By DEBORAH SONTAG

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/world/americas/17rural.html

FOND-DES-BLANCS, Haiti — Before the earth­quake that changed every­thing, Chlotilde Pel­teau and her hus­band lived a supremely urban exis­tence. A cos­met­ics ven­dor and a mechanic, they both enjoyed a steady clien­tele and a hec­tic daily rou­tine, ser­e­naded by the beep­ing cars and gen­eral hub­bub of Port-au-Prince.

Now, as roost­ers crow and goats bleat, Ms. Pel­teau, 29, toils by day on a craggy hill­side in the iso­lated ham­let of Nan Roc (In the Rocks), which she had aban­doned at 14 for a life of greater oppor­tu­nity. At night, she, her hus­band and their two chil­dren sleep cheek-to-jowl with a dozen rel­a­tives in the small mud house where she grew up.

“With every­thing destroyed, what could I do but come back?” said Ms. Pel­teau, wear­ing a flo­ral skirt as she poked corn seeds deep into arid soil unlikely to yield enough food to sus­tain her rail-thin par­ents, much less those who fled the shat­tered cap­i­tal city to rejoin them.

Life has come full cir­cle for many Haitians who orig­i­nally migrated to escape the grind­ing poverty of the coun­try­side. Since the early 1980s, rural Haitians have moved at a steady clip to Port-au-Prince in search of schools, jobs and gov­ern­ment ser­vices. After the earth­quake, more than 600,000 returned to the coun­try­side, accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment, putting a seri­ous strain on des­per­ately poor com­mu­ni­ties that have received lit­tle emer­gency assistance.

“There has been a mass exo­dus to places like Fond-des-Blancs,” said Briel Lev­eillé , a for­mer mayor and founder of the lead­ing peas­ant coop­er­a­tive in this region, which includes Nan Roc. “But the mis­ery of the coun­try­side is com­pound­ing the effects of the dis­as­ter. I’ve heard peo­ple say it would be bet­ter to risk another earth­quake in Port-au-Prince than to stay in this rural poverty with­out any help from the government.”

Indeed, some have already returned to the cap­i­tal seek­ing the inter­na­tional aid that is con­cen­trated there. But if the reverse flow con­tin­ues, it could under­mine a pri­mary goal of the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment and the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity: to use the earth­quake as a cat­a­lyst to decen­tral­ize Haiti and resus­ci­tate its agri­cul­tural econ­omy, said Nancy Dorsinville, a spe­cial adviser to for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton, the United Nations spe­cial envoy to Haiti.

“If we really mean what we say about decen­tral­iza­tion, then we have to think fast about a more robust dis­tri­b­u­tion of food to the coun­try­side, cash-to-work pro­grams there, and assis­tance to agri­cul­ture,” Ms. Dorsinville said.

Decen­tral­iza­tion has long been cham­pi­oned by many advo­cates for Haiti because the coun­try­side endured decades of neglect while the Port-au-Prince area gained dys­func­tional con­ges­tion. Now, with the cap­i­tal city bat­tered, it has become a pol­icy buzz­word, even as food is grow­ing ever scarcer in the countryside.

“It is only a mat­ter of time before we start see­ing severe mal­nu­tri­tion in Fond-des-Blancs,” said Conor Shapiro, direc­tor of the St. Boni­face Haiti Foun­da­tion, which runs a 60-bed hos­pi­tal and com­mu­nity devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tion here.

So far, there has been noth­ing less than a wel­come mat pro­vided for the returnees, who are fam­ily. Jacque­line Jerome, Ms. Pelteau’s wiz­ened mother, who does not know her age, said, shrug­ging: “They don’t have any­thing now, so it’s up to me to take care of them. Like if God gives you a good har­vest, you share with those who were not so blessed.”

Fond-des-Blancs is a remote, moun­tain­ous area 75 miles south­west of Port-au-Prince, acces­si­ble only by a rocky road impass­able by vehi­cle after heavy rains. Com­mu­nity lead­ers say the pop­u­la­tion, counted at 45,000 by a gov­ern­ment cen­sus in 2001, has swelled by at least a third since the quake.

The growth is hard to mea­sure, but the com­mu­nity lead­ers point to a few indi­ca­tors. Some 300 needy fam­i­lies sur­veyed reported tak­ing in an aver­age of five earth­quake vic­tims each. St. Fran­cois Xavier, a sec­ondary school, has seen its stu­dent body increase by half with 150 dis­placed teenagers. And an addi­tional 500 to 600 earth­quake refugees are seek­ing to resume their stud­ies although Fond-des-Blancs has only two gov­ern­ment schools (and nei­ther goes beyond the ninth grade).

The post-quake trans­for­ma­tion of Fond-des-Blancs is pal­pa­ble. At St. Boni­face Hos­pi­tal, earth­quake sur­vivors with spinal cord and trau­matic brain injuries fill the wards, while their rel­a­tives live in the court­yard. The hos­pi­tal, which did not even have an X-ray machine until one was donated after the quake, vol­un­teered to take the patients from the Amer­i­can naval hos­pi­tal ship the Com­fort, which pulled up anchor last Tuesday.

In the cen­ter of town, the influx from Port-au-Prince has cre­ated a night life where none existed before. The sole lamp­post draws an evening crowd, and earth­quake refugees jok­ingly call the dusty gath­er­ing place the Champ de Mars after the bustling plaza in the Hait­ian capital.

Near that lamp­post, Ronange Buis­sereth has set up a small fresh-air restau­rant, try­ing to mimic the busy one she lost in Port-au-Prince to the earth­quake. But, she said, sigh­ing, her rel­a­tively small home­town can­not pro­duce a very steady clien­tele for her fried bananas, pota­toes and pork, so her labor is really just a way to pass the time.

Sev­eral dozen mem­bers of Ms. Buissereth’s extended fam­ily have returned to a scrubby plot of land that her gen­er­a­tion aban­doned decades ago. Some, like her sis­ter Rose­men Buis­sereth, 37, are happy to be back, if anx­ious about mak­ing ends meet.

“It’s like you become a Com­mu­nist here because you never touch money,” she said. “But it’s not so bad. Even though I left 25 years ago, Fond-des-Blancs is still the place that I call home.”

Her cousin Monique Alexan­dre, 45, is already lay­ing down new roots. Last week­end, with rainbow-colored rollers in her hair and pigs root­ing through the dirt at her feet, she over­saw the lay­ing of a foun­da­tion for a new house — “with a tin roof that can­not crush us!” she said.

“If I some­how scratch together some money, I’ll go back to Port-au-Prince and rebuild my busi­ness,” a food store, she said. “If not, I’ll stay here and work the land. You have to adapt.”

Mis­soule Alexan­dre Pierre, 54, was not so san­guine. As her list­less daugh­ters leafed through mag­a­zines and stared at their nails, she expressed con­sid­er­able frus­tra­tion that her children’s edu­ca­tion had been interrupted.

“These three girls were all uni­ver­sity stu­dents, and now their future is uncer­tain,” she said. “They don’t know what to do with them­selves here. Every morn­ing they wake up and say, “Mama, take us back. We’d rather sleep on the street.’ ”

Fond-des-Blancs has a long his­tory of migra­tion, with res­i­dents flee­ing to Cuba, New York and French Guiana even in the best of times.

“Until 1963, it was beau­ti­ful coun­try with all kinds of birds, plen­ti­ful rain­fall, big old trees and cof­fee plan­ta­tions,” said Mr. Lev­eillé , 62. “But that year, Hur­ri­cane Flora dev­as­tated our envi­ron­ment in a day. Inter­na­tional com­pa­nies like Dupont began replac­ing sisal, which we grow, with syn­thetic fibers. And peo­ple started cut­ting down trees to make charcoal.”

By 1982, Fond-des-Blancs, defor­ested, was at its nadir and the exo­dus to Port-au-Prince was under way. At the same time, help began arriv­ing: a rel­a­tively suc­cess­ful refor­esta­tion pro­gram and a health clinic started by a Catholic parish in Quincy, Mass., which became St. Boni­face Hospital.

Projects like the cross­breed­ing of scrawny local goats with large Domini­can studs breathed some life into the econ­omy (with Fond-des-Blancs aspir­ing to be known as the goat cap­i­tal of Haiti), but the area still struggles.

Wor­ried about the impact of the returnees, local lead­ers have decided to unite their myr­iad com­mu­nity groups to fig­ure out how to absorb the new­com­ers while using the earth­quake to draw atten­tion to the plight of rural areas. At a recent New England-style town meet­ing, they summed up their resources suc­cinctly on a black­board: “Pub­lic health: nonex­is­tent; elec­tric­ity: nonex­is­tent; water: insufficient.”

The for­mer mayor, Mr. Lev­eillé, his face weath­ered under a straw hat, told the crowd, “It is time to force the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity and our own gov­ern­ment to focus on us, too.” And heads nodded.