By William Booth, Wash­ing­ton Post For­eign Service

LASCAHOBAS, HAITI — The earth­quake that struck Haiti’s cap­i­tal city has also jarred the impov­er­ished coun­try­side, send­ing 600,000 peo­ple into the provinces — where locals are now over­whelmed with the task of feed­ing and shel­ter­ing des­per­ate newcomers.

Hait­ian and inter­na­tional aid offi­cials describe the migra­tion as one of the largest and most wrench­ing in the hemi­sphere, as inter­nally dis­placed peo­ple stream out of Port-au-Prince and head to strug­gling provin­cial towns in the after­math of the earth­quake like civil­ians flee­ing war zones in places such as Rwanda, Kosovo and the Swat Val­ley in Pakistan.

“They are every­where. They are in the town, and they are sleep­ing in the fields,” said Ger­ald Joseph, mayor of Lasc­a­hobas, a farm­ing and trad­ing town about three hours north of the cap­i­tal. “Our schools are beyond full now. Our hos­pi­tal is full. All our houses are full of peo­ple. We don’t have an empty house. Where four peo­ple were sleep­ing before, there are now 14.”

The mayor said that by his cen­sus, his town of 60,000 had grown by 10,000 refugees from Port-au-Prince since the Jan­u­ary quake. They leave the city with a bag of rice or a suit­case of clothes and arrive here with no jobs and lit­tle money, the mayor said. “They are poor peo­ple over­whelm­ing poor peo­ple,” he said.

Offi­cials in the coun­try­side say that no help has come from the bank­rupt and enfee­bled Hait­ian gov­ern­ment and that inter­na­tional aid has arrived in a frus­trat­ing trickle. In Lasc­a­hobas, the char­ity group World Vision fed 500 peo­ple one time, the mayor said. Nepalese troops work­ing for the United Nations also came once to feed about 800 people.

Hait­ian offi­cials prepar­ing to seek bil­lions of dol­lars in aid from for­eign donors and U.S. tax­pay­ers at the United Nations at the end of the month stress that their plan for a bet­ter Haiti includes a promise to decen­tral­ize power.

Eduardo Almeida, head of the Inter-American Devel­op­ment Bank in Haiti, said the plans should include mas­sive invest­ments in infra­struc­ture in the provinces — in schools, uni­ver­si­ties, ports, tourism, man­u­fac­tur­ing and espe­cially agriculture.

“Haiti is a farm­ing cul­ture that can­not feed itself, and that must change,” Almeida said. As an exam­ple, devel­op­ment offi­cials and aid advis­ers repeat that Haiti is so poor, and its agri­cul­ture so rav­aged, that it must import a mil­lion eggs a day from the neigh­bor­ing Domini­can Republic.

Dur­ing years of polit­i­cal chaos, coups and soar­ing poverty, Haiti and its part­ners such as the World Bank and U.N. agen­cies have done lit­tle to bol­ster the coun­try­side, where local gov­ern­ments are broke and mostly pow­er­less to develop on their own. Before the earth­quake, nearly a third of Haiti’s roughly 10 mil­lion res­i­dents lived in Port-au-Prince.

“Look!” said the Rev. Raphael Bernadin Desras, the priest at the St. Gabriel Catholic church in the cen­ter of the town, as he swung open the door to a store­room. A dozen bags of rice and some sacks of beans remained in a larder that once was full. “I have enough left for the kids in my school. But every­one else? Good luck.”

Desras said “the biggest prob­lem is that all the aid stays in Port-au-Prince.” Peo­ple from the city, he said, “are our sis­ters and broth­ers, so of course we will help them.” But he com­plained about the dom­i­nance of the cap­i­tal in all mat­ters — gov­ern­ment, trade, indus­try, edu­ca­tion, aid.

“They have aban­doned the coun­try­side for the last 50 years,” the priest said, and he asked whether a vis­i­tor had seen houses along the road from the city. “Stick and mud,” he said.

Desras said that many of the adult chil­dren of his town died in Port-au-Prince “because they went there to go to school — because there are no uni­ver­si­ties in the countryside.”

Monique Michel, who sells clothes for a liv­ing, has a lit­tle house in Lasc­a­hobas where her fam­ily of five lived before the earth­quake. Now 16 peo­ple live in her home. “We’re sleep­ing four to a bed,” Michel said. She said her mea­ger sav­ings were dis­ap­pear­ing as she bought chick­ens, rice, beans and bananas to feed her sis­ters and their chil­dren. “They’re hun­gry,” she said.

“We are see­ing crazy num­bers of peo­ple,” said Milien Christophe, a sur­geon at the Zanmi Las­ante med­ical clinic here, who said that he now treats more patients from Port-au-Prince than from the town.

Hait­ian offi­cials draw­ing up plans for what they call Haiti 2.0 say they envi­sion using donor money to pro­vide gov­ern­ment ser­vices out­side Port-au-Prince, to open “wel­come cen­ters,” and to build uni­ver­si­ties and clin­ics and two-lane high­ways in place of muddy tracks.

“If we don’t want those peo­ple to return to Port-au-Prince, then we have to pro­vide assis­tance and oppor­tu­ni­ties in the provinces,” said Edmund Mul­let, the act­ing U.N. spe­cial envoy for Haiti. “If we don’t do that, peo­ple will move back to Port-au-Prince.”

Many Haitians, how­ever, do not think that their gov­ern­ment, or inter­na­tional char­i­ties and agen­cies, will be able to act quickly — or at all — out in the countryside.

Asked her plans, 20-year-old Freda Antoine said she planned to get away from Lasc­a­hobas as fast as pos­si­ble, once the cap­i­tal gets back on its feet. “There’s noth­ing to do out here,” she said, using the Hait­ian Cre­ole word for the sticks.