The government conducts business in French, while most of the citizens speak only Creole, often spelled "Kreyol" in Haiti. Illiteracy is rampant. And they've had a dozen different governments in as many years, a disquieting epilogue for people who already survived the devastating rule of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier. During their regimes, which stretched over three decades, the government racked up $1.1 billion in debt. The Duvaliers' personal wealth, perhaps not coincidentally, was estimated at more than $900 million.

But the Haitians are mostly smiling as they make their way across garbage piles and areas of open sewage. They're strikingly clean in a city that is shockingly dirty. They favor bright pinks and greens and blues and yellows in both their dress and their buildings. Many of them wear their Sunday best, frilly dresses and clean, pressed pants. When they visit the clinic, even the children look like brides and grooms, like people expecting to see the face of God.

The vast majority are Christian, mostly Catholic. Wags have reported that all of them believe in "voodoo." It's an exaggeration, but at least three-fourths of the population practice aspects of Voodoo, descended from African spirit religions, as part of their daily spiritual lives. At night, if it's quiet, you can hear the cadence of drums in the hills surrounding the city.

Their devotion to Christianity is more obvious, written in Bible references even on the tap-taps, the trucks that have been converted to makeshift buses that run the street. They even have an "eternal father" lottery.

The first day occupational therapist Beth Cardell was there, sweating in the 104-degree heat, painting a clinic that, like the rest of the city, had no electricity during daytime hours, the only safe drinking water corralled in little plastic bags purified by Culligan, she thought she'd made a mistake. She was miserable and "could easily have been talked into never coming back."

That was before she discovered she really could make a difference.

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Monday: The children of Haiti.

E-mail: lois@desnews.com