A year after nearly a quarter of a million people died in a magnitude seven earthquake, unfounded rumor is one of the few commodities Haiti has in good supply.

In Trazeli, home to about 4,000 people on sun-scorched waste ground outside the town of Tabarre, three actors reduced an audience to tears of laughter as they depicted the ignorance afflicting many in a country unable to make sense of what happened.

The actors, Haitians working for the French non-profit Haiti en Scene, depicted a Rastafarian claiming marijuana will ward off cholera, a fraudulent voodoo priestess, a slimy politician, and other out-sized characters.

The crazier the scenes became, the more the homeless Haitians, some 60 of them cramming into a sweltering tent, laughed.

Yet nothing -- not even the story of a man tricking another into handing over his wife and house by warning of an impending earthquake -- really seemed that outlandish.

"They totally understand it. People are living this," one of the actors, 22-year-old Samuel Andre, said.

Facing deep political uncertainty after disputed presidential elections, this is a country where rumors can be deadly serious.

Frightened people will change their daily plans on being told, with absolute certainty, that another earthquake is due in a certain place.

In the past weeks, mobs stoned, hacked to death and immolated 45 people, mostly voodoo priests, accused of using magic to trigger a cholera outbreak that has killed 3,650 people and sickened 170,000.

Others believe "politicians caused the cholera, that it even came with the elections, to stop the elections or influence them," Andre said.

Haitians have a reputation for being superstitious. The dark arts of voodoo and religious fervor are deeply ingrained.

But the power of rumor in this hilly Caribbean nation can be explained more simply by the scarcity of objective information, particularly in the tent camps still housing more than a million people.

In Trazeli, women cook over wood fires and children grow up without school. Toilets are covered in putrid, fly-blown piles of feces.

There's almost no electricity. Or television. Newspapers never come. The Internet is a fantasy.

For people surviving in these medieval conditions, Haiti's leaders, still squabbling over who won the post-quake election, might as well inhabit another planet.

"The election was meaningless for us. We've never seen a single candidate," said Yves Raymond Emmanuel, 43, a camp leader.

International aid workers speeding between projects in Land Cruisers seem equally remote. One irony-laden segment of the theater performance was titled: "Right after God come the whites."

Bertrand Labarre, the Frenchman behind Haiti en Scene, said Haitians have questions, but no one whom they can ask. So his theater groups teach them to think for themselves.

"People have no one to believe in, so rumors spread. It's all based on fear," said Labarre, 42.

"They want answers. But if you ask 'Why did it happen?' then you open yourself to all sorts of beliefs -- like the earthquake being caused by a secret American weapon, or a nuclear test, or the will of Christ, or because 'we were bad.' What you really need to ask is: 'What do we do now?'"

As the theater audience slipped away under a fierce sun, Duquenson Royer, an evangelical pastor, was walking into camp.

He agreed that Haitians "don't really know what's going on." He agreed that wild rumors are rife.

And he said he believed them all.

The January 12, 2010 earthquake was brought by God "to bless us. He wants to make Haiti a different place," Pastor Royer said.

There was more.

"Something will happen to Haiti, something worse," he said, "something much worse."

earlier related report
No let up for traumatized Haiti one year on
Port-Au-Prince (AFP) Jan 8, 2011 - How much pain can a country take? One year after an earthquake crushed almost a quarter of a million of their people, Haitians are still finding out.

The magnitude seven quake struck at 4:53 p.m., January 12, just as children in their smart uniforms, satchels and ribbons spilled out across the bustling capital of Port-au-Prince, overlooking the shining Caribbean sea.

Within seconds, more than 220,000 people were dead and almost two million homeless. Haitians call the quake "Goudou Goudou," the sound that came when the world collapsed.

They have not yet invented names for the misery that followed -- and continues to pile up.

Hurricanes, flooding, and a cholera outbreak that killed 3,650 and sickened 170,000 compounded the natural disasters afflicting the country of 10 million.

Then politicians turned a hope-filled presidential election into a farcical, still-unresolved squabble over who won, entrenching the chaos that for years has made this the western hemisphere's poorest, most dysfunctional state.

"All we see is catastrophes," said Eliefritz Jean, a 24-year-old man living in a tent camp outside Port-au-Prince.

Rising from the sea into palm-covered hills, the capital was once dubbed the Pearl of the Antilles. But today Port-au-Prince is a squalid place where tent camps, ruined buildings, and intense open-air street life exist seamlessly.

Starved dogs roam potholed streets. Smoke rises from every other block where garbage heaps have been set ablaze and in some neighborhoods women wash clothes in grey, trash-filled streams. There are no cats in the street -- they are eaten.

If a year ago the scale of destruction was breathtaking, then today it is the scale of inaction that shocks.

Almost nothing has been rebuilt. Not the presidential palace and not the houses of more than a million ordinary people forced to remain in tent camps.

Even rubble clearance -- the first step to rebuilding -- has barely begun.

The charity Oxfam estimates that five percent of the collapsed masonry has been taken away. Officials predict it will take until August before that reaches 40 percent.

"Totally unacceptable," says former US president Bill Clinton, who is helping to coordinate a huge international aid effort.

Haiti's government, limping along while rival candidates bicker, defends its performance.

"It's hard to give a time-frame, to say 'two, three, five years,'" Jacques Gabriel, minister for public works, transport and communication, told AFP.

He reluctantly put a figure on how long it will take to rebuild just the administrative complex in the capital: five years.

"The task will be very heavy, not just in the city, but in the provinces that were concerned and perhaps nationally."

If life in the capital is bad, in the tent camps it is far worse.

Barely 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the Florida coast, a generation of children is growing up without education, believing that wood fires, mud floors and no electricity are normal.

Sickeningly, the crowded, unlit rows of tents have become rape magnets for roving gangs preying on women torn by the upheaval from the protection of their traditional communities.

One, a widow named Guerline, told Amnesty International how she had to watch four men rape her 13-year-old daughter. Then it was her turn.

"They told me that if I talked about it, they would kill me. They said that if I went to the police, they would shoot me dead," she said.

But, incredibly, hope and dignity survive in this tropical hell.

In the capital, within spitting distance of ruins that may well still entomb unburied dead, impoverished, but carefully turned out Haitian men line up to have their shoes polished.

And in camps, sitting under tarpaulins donated by every country from China to the United States, women set up impromptu beauty salons, gossiping and laughing as they put in curlers and creams.

The tears will flow on Wednesday, the anniversary of the earthquake. But as they go about their daily lives, Haitians radiate the high spirits that have made them famous worldwide as musicians and entertainers.

"Haitians are strong," said actor Fernand Joseph, 22.

His face fell as he described how his wife -- like so many other desperate Haitians -- decided to emigrate with their baby daughter after the earthquake.

"All I wanted is gone," he said. "But then I say to myself: 'It's OK. You're young, you are 22, you can fight."

Joseph flashed a brilliant smile. "I am fighting for them to come back.... I must never lose hope."

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