Haiti All latest updates The island and the outside world Being in Haiti without being in Haiti Feb 12th 2009 | Online extra Gonaives | Labadee | Port au Prince Gonaives TRAFFIC creeps down a dusty avenue. Gonaives looks like a poor city, with a steady flow of pedestrians walking along the edges of the road, but it does not immediately seem destroyed. Then we turn a corner and find a wall of dirt halfway up the street. The bulldozers and dump trucks have cleaned the thoroughfares, and the efforts of thousands, with shovels, have begun on the smaller streets. But the empire of dirt persists. It looms over our heads and we scramble up the edge, looking now down at nearby rooftops and then around the nearest corner, where this cracked tube, like an engorged elemental boa constrictor, continues into the distance. I remember grappling with the idea of infinity when I was a boy. W...