Haiti

Photographer Angela Catlin and I arrived in Port Au Prince yesterday after travelling for about 20 hours. We are staying in a hotel close to the airport called Hotel Visa Lodge. Today we hired a driver and had a two hour tour of the city, albeit staying inside the vehicle because of the fear of kidnapping - Haiti is second only to Iraq for this crime. The situation is quite tense as local elections are being held next weekend and there have been sporadic bursts of violence here in recent weeks, most notably with the shootings of two UN soldiers. Tomorrow we go into Cite Soleil, a sprawing slum of 400,000 people and where the population live in dire poverty. We will spend three days there documenting the conditions these people endure. In downtown Port au Prince today we got our first taste so we now have some kind of idea of what we will witness....