***
It rained the night before. Just a drizzle, and not for long, but it was enough to remind everyone of what's at stake.
Thousands of people in Port-au-Prince sleep outside, without tents or tarps or any other form of shelter. Rain will soak the mattresses, making misery more miserable.
Worse, the mosquito population will explode, increasing the risk of malaria; rain will flush waste into the water supply, leaving people even more vulnerable to diarrhea and other intestinal ailments. Those still living in houses on the hillside will be at greater risk of rock- and mudslides.
"Rain will make a very bad situation even worse," said Daniel Dorsainvil, a former Haitian finance minister.
Don't for a moment think things are getting better here. They're not. And if the international community can't get aid in faster and deliver it more efficiently to the people who need it most, when the rainy season arrives in April or May the hell that is Port-au-Prince will become even more hellish, if such a thing is possible.
Yes, some things have improved. The corpses - at least those that can be reached - are gone. People in need of emergency medical care have received it. In the last day or two, bulldozers and backhoes have started clearing rubble, though they look like teaspoons against a mountain.
Traffic jams are chronic, because there's more gas, and some banks are open, so people can receive wire transfers from abroad.
But bad things are staying bad. The dozens of outdoor camps - you can't call them tent cities, because there are few tents - are entrenching. Some are better organized than others, but most are foul, fetid encampments devoid of any kind of basic services, except for the odd, overflowing portable toilet.
Food and water supplies are haphazard. At one moment yesterday our car was suddenly surrounded by dozens of young men running in the opposite direction. They quickly formed a line outside the shattered remnants of the former military barracks, expecting food. There was none. They lingered, hoping rumour was fact.
There are plans to establish large tent cities with proper services, even schools for the children, but little has been done, and no one knows whether the people would leave what is left of their homes to move into them. They prefer to sleep near the wreckage of their lives.
Meanwhile, people keep looking up at the sky.
"The occasional rains in February and March will be miserable for people," said Mark Fried, a spokesman for Oxfam Canada. "But the real public health dangers ... begin with the steady rains in a few months time."
Oxfam and other charities are distributing plastic sheeting for shelters, and hopes are high that most people will be covered by the time the rainy season begins, A Canadian might wonder how long the people living on the streets and in the camps can go on like this before their endurance drains and their patience snaps. But that's not a Haitian way of looking at things.
On a sidewalk a little way up the hill from the Champ de Mars, a woman named Marie was selling snacks and other assortments, as she was doing on the day of the quake. Except before the quake her home on the hillside shantytown of Canapé Vert was not in the bottom of a ravine, and her 25-year-old daughter wasn't dead.
How much more of this can she endure, she was asked.
"Only God can decide how long we go on like this," she shrugged. That answer is a litany, repeated by dozens over the past week.
Haitians have tough hides and low expectations. If this is their new life, then they will live it.
"If it rains, it rains," said Joseph Hoberne, who once had a house and a job as a security guard, but who now has neither. "It's all good."
The forecast calls for rain today.
