Istwa Nou

When the Americans landed, Haiti carried hookworm, tuberculosis, filariasis, leprosy, malignant malaria, yaws, syphilis, smallpox, typhoid and a range of intestinal diseases. Captain Kent Melhorn, the naval officer put in charge of public health, described a country full of filth and sickness in which the few buildings called hospitals were shacks where the sick were brought to die. The Service de Santé Publique built and ran eleven modern hospitals employing 2,222 people, all but two percent of them Haitian, along with 147 rural and travelling clinics. Four further hospitals included the United States naval hospital in the capital, a building that later became the Hotel Oloffson and the setting of Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. In 1929 the service recorded 1,341,596 consultations and treatments, and nearly half of Haiti's 159 physicians worked for it. From 1926 a Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed the occupation to reorganise the national medical school, which with a new dispensers' school let Haiti train doctors and technicians to current standards. The British minister, who praised little else, called the medical work a credit to the profession.

By 1920 the gendarmerie, with marines behind it, had produced enough order for the rest of the occupation's programme to proceed. The marines pulled back to Port-au-Prince, keeping only a detachment at the Cap, and the gendarmerie, renamed the Garde d'Haiti on 1 November 1928, took on police work, fire, prisons, customs, immigration, emergency communications, the lighthouses, rural medicine and advice to the communes. It enforced firearms laws stricter than anything in the United States and emptied the country of private arsenals, a condition that held into the early 1960s. Marksmanship was pushed to professional standard. A Haitian team went to the Olympic Games for the first time in 1924 and tied France for second place. An Ecole Militaire opened in 1922, one of Russell's earliest projects, though elite families found the discipline, the junior officer's workload and the prospect of a posting outside the capital beneath them. Jules Andre, Demosthenes Calixte, Gustave Laraque and Franck Lavaud came through it. By 1929 just under forty percent of officers were Haitian.