Tested blocks come in at a fifth of the minimum acceptable strength

An analysis published in 2011 tested samples taken from masonry blocks in Port-au-Prince buildings of various ages that had been damaged in the earthquake. The concrete measured between 545 and 1,135 pounds per square inch. The minimum acceptable standard set by the American Concrete Institute is 2,500 pounds per square inch, so the weakest samples came in at about a fifth of what the material was supposed to deliver and the strongest at under half. The assessment also worked out the remedy. Raising the proportion of cement in a block from one part in thirty to one part in six, and using better aggregate, doubled the compressive strength. The ratio was known and the ingredients existed. What was missing was money to buy cement at the price Haitians were charged for it, and any institution able to insist that they did.

Cholera appeared in the Artibonite valley on 22 October 2010 and spread through the country within weeks. The source was a MINUSTAH camp staffed by Nepalese soldiers whose sewage ran into the river that irrigates Haiti's rice country and supplies drinking water to the towns along it. Genetic work matched the Haitian strain to one circulating in Nepal. More than ten thousand Haitians died and hundreds of thousands fell ill. Haiti had no recorded cholera before this. The disease arrived with the force sent to protect the population after the earthquake, in the one form of contamination nobody had planned for. The United Nations denied responsibility for six years, invoked its immunity when Haitian victims sued, and when an apology finally came it arrived with no compensation attached. That sequence confirmed something Haitians already suspected. Help arrives with terms, the terms are written elsewhere, and when the help does harm the institution that sent it answers to no Haitian court.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.

Unitransfer USA was created in 1999 to move money from Haitians in the United States to families and institutions in Haiti. By 2013 it ran 716 offices, 284 of them in Haiti and 432 in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Europe. Its chairman put the annual traffic at 275 thousand people in the diaspora sending more than two hundred million dollars home. Its headquarters is in Hollywood, Florida, and it is licensed to operate in eleven states. Before the earthquake of 2010 it claimed more than fifty offices and three hundred agents inside Haiti. It has since followed Haitian workers into Aruba, the Bahamas, Curacao, the Dominican Republic, French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Sint Maarten and the Turks and Caicos, so money now moves between one Haitian settlement abroad and another as well as toward the island. Staff work in French, English, Spanish and Creole.