PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Deported from the United States, Pierre Charles landed a week ago in Port-au-Prince, a capital more dangerous and dystopian than the one he’d left four years before. Unable to reach his family, he left the airport alone, on foot.
Charles was unsure how to make his way to the Carrefour neighborhood through a city shrouded in smoke and dust, often tolling with gunfire from gangs and police. On the airport road, the 39-year-old laborer tried unsuccessfully to flag down packed buses. He asked motorcycle drivers to take him but was told again and again that the trip was too risky.
Finally, someone agreed to take him as far as a bus stop.
“I know there are barricades and shootings,” Charles said as he took off into the unknown, “but I have nowhere else to go.”
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