Haiti, one year later: on the anniversary of a massive earthquake, a Times columnist on how to really help Haiti recover--and move ahead.

• Author: Kristof, Nicholas D.
• Position: OPINION

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An emergency cholera hospital is the grimmest kind of medical center, and it's a symbol of the series of horrors that have battered Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, over the last year.

At the cholera treatment center I visited in central Haiti, nobody goes in or out without being thoroughly disinfected. To try to control the epidemic, bodies are buried rather than released to families.

Since the epidemic began in November, more than 2,000 people have died of cholera, a highly contagious but treatable disease if it's caught early. The Pan American Health Organization estimates that 400,000 Haitians may get cholera over the next year.

The 7.0-magnitude earthquake last January killed 250,000 people, devastated the country's capital, Port-au-Prince, and left more than 1 million people homeless out of a population of 9 million.

The death toll was a result not only of the quake, but also of poverty: Shoddy construction and slow rescue efforts resulted in many more deaths than if the same quake had occurred in, say, California. Then came cholera, which is a disease of poverty--poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water can themselves create an epidemic.

One cholera patient, 21-year-old Dieulimere Renatu, told me that she gets drinking water for her family from a river. If she tried to find water from a safer source, it would take her three or four hours a day--and she'd have less time to work and make money. Those are the trade-offs that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Haitians face.

When international donors pledged $5.9 billion in aid to rebuild Haiti, some relief groups saw an opportunity in the catastrophe to build a better infrastructure in a country that was in terrible shape before the earthquake.

Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly suggested that humanitarians were romanticizing aid as a solution: "One year from today, Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now," he said.

I criticized him at the time, but he wasn't far off. Haiti has certainly improved since right after the quake...