The Price of Caring.

Byline: Rick Perera

"Excuse me, Mr. White Man." The guy sloshing past me might be perplexed to see a group of foreigners with a TV camera, standing on the one dry spot in a giant puddle in the middle of an intersection. But if so, he doesn't show it.

I'm an international aid worker in Haiti, and my companions are shooting a documentary on the island's latest environmental-humanitarian catastrophe. They've asked me to translate for Pierre, an elderly man who's supposed to point at the barren, washed-out mountains behind him and reminisce about how they used to be lush and forested. He plays along dutifully, even spontaneously offering that when he was young he used to take his girlfriends into those long-gone woods. The cameraman gives him a thumbs up.

My cell phone rings. It's the CBC in Canada, wanting to set up an interview with my boss, the country director for CARE International. It would be at 6 a.m. the next morning, to talk about the constant looting of aid trucks. She won't mind, will she? Oh, and could she comment on the capital city's collapsing into partisan violence?

It's all in a day's work here in Gonaives, a grim place even before the last hurricane hit. Now it's a hellish mudhole. A dozen children have surrounded us. My latest trick is to take their pictures with a digital camera. Their shock at seeing their image for the first time quickly turns to giggles.

The jostling and shoving at CARE distribution points is less enjoyable to watch. We give food only to women; they're more likely to feed their children than to sell the stuff on the black market, and they're easier to control in a crowd. They stand for hours behind barbed wire to pick up a few kilos of wheat, beans and oil. One man explodes at this policy. Thirteen members of his ...