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"  Published in Esquire&amp;#039;s special August 2010 issue on The Impossible. For more on Clinton and Haiti on The Politics Blog, click here. After five days in Port-au-Prince, I sat at the hotel bar and ordered a Prestige, the beer of Haiti, the beer of preference \u2014 a pretty damned good beer, if you ask me. I liked the word, Prestige, which somehow rolled French off my tongue. And I liked the way the bartenders wrapped the fat brown bottle in a white paper napkin, which in the evening heat clung like gauze to a wound. A jazz trio played under the eaves at one end of the courtyard, well enough that I wondered who they&amp;#039;d played with and what they knew. Next to me: a baby-faced accountant, here from Kentucky to audit microcredit payments, Ryan, the only person at the hotel I could stand to drink with.The rest of them were NGO volunteers or medics in for a week, insular, high-minded, and somehow vacant in their mutual moral purpose. Just then, some of them were swimming in the hotel pool, a half dozen American nurses and a pair of Canadian surgeons, playing a game of Marco Polo.  Keep in mind: This is now. A kind of now, anyway. Late spring 2010, just five months past the great earthquake that rocked the already roiling city. To the south was a city lot, half full with a twenty-foot pile of wreckage that once constituted an Italian restaurant. A sweeping pile of rubble projected eight feet into the road, having been carried there, one bucket at a time, by an old guy who worked the lot all day with a worn-down mattock. Rubble dropped there on faith in an unscheduled collection. Traffic bent and slowed around it, a little more each day. In that rubble: a child&amp;#039;s sock, half a purse, bloated rolls of toilet paper, a key chain, the wet skin of a grocery bag, and notes regarding inventory off the top of a desk long since splintered, or salvaged, or stolen. Used-up gaskets. Broken bottles. Bits of food, too. Pits. Rinds. That was just what I&amp;#039;d seen that morning, when the guards from the hotel let me step into the street for a look while they stood watch, shotguns cocked.  Around the corner, facing the main entrance of the hotel, stood a tent city \u2014 more cardboard than plywood, more plywood than tin, more tin than tent pole, more tied-down blue plastic sheeting than anything else \u2014 unspooling itself across the Champs de Mars, the former national plaza, rooting fifty thousand people right up to the ruined national palace. That was west. To the north, more: churches, guts blown outward, still somehow uncollected in the street; collapsed apartments, one cement deck piled upon the other, unexcavated and peopled, everyone supposed, by skeletons. Through these streets walked the Haitian citizenry, scores of them, hundreds, thousands. Haitians selling fruit, selling floor mats, selling chickens, washing windows, cooking corn on rusted hibachis, proffering bags of drinking water.  That night in the hotel, with the jazz throbbing, it started to rain. I pulled out my cell phone and texted the single soul I knew in the city of 2.4 million, Emmanuel Midi, my twenty-five-year-old fixer, who&amp;#039;d dropped me there an hour before. I had no idea where he went at night. I thumbed out my concern: Are you safe in this rain? I&amp;#039;m ok! he texted back. Thanks for asking! I liked the kid. Everything with him was exclamation points. I didn&amp;#039;t know much about the geography of Haiti, but I had known enough to look for Cit\u00E9 Soleil, the notorious slum, as the plane landed. The district occupied a dark, gray clump of land near the airport, at the water&amp;#039;s edge. People had warned me about it. The night before I left, in New York, I had watched half of a documentary about it, Ghosts of Cit\u00E9 Soleil, then nudged around the Internet long enough to find State Department travelers&amp;#039; warnings naming it the most dangerous place in the world. It seemed a place apart, beyond reckoning somehow, a place the Haitian government ignored and the UN struggled with \u2014 and one that some part of my most greedy heart wanted to see. Then I got my first up-close look at Port-au-Prince, straining, crumbling, collapsing in every quarter, and Cit\u00E9 Soleil was forgotten again.  In the mornings, I sometimes stood in my T-shirt, hands in pockets, on the steps of the hotel, staring across the street at the wall of the tarpaulin city. The hotel clerks fussed at me about going outside. Even when it was a park, when you could see through the arbors right to the walls of the palace, the Champs was not particularly safe. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t see past the tents,&amp;quot; one told me. &amp;quot;So there is nothing to see.&amp;quot; I persisted until he came out from behind the desk, unlocked the folding gate, then unlocked the front door, then stood watching me watch the camp. One morning, someone in the camp had a rooster. Three men \u2014 one shirtless, one pantless, the other fully dressed for work \u2014 rousted by the crowing, prowled the curving exterior of a clutch of tents. Two women stood over a charcoal fire, heating up bread. Even at 5:45, the traffic was sometimes loud enough that the rooster was difficult to track. The men closed in. Then the bird went quiet.  Then, in one moment, all three caught sight of me for the first time. The shirtless one walked straight to the edge of the traffic, intent on me. The pantless one at his heels. They called to me, &amp;quot;Monsieur! Mister!&amp;quot; Not good. I turned, and the door swung open for me \u2014 a guard, shotgun crooked in his elbow. He said something I couldn&amp;#039;t make out. &amp;quot;Bonjour,&amp;quot; I replied. But he stopped me to clarify. They&amp;#039;re pimps, he was saying. Pimps who watch the doors. You cannot go out there. After that I didn&amp;#039;t.  In an office in Harlem, the day after I return from Haiti, after he picks my seat, after he makes sure there is water, Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy to Haiti since 2009, draws a deep, yoga breath because it&amp;#039;s the end of the day but his day has not yet ended. He looks flat-out dog-tired. He keeps a piece of gum tucked between his molars and his cheek, bouncing his jaw on it once in a while. In his hour-long narrative about the past, present, and future of the country, time and again, the two of us are his rhetorical pair, conjoined in the propositions he draws up for Haiti.  Let&amp;#039;s say we were going into the textile business... Suppose the two of us had some money we wanted to take down to Port-au-Prince... We should go down there together and take a look... &amp;quot;You and I are sitting here today because at critical points in our lives, from the time we were quite young, whatever adversity we faced, we knew that there was some predictable, positive consequence that would flow forward if we did the right thing \u2014 if we studied hard, made good grades, went to college, whatever.&amp;quot; Clinton&amp;#039;s givens are broad enough to be inarguably illustrative. &amp;quot;Really poor people, people in really poor places, don&amp;#039;t have predictably good outcomes for good behaviors. It&amp;#039;s a disorienting experience. Poor countries need predictability,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;In Haiti, we have to build systems.&amp;quot;  Systems. This makes sense. No one in Haiti seems to believe there are any reliable systems, except perhaps cell-phone coverage and mango distribution.  At a UN conference in March, Clinton raised $9 billion from fifty-nine donors. Can that be used quickly enough to provide lasting, constructive improvement of the systems that already exist? Clinton draws a breath, tilts his head, and starts up with the list. The list of what must be rebuilt is weighty and long. Clinton ticks them down, one finger to the next. The federal workforce, never that strong to begin with. Schools \u2014 not just the ones that collapsed but a system of universal elementary education, which never existed. Infrastructure. Small-business credit. &amp;quot;Then the health-care system needs to be built. I used to say rebuilt, but then I realized there really wasn&amp;#039;t one before,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Now I say built.&amp;quot;  He pauses, and at that moment the muffled room demands a grandfather clock, something to emanate a giant tick. Any noise marking the movement of time. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll have to rebuild the infrastructure,&amp;quot; he says, as if reminding someone at the back of the room. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll have to rebuild the agriculture.&amp;quot; Port-au-Prince was still a city of cement rooms, like this one, hanging two flights above the cloud of the street, cement deck barely cured, cinder-block walls, two doorless entries. On my first morning in Port-au-Prince, it was being used for a meeting between an NGO and some men from the Teleco settlement, just across the street. This was the work of the city. By 10:15 there were twelve men carrying clipboards, fresh from working in the drainage ditches, there to speak with the rep from an NGO called the International Rescue Committee \u2014 Kate Montgomery, twenty-eight, American, stationed in Haiti for two months now \u2014 to make their pitch to extend a program called Cash for Work. They came to argue for jobs that paid slightly less than minimum wage and were available to only 315 of the camp&amp;#039;s 3,600 citizens, jobs that consisted of climbing into trenches to shovel out soupy, shit-glistening, goop-covered trash. There was a Creole translator and an engineer. As the meeting progressed, more men arrived to show unity, until there were twenty-nine in the room, crammed in the doorways.  The IRC would extend the program for another twenty-four days, Montgomery said, but also reduce the total number of workers from 315 to 180. She insisted on a plan to select new candidates with selection limited to only one worker per family, with a minimum of 40 percent women.  The entire event was like watching a book-selection meeting at a subcommittee of the local library. After, the men retreated to an open terrace, where they huddled up and grumbled through a set of agreements. They wanted a force of 315. Montgomery agreed. Done. Inroads for women, accountability, respect for process \u2014 reasonable accomplishments. Something like progress. It just wasn&amp;#039;t clear what would happen now \u2014 what the relationship would be between this room and the camp. I asked one of the men, &amp;quot;Are Haitians used to working in committees?&amp;quot; The man pffed and shook the sweat from his head. He smiled, jabbed the air, and said, &amp;quot;Only committees with knives.&amp;quot;  There was only one dog left in Port-au-Prince. A ribby yellow bitch, teats dragging in the filth. She jogged along the narrow sidewalks, in and between the fruit piles. She ran alongside the filthy channels being cleared for the storms, skirted the edges of the places where people cooked in the open. Or found a corner and disappeared. Skinny yellow bitch. I saw her a dozen times a day. More. Each time miles from the last place I saw her. The Haitians didn&amp;#039;t seem to notice. To them she must have been a mere detail, like the pile of charcoal sold for heating a kitchen stove or the blanketload of mangoes sold in the streets, because a Haitian mango is still a righteous thing. I saw the dog in a riverbed as men dug for sand to sell to the concrete factories. Another time tramping along a drainage ditch, carrying a pup in her jaws, and once at the gate of a tent city, with a compound fracture at the bottom of her right front leg. No one noticed. No one pitied the dog of Port-au-Prince. At one point, I said to Emmanuel, &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s the dog again.&amp;quot; He replied, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not the same dog, Tom.&amp;quot; I knew this, of course. It was my joke with him, because the dogs in Port-au-Prince all looked the same. Very much the way you&amp;#039;d expect the people to look \u2014 somehow cracked, anxious, and broken. Though the people, despite everything that&amp;#039;s happened, were nothing like that. They looked generally insistent, a little pissed, trapped in the middle of a story they will tell later. This is not to say they aren&amp;#039;t sometimes dirty, or hungry, or that they look particularly pure of heart. There is a juicy malice in Port-au-Prince, my fixer told me. Assault. Rape in some camps. At night, I heard guns \u2014 fired at the police, at the UN soldiers, from one gang to the next, I would learn. But by day the streets were full; there was food in the small stands set up each morning, carried in on the backs of women whose ancient supply lines healed themselves many weeks ago, in a fashion that continues to elude construction interests. I can call Emmanuel that, by the way: fixer. It&amp;#039;s not a derogatory term, not a colonialist leftover. I asked, &amp;quot;Would you rather I call you a translator?&amp;quot; He pursed his bottom lip, shook his head. &amp;quot;No, fixer is good, I think.&amp;quot; He taught himself to speak English as a teenager \u2014 by reading newspapers, listening to tapes, and watching DVDs. He had a thready, negligible accent but occasionally struggled with diction, though he was stubborn about asking for help.  He knew why I was there and he knew exactly how to help me. &amp;quot;Fixer is a good word. I think a fixer is what people want,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;A fixer does many things.&amp;quot; He knew that I was going to speak to Clinton following my visit. All week I listened as he opened doors with this information, calling me &amp;quot;L&amp;#039;homme du Clinton&amp;quot; \u2014 getting me into camps, into meetings and classrooms where I had no business, leading me to bleary men who&amp;#039;d spent the night climbing into three-by-four-foot drainage tunnels in order to drag out every manner of rotting obstruction found in the darkness.  &amp;quot;Bill Clinton \u2014 he&amp;#039;s a fixer, I think,&amp;quot; Emmanuel said one day. In the hotel courtyard on the night with the jazz and the rain, I bought Ryan a drink. He was probably about twenty-eight, black hair, cheap, neat haircut. Twice since the quake he&amp;#039;d come to Port-au-Prince to audit payments on microcredit loans. This involves, he told me, sitting in a windowless room in a bank, peeling open envelopes dropped by the poorest Haitians, mostly women, payments on tiny business loans. Microfinance has been a boon in places like India, Indonesia, and Haiti, he told me, and repayment rates are generally higher than 95 percent. Ryan won&amp;#039;t tell me the name of the bank or the address of the office. I laughed. Why would you hide the name of the bank? &amp;quot;I promised my boss,&amp;quot; he said. He ordered more amaretto. The currency itself \u2014 Haitian gourdes \u2014 smelled, he said, each packet a little different from the last. Rotting fruit. Sewage. Gritty, unnamed dirt. Sometimes the bills were so black, it was hard to tell their denomination, except by rubbing the corners with baby wipes. The payments were generally spot-on, however. &amp;quot;Haitian women are good with money,&amp;quot; he said. They must have to hide it, he told me, who knows how.  Ryan motioned over his shoulder. &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t you interview Patricia Arquette?&amp;quot; I thought, George Clooney, maybe, because he organized the initial telethon. Or Sean Penn, who&amp;#039;s been living in a tent city in Port-au-Prince for months now. But why Patricia Arquette? Had she made some particular strides that I hadn&amp;#039;t heard about?  Ryan shrugged. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just saying she&amp;#039;s right there.&amp;quot; He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the table behind us. There she was, hunched forward, hands on her knees, speaking quietly to two Haitians. I could hear her say three words: tents, extreme, and equity. Patricia Arquette. The bartender, a little guy named Sam, proffered a Prestige without my asking. Then I told Ryan about my day: the city, the rubble, the driving, the dog, the stopping to watch NGO volunteers. I had seen enough of their work to recognize what it was: difficult, slow, frustratingly small but inarguably important. &amp;quot;If I were you,&amp;quot; Ryan said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d want to see a little nothing.&amp;quot; A bearded white guy, one of the medics, entered the pool area with eight boxes of pizza. I could see from here: Domino&amp;#039;s. &amp;quot;Nothing,&amp;quot; I repeated. &amp;quot;You should go to Titanyen,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You should get out of the city.&amp;quot; I couldn&amp;#039;t place the name. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s where they buried the bodies,&amp;quot; he said.  &amp;quot;Is there a memorial?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Nope,&amp;quot; he said, shaking his head, absently wiping his lip. &amp;quot;Nothing.&amp;quot;  All week, night and day, the city was lousy with traffic, the streets a storm of careening progress. Tap-taps, brightly colored private buses, jammed so tight with the flesh of passengers that men crouched in the aisles, throttled ahead, behind, around us; trucks downshifted through signal-less intersections; bicyclists were brushed and bumped. There were knee-deep potholes, which the locals filled with cut-up tires, and potholes as wide as the street itself. In six days, I saw four operating streetlights.  One afternoon we blazed through the city to a tent hospital run by a group called Medishare. Our driver, Renor, a solid, dapper guy, drove like a Haitian, brave and batshit crazy. It was a green SUV deal, a Nissan something, with a shitbox transmission and not a single seat belt. The hospital&amp;#039;s chief medical officer, Dr. Vince Gennaro, a New York kid who&amp;#039;s been working in Haiti on and off for six years, had seen every manner of trauma related to the lack of seat belts. By nature, Haitians are unprepared for disaster, he said. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve seen the way they drive,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;This is how close the Haitians are to disaster: Trauma is a leading cause of death in Haiti. Car accidents, pedestrians getting hit. It&amp;#039;s just a constant.&amp;quot;  Gennaro pointed to the surfeit of gauze, tubing, suture kits, all available by the handful, to the cases of saline solution open on the floor. Every bed in the hospital was taken, by all manner of patient \u2014 ancient double amputees next to babies no bigger than an unusually generous croissant.  &amp;quot;We can practice medicine because we have the resources,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You go to Port-au-Prince General right now and you won&amp;#039;t see anything like this. You&amp;#039;ll see nothing. Nothing. Haitian nurses are really good, but they aren&amp;#039;t getting paid for months at a time, and if they go to a cupboard for a liter of saline solution and there isn&amp;#039;t one, what are they going to do? There&amp;#039;s no magic. It&amp;#039;s a question of resources. There is no fight without resources. So they send people home to die.&amp;quot; These stories still seem to give Clinton a little charge, a dim sense that he can fix things \u2014 even something as potentially unfixable as the health-care system in Port-au-Prince. &amp;quot;It may be time for me to fill another plane with supplies for the hospital,&amp;quot; Clinton says when I tell him about the Medishare tent and the hopeless state of Port-au-Prince General.  Then he resets, locates priorities. &amp;quot;But you have to start where people live. In the camps, we need more sanitation and protection from blowdown. In the streets, we need more jobs. We need to begin reconstruction. Then do something on the education front that puts money into the hands of families so we can build an education together.&amp;quot; A few days after my conversation with Clinton, I speak with Dr. Paul Farmer, Clinton&amp;#039;s fellow special envoy to Haiti and the legendary cofounder of Partners in Health, a kind of medical safety net for citizens of the Third World. &amp;quot;All of the medical struggles we&amp;#039;ve had in Haiti have centered around very uncreative ideas about how to finance health care,&amp;quot; says Farmer. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a country of nine million people where only a couple hundred thousand have insurance. The uncreative financing models came out of the international finance community, like the World Bank in the 1980s. Very regressive policies made it very difficult for someone trying to provide high-quality health care for poor people. Truth is, the devastation of the earthquake creates the perfect moment to undo all of that, fairly quickly. &amp;quot;For me, that&amp;#039;s a fresh chance to rebuild a system where, when people need complicated care, they can be referred from a clinic to a hospital or even a tertiary-care hospital. I worked with President Clinton on a very similar effort in Rwanda. And the Rwandans, they came back from hell.&amp;quot;  Haitians speak about the end of the old Haiti. They have for months now, yearning, as Farmer does, for this fresh start. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the rising,&amp;quot; says singer and Haitian icon Wyclef Jean, &amp;quot;and what I mean by the rising is destroy to rebuild. If we can&amp;#039;t get it right, if we didn&amp;#039;t, let&amp;#039;s destroy completely and start from scratch again. Haiti has an opportunity now to start from scratch, and what that means is, we can get real schools in there. There&amp;#039;s a chance of getting real hospitals. There&amp;#039;s a chance of teaching a population how to read and write, where kids can get a degree and actually do something with the degree right now.&amp;quot;  Titanyen, fifteen miles north of Port-au-Prince: the place to see nothing. There was a small sign on the north side of the road with an e-mail address. Down this road they buried tens of thousands, more perhaps, of the city&amp;#039;s unknown dead in the weeks after the quake. There were trash burns on the side of the road; we passed a dead donkey, its body folded and blown up like a gas bag. We saw a large cross on the face of a hill. Burned or painted there, I wasn&amp;#039;t sure. The SUV spun along bit by bit, down and across a precarious washout and up onto a small plateau. &amp;quot;This is the start of it,&amp;quot; Manu said. I called him that sometimes. He pointed up into the hills, past a truly massive burn mark, perhaps 150 yards across. &amp;quot;It goes very far into the hills.&amp;quot; We got out. The air was dense and sour. Emmanuel spat. Then I did. It was not foul really, but I have to say it sat there, in my throat, like it knew what it was. The place appeared to be your basic wilderness: a set of ragged ridges, something to climb or ignore. But there was one long rise, smoother than the others, more berm than ridge \u2014 flat along the top, elongated, like a thigh muscle in the earth. &amp;quot;I see it,&amp;quot; I said to no one. The hill was grid-lined with stones in large rectangles, marking the land. Graves, I figured, or tombs. The Duvaliers dumped bodies out here for decades \u2014 enemies, torture victims, prisoners. Maybe these were search grids. But the areas were too large and irregular.  &amp;quot;People want to build out here,&amp;quot; Emmanuel explained. &amp;quot;Those lines are for houses.&amp;quot; I could not figure this. I really tried. &amp;quot;People want new cities,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;All this land could be a new city.&amp;quot;  We looked south, at the sight of Port-au-Prince, a dark cluster in the distance, and the fifteen miles of open land between here and there.  &amp;quot;People would build on a graveyard?&amp;quot; I said. Emmanuel flattened his lips, the way he did when I said something vaguely dumb. &amp;quot;People need houses,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;That whole city is graveyard now.&amp;quot; We stood and stared, the light open and unfailing. A dark cloud of smoke worked its way from the water, thinning itself up the slope of the city, toward the mountains. Then black smoke rose again, at the water&amp;#039;s edge, moving like a wave up the shore. &amp;quot;Something&amp;#039;s burning,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a fire.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; Emmanuel assured me. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just Port-au-Prince. Just how it blows, I guess.&amp;quot; There came a day when Emmanuel was sulking a little in the courtyard of an NGO office. Hurt, hungover, or troubled \u2014 something was off.  In his presence, I&amp;#039;d asked some aid workers about Cit\u00E9 Soleil. I wanted to know: Which NGO handled that site? Why had it taken two weeks for its people to get aid? The aid workers, some of them in only their second month in Haiti, said things like, &amp;quot;Boy, we don&amp;#039;t go near it&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;We were told not to even drive by.&amp;quot; These answers had set Emmanuel off.  &amp;quot;I could take you there,&amp;quot; he grumbled when we were alone. &amp;quot;These people talk about the poorest place on earth, the most dangerous place on earth. When you talk about a place in that way, that&amp;#039;s what it becomes. That is Haiti, too.&amp;quot; At lunch that day, Emmanuel asked me directly, &amp;quot;What about what we do ourselves?&amp;quot;  I had insulted him somehow. &amp;quot;Haitians, you mean?&amp;quot; He looked at the cars parked end to end along the curb, at the men playing dominoes on the hood of a spray-painted car and the unfractured rock wall behind them. Port-au-Prince looked like any city just then, a place where everyone who passes has some thread in the fabric of a larger, vaguely logical narrative.  &amp;quot;We do things for ourselves,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;My friends and I go to Cit\u00E9 Soleil every Saturday.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;To do what?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We teach classes,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;We teach about manners. And responsibility. Eight of us. You want to go to Cit\u00E9 Soleil?&amp;quot;  We stood, Emmanuel I and nine citizens of a camp called Delmas 33 in Port-au-Prince, on the shallow banks of a basin of concrete. Down here, where the water collected, where the ground was a carpet of broken concrete, the tents were sparse. When I asked what this place was before the quake, all nine of them answered at once. Emmanuel listened, then turned to me and said, &amp;quot;A form.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;A form?&amp;quot; Emmanuel winced. &amp;quot;Farm,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Then where did the rubble come from?&amp;quot; I asked.  &amp;quot;The trucks bring them the rubble,&amp;quot; Emmanuel said. &amp;quot;These people want the rubble, to raise up the land.&amp;quot; At any mention of something lacking \u2014 supplies, heavy equipment, food, hope \u2014 Clinton flinches toward action. His own. &amp;quot;I obviously need to go down there and get those camp leaders together again,&amp;quot; he says. This time he twists his chin with his fingers a little and gets just the tiniest bit exasperated, with time, with the way efforts pale months later, maybe with the relentless need of it all. &amp;quot;See, in the aftermath of the quake, I would go down there, but I didn&amp;#039;t like to go unless I had something to bring them. I could do more good up here, mobilizing services. I got them 120 trucks, 90 of which are now on the streets. What I tried to do every single day was find the gaps and fill them.&amp;quot;  Clinton sits about as still as a man can. He can&amp;#039;t be blamed for suppressing a yawn in the middle of a ribbon of policy statements \u2014 it&amp;#039;s late, he&amp;#039;s getting old, and he&amp;#039;s been working \u2014 but he likes the story of the men trying to raise the ground in the Delmas camp, and he bangs on the gum pretty good when talking about the problem of the rubble. &amp;quot;You may have seen where someone said it may take us two and a half years to clean the rubble out of Port-au-Prince even if we had a thousand trucks all working round the clock, because of the volume of material,&amp;quot; he says. I had not heard this calculation. Seemed optimistic. I&amp;#039;ve learned there is no exaggerating the exaggeration of this city.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s premised on the assumption that the roads are bad, and we have to take the rubble out to centralized dumps and all that.&amp;quot; He shifts from one hip to the other, then sits forward. &amp;quot;So I got &amp;#039;em working on a thing now where they go into, let&amp;#039;s say, a two-square-block area, and let&amp;#039;s say there are twenty lots that are devastated. They collect all the rubble and store it right there on two or three lots, whatever you have to do. You clear the others out and let people rebuild by lottery.&amp;quot;  He pauses there, maybe wants a little love for having come up with that.  &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re going to have to be clever,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But if people can see the homes coming back, and if we could put many, many more people to work, I think that would make a huge difference.&amp;quot; Clinton&amp;#039;s team had set me up with pretty much the only prescheduled meeting I had all week in Haiti, with a fish farmer. I had learned about the fish farmer at a midyear meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. &amp;quot;In business, things really pretty much always get solved,&amp;quot; Clinton said that day. &amp;quot;Competitors will study every previous solution to death and then build on it. In humanitarianism, big ideas get fairly isolated. So I try to look for big ideas that have been isolated for whatever reason and show people the possibilities.&amp;quot; So I asked to see this big idea, this fish farm. In the dense heat of the Haitian backcountry, in a compound verdant and overgrown, I shook hands with the operator, a gentle man, Valentin Abe, forty-seven, small, strapping, smiling, bespectacled.  &amp;quot;Tilapia,&amp;quot; Abe said as he circled the perimeter of the first tank, one of thirty-six corrugated-aluminum tanks wrapped in a concrete base, twenty feet across, each half submerged in the earth. He explained the filtration system that used local bean stalks, pointed out the solar panels that powered the facility, and canisters that caught and reduced the waste from each tank, producing a potent organic fertilizer. He gave that to the local farmers for free. Ingenious, all of it.  Born in the Ivory Coast, educated in the States at Auburn, Abe, an efficient man, begged me not to ask questions until he had explained everything: There are three major lakes in Haiti, all of which had suffered heavily from overfishing. Local fishermen, who had once pulled twelve hundred tons a year from the largest lake, were down to forty-two just four years ago. These lakes needed to be stocked yearly, but the only time that happened was after disasters. &amp;quot;It got to the point where I was hoping for something awful to happen so we could see some progress. And that is nothing to pray for,&amp;quot; he said. Abe, who had argued to a deaf legislature for more than a decade that Haiti should start a national hatchery, finally decided to try it himself, investing his own money to set up three tanks to breed and raise fingerlings. Then he developed an army of five-by-five portable cages and gave these, fully stocked with fingerlings, to the farmers the first year, and supplied them with feed. At the end of a six-month cycle, Abe bought back the largest 70 percent of the catch, financing each farmer&amp;#039;s next cage, stock, and feed in the process. He left the remaining 30 percent to the fishermen. The average family in his first village had lived on $400 a year. Abe&amp;#039;s cages produced $1,200 per cycle. Suddenly, children were going to school, water systems and sanitation improved. &amp;quot;The thing you have to remember with Val,&amp;quot; Clinton says, &amp;quot;is he knows what fish farms can mean. That they can be an absolute disaster to the environment. I&amp;#039;m from Arkansas, where we grow a lot of catfish. Abe insists on this top-quality feed, developed here. I mean that stuff is efficient. That&amp;#039;s what I mean by a reliable system, reliable return. I was there, I saw families of eight living in one room with hardly any roof at all. He changed all that.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a good system, I told Abe, so good, I don&amp;#039;t know what would stop a fishing company from coming in and doing it on a large scale, using cheaper feed. Abe nodded. &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;This is a worry of mine. It really is.&amp;quot; That same point gets Clinton excited, makes him point straight at me. &amp;quot;Right,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s exactly why I want anyone who comes in there to have to be licensed to work with Valentin and with the farmers. Things could be expanded. Just stick with the program that does the most people the most good. It&amp;#039;s an exciting program, it really is. Given enough time and support, Valentin Abe really could feed the whole country. &amp;quot;Haitians have the incentive. They need organizational structure and the support to get things done. That&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m trying to do: move things along. I want them to consider all their big alternatives. I want them to consider becoming a wireless country, consider becoming an energy-independent country. I want them to close their landfills, recycle everything, and use the rest for energy. Wouldn&amp;#039;t it be great if they became the first wireless nation in the world? They could, I&amp;#039;m telling you, they really could.&amp;quot; Noon on a Saturday. I asked for this \u2014 this drive through Cit\u00E9 Soleil. One car directly behind us, another four feet in front. I rode middle seat in the back. Our guide, a school headmaster, gestured to an open area on the left, perhaps sixty yards across. Two bullet-ridden cement towers, a string of plywood sheets bearing half a slogan, leaning against sawhorses. A young man wheeling a bicycle with no front tire. A woman pulling lines of children, three and four at a time. An oil drum. Another oil drum. A box of lumber. Something burning. As long as we moved fast, it was hard to make any of it out. It was not really much of a tour. &amp;quot;This is Bill Clinton Town,&amp;quot; Manu translated. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what they call it.&amp;quot;  There was more said in French then, more to be translated. I didn&amp;#039;t know what to make of the Clinton line, couldn&amp;#039;t tell if the nickname was a tribute or an irony, because everyone in the car started speaking much louder. Two cars in front of us was a UN security vehicle, in our same lane, driving our same speed toward the shore. Emmanuel shook his head to let me know not to worry. And I didn&amp;#039;t much, not even when the UN vehicle slammed to a stop and four camo-suited UN soldiers emerged. Then the crowd pressed in tight against the cars, and the yelling started. One young man, ham-boned against our passenger door, took a long cold look into our car, eyes moving from face to face. I stared right at him like a dumbass. The headmaster told Renor, our driver, to back out, which was difficult given the crowd, and as soon as the UN guys heard him get it in gear, a hand smacked our hood. Another soldier leveled his rifle at our car.  More yelling. Assurances this time. Someone made room behind us, Renor made the K-turn, and we headed away from the scene. &amp;quot;It was just a fight,&amp;quot; the headmaster said in French. &amp;quot;Pas mal.&amp;quot; This was not the Haiti I&amp;#039;d seen, where no one was willing to give up going on, to quit on normalcy. These people dropped normalcy, same way normalcy long ago forgot about them. The headmaster was right; it really was not bad. But in that moment, it did seem to me like the Haiti \u2014 angry, stressed, ignored, worn, explosive \u2014 that Haiti might become. We went north, out of town, then turned and passed a soccer field loaded with children. &amp;quot;This was donated by Wyclef Jean. Wyclef put it right here in Cit\u00E9 Soleil,&amp;quot; the headmaster noted. &amp;quot;He wanted it this way.&amp;quot; Finally I ask Clinton flat-out why the Haitians like him. Why are they so willing to listen to him, above any other leader? He looks at me, a glance at once narrow and earnest. &amp;quot;Was that your experience then?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes. They&amp;#039;re frustrated. And they have questions. But why do they want your answer in particular?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve tried never to have my words outrun my deeds in Haiti,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;which is always a huge problem in every poor place on earth, especially in a great lively culture like that one, where people are demonstrative, and they love to talk, and they love to sing.&amp;quot; He smiles in his et cetera fashion, as if everyone knows what he is talking about. He lays claim to his lessons: &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t forget there are people listening when you say you are going to do things, and I try not to overpromise. Mostly, I think people who have been worked over and messed around with, they kind of get it. Now, I also believe they could withdraw their support from me if they feel I don&amp;#039;t do anything.&amp;quot; He stops. When he starts again, the eyebrows go up. &amp;quot;I wake up every day sick at heart that we aren&amp;#039;t doing more.&amp;quot; Three hours before the UN soldier leveled that rifle at the car I was in, we&amp;#039;d arrived for class. The children had already tramped across the street from Cit\u00E9 Soleil, up the muddy, uneven path, and come in behind the cinder-block walls to the compound where the six-room schoolhouse stood. Haitian children had proven a witty chorus to my stay, naming and renaming me in the camps \u2014 le ministre, l&amp;#039;homme blanc, le pr\u00E9sident \u2014 asking nothing from me except proximity. In Teleco, I reached into a gutter to dredge out a Ping-Pong ball, Purelled the hell out of it, and gave it to a six-year-old boy. He whispered his giddy words of thanks before the boy next to him grabbed it and ran. Those kids, gripped by 93 degrees of midmorning boredom, need balls.  At the school, still around the corner, I could hear them singing. Emmanuel assured me that most of them had seen white people. &amp;quot;They may stare, you know, but we work on that with them,&amp;quot; he said. We walked past a room where a young woman was filling bowls with cereal. &amp;quot;That is my girlfriend.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Pretty,&amp;quot; I told him. He shouted to her and told her that I said she was pretty. She smiled and waved. Just before we stepped around the corner into the class, he said, &amp;quot;Will you teach the class, Tom?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Me?&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; Emmanuel said. &amp;quot;I think they will want that. You can teach them about a good handshake. Being respectful. About manners. The children will listen to you.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Manu,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;My own sons don&amp;#039;t listen to me.&amp;quot;  He laughed and shifted from one foot to the other. &amp;quot;I do,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;And I think they want you to speak.&amp;quot; I took a peek. It was a classroom all right, about fifty children, some of them holding their infant siblings. Clean clothes, sitting up so straight. All of them singing. In the middle of the room, the program director was calling out to them. My name was there on the board in that universal white school chalk, M. TOM CHIARELLA, ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, even the angle of the article: &amp;quot;Possible ou impossible?&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d asked that question a dozen times that week about Haiti: possible ou impossible? Ryan, the young accountant, thought it might be impossible. Nothing is impossible, the fish man assured me. Nothing is impossible, the chief medical officer said.  The ma\u00EEtre d&amp;#039; said, Difficult is not impossible.  Wyclef Jean, deep in his studio back in New Jersey, told me: &amp;quot;In the course of history we have to define what the word impossible means. You put Haitians anywhere, and they&amp;#039;re going to rise to the occasion.&amp;quot; And there was Clinton, the ex-president and, for better or worse, the CEO of the leaderless nation: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to be naive. It&amp;#039;s going to be a stretch. It&amp;#039;ll be hard, but I&amp;#039;m excited about it. Enough so that after a couple of heart incidents and being sixty-three years old, I am prepared to spend three years on it. They want the right things for their country.&amp;quot; So Emmanuel went ahead while I stood there thinking: What the hell did I know about manners? And how would I lead that discussion around to the big question \u2014 possible or impossible? He came back for me then and asked if I was all right. I&amp;#039;m just thinking, I told him. Then Emmanuel Midi, fixer extraordinaire, standing on the blessed eastern edge of the most dangerous place in the world, gave me the best advice of all, uttered the words that rang clearest, the ones that anyone who presumes to care about Haiti should hear. &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;but now we have to hurry.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a7993/bill-clinton-haiti-relief-0810/>