PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti.- We’ve almost crested the hill when the battered red Land Rover’s engine stalls, and we roll backwards towards a chorus of frantic honks. “Oops,” says Rodrick, the driver, and with a quick motion of his wrist roars the vehicle back to life. He floors the gas pedal, and we lurch up over the uneven pavement and down another steep road immediately to the right. “Wrong hill, anyway,” Rodrick says, and shakes his baggy sleeves clear of his hands. The last light of day fades behind the mountains above us.

Rodrick drives on through the maze of dark streets. Pinholes of electric light shine in the blackness far below, suggesting the harbour that lies cradled in the arms of two massive mountain ranges. Up here the only light comes from the hundreds of kerosene lanterns flickering on the sidewalks, casting uneven shadows over women at their stalls of candy and shoes, students in uniform leading younger children by the hand, men carrying boxes and bags, some in white shirts that seem to glow with trapped sunlight.

Rodrick stops to ask directions to the Prince Hotel, then asks the next three people he passes to corroborate the first man’s story. “Sometimes they give wrong information,” he explains.

You could hardly blame them; when we do finally reach the hotel, it’s with the feeling of having made an accidental discovery rather than reaching the end of a carefully planned route. It’s as though someone poured concrete downhill and hoped for it to form roads. Rodrick calls the larger potholes “swimming pools.”

“This is a destroyed country. Everything has to be rebuilt,” Rodrick says. The people are still reeling from Aristide’s ousting in 2004, still trying to decide whether or not they have confidence in the new administration. Those who remember Haiti under Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, like Rodrick, are still hesitant to speak too loudly about politics and progress in case the walls have ears.

I think about what I’ve seen on the long journey by bus from Santo Domingo to nearby Pétion-ville today – blurred snapshots from a window that don’t quite add up to the picture of a nation on its knees portrayed by the international media. Men gather around a television set on a restaurant patio to drink beer and watch baseball. Ordinary pickup trucks take on a mythical quality with their brightly painted stripes and swirls, declarations of thanks to God and grandma, and airbrushed portraits of American rap stars. Women and children sit in the shade, sharing rice and beans in dented tin bowls. There is little I can glean from these ordinary visions except that life finds a way to go on even in extraordinary circumstances.

But every so often we pass a house, or the shell of a house – unpainted concrete, exposed support wires – and I wonder when construction on it stopped, and why. As with the roads in Port-au-Prince, work, progress, was happening here once. Lives were being built, but for years now progress has taken a backseat to survival. The presence of the UN peacekeepers has quelled the violence and according to Rodrick kidnappings have become less routine and also depoliticised, more desperate than strategic. Unemployment sits between 70 and 80 percent, and though the door is open to foreign investment, investors are hesitant to approach it and Haitians are wary of the social and cultural costs that accompany the economic benefits.

It will take time for Haiti in its incompleteness to find a way to develop without ceding its sovereignty and identity to external forces, to harness the fierce pride and revolutionary spirit of its people without pitting them against each other.

Right now, though, there are needs that must be met among the poorest segments of the population, most critically education and health care, which is why I’ve come to Haiti. The Batey Relief Alliance (BRA), a New York-based NGO with ten years’ experience and success providing primary healthcare in bateyes and rural and urban slums in the Dominican Republic has decided to explore the possibility of establishing a new incarnation of their organization to operate a permanent humanitarian mission in Haiti.

Ulrick Gaillard, founder and CEO of the BRA, is Haitian and says since many of the organization’s board members and staff are Haitian or have some connection to Haiti, it made sense to use their accumulated expertise to assist Haitians.

For one week, Gaillard and two founding members of the BRA’s board of directors, Dr. Thomas Beague and his wife Sara, will be meeting with Haitian government officials, other NGOs and foreign government agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to get permission and advice on how to proceed. It’s a critical time, Gaillard says. The prospect of an experienced NGO like the BRA working with government to provide treatment and education on key health issues has been met with enthusiasm and gratitude.

As I will learn by observing the official process of establishing a mission, contradictions are abundant: between how government perceives itself and is perceived, between what Haiti was and what it is, between the significance of this virgin land to its own people and to the international community, between what is needed and what is actually possible.

Dawn comes to Port-au-Prince as a 6 a.m. wake-up call through my hotel window. The city is laid out below me like a watercolour painting on a blue lacquer table, orderly and clean at a distance, chaotic and complex at the experiential level. The distant mountains are the colour of oil smoke, and there is a vast distance to cross in between.