them whatever backwardness they had acquired by living as Haitians. He places the episode in a line running through the schools built for Native American and Australian Aboriginal children, and calls the combination of black and heathen the perfect one for a rescuer.

The debt began with loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s for projects that never paid, and compounded when governments borrowed again to service what they already owed. Export prices fell, terms of trade worsened, and states lost the revenue to run themselves. Africa's total debt went from 9 billion dollars in 1970 to 321 billion by 1997, and interest on unpaid arrears took a growing share of national output that would otherwise have gone to schools and clinics. Western aid averaging 12 billion dollars a year through the 1990s was a stopgap, and it gave the donors an unprecedented voice in the internal policy of sovereign countries. The money came with conditions attached: liberalise, privatise, cut state spending on health and education. The campaign to cancel the debt was the newest in a line of public causes that began with the movement to abolish the slave trade, and like the missionary appeals of the nineteenth century it treated the continent as a condition to be corrected.

Archaeologists long assumed that the first settlers of the Caribbean preferred the larger islands, reasoning that a small island holds fewer animals and less ground to farm. The excavated evidence does not support that. Land animals were never a large part of the diet in these islands. The food came from the sea, and many small islands sit on banks more productive than the water around their bigger neighbours. Saba is one of them. A village of this period worked a catchment of about five kilometres around itself, which an island of five square kilometres supplies without difficulty. Once that is understood, the distribution of Early Ceramic Age sites stops being puzzling. Settlements turn up on islands that earlier scholars had dismissed as too small to hold anyone permanently, because the calculation was being made from the land rather than from the water. People who lived by sailing between islands did not measure them the way people who live on continents do.

The earthquake hit at 4:53 in the afternoon on 12 January 2010, with its epicentre at Leogane, sixteen miles west of Port-au-Prince. As many as three hundred thousand people died, among them Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot and Hedi Annabi, who ran the United Nations mission. More than a million were left without homes. At least two hundred and fifty thousand houses came down, along with thirty thousand shops, offices and public buildings, among them the National Palace and the cathedral, thirteen hundred schools and some fifty hospitals. Over four thousand prisoners walked out of the main penitentiary. Foreign governments pledged ten billion dollars. The Dominican Republic, whose relationship with Haiti is a two hundred year argument, was the first country to send help. The American military ran Operation Unified Response. A telethon fronted by George Clooney and Wyclef Jean brought in fifty-seven million dollars. Port-au-Prince stopped working as a city, and the buildings housing the Haitian state and the foreign mission supervising it fell in the same minute.