Haiti

The country that Seth's family comes from, Haiti, is an island in the Caribbean Sea. It is part of a string of islands known as the West Indies, which stretches from the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico to the coast of Florida. There are about 7.2 million people in Haiti, of which roughly seventy-five percent live in poverty (by comparison, the U.S. poverty rate was fourteen percent in 1995). The country has a history of poverty, which has itself caused even worse poverty. There is no industry, and only about one-fifth of the land can be used for farming because careless farming techniques in the past have leeched all of the nutrients out of the soil. Diseases, from AIDS to tuberculosis, run rampant because the country has no resources for an effective public health policy. The country has little hope of keeping up with the technological boom, since only...