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Reporter Amy Bracken is currently in Haiti on assignment. She knows the country well, having lived and worked there in the past. We asked her to keep a notebook of her experiences during her current reporting trip. This is her third entry. You can find her previous posts here and here. You can find her stories for The World here.

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On my last night in Haiti, I went to a street party downtown. It was a high energy hip hop scene, with young men in rhinestone earrings and pants as baggy as their girlfriends’ were tight, writhing and rapping along to the music that blasted from a small bar.

I climbed onto a pile of rubble that had been a building and snapped a bunch of photos. Then I leaned against a parked car and opened a bottle of Prestige beer. It was a beautiful, starry night, and people were smiling. I felt this could have been anywhere in the Caribbean.

Until I got a tap on the shoulder. It was a man leaning against the car next to me. He had cornrows and a handsome, delicate face, and he was bearing weight on a pair of crutches. He asked the usual questions – where was I from, was I having fun, did I like Haitian music. Then his face hardened, and he said, ‘What are you going to do for us? Because you know we’re all suffering.’

It was a question I had gotten before, and as usual I struggled for words. Then he went on: ‘I’ll tell you what I need. I need two legs and two cigarettes. That’s all I ask for. Two legs and two cigarettes.’

Then he spotted a friend who had just arrived at the party. He jumped onto his crutches and dragged what legs he had across the street to embrace his buddy, a smile spreading across his face, white teeth gleaming in the darkness.

When I flew into Port-au-Prince two weeks ago, I was struck with the sense that Haitians were waiting – waiting for a recovery that would never happen, or waiting for further doom in the form of heavy spring rains that would cascade into muddy, trash-filled tent camps.

But people in this poorest country in the Hemisphere are used to things being out of their control. No one says, ‘See you tomorrow,’ without following it with ‘si dye vle,’ or ‘God willing.’ In Haiti anything can happen to interrupt one’s plans. But people live their lives nevertheless.

Tens of thousands of people are in camps at high risk of floods, unable to move back to homes that are dangerously cracked or reduced to rubble. Yet the basic activities of life here have resumed. Time is spent fetching water, procuring soap, bathing, washing and hanging clothes, standing in line at a food distribution, soaking rice, and cooking beans in cauldrons over charcoal.

The return of the rituals of life seemed to come with a sense of dignity. I no longer saw food thrown from trucks into crowds. Rather, camp committees gave out food tickets, and family members calmly gathered at distribution sites where they could fill wheelbarrows with staples to cook for their families.

In my final days in Haiti, most of the lines I saw were not for food or water or medical help, but for jobs. I passed the heap of concrete where a multi-story hospital had collapsed like an accordion, but beside it were two large containers marked with a sign saying ‘Agence d’Emploi Médical.’ Men and women in suits and dresses were queued down the block.

Elsewhere, crowds gathered outside NGO offices that had advertised ‘cash-for-work’ programs. They’re low-paid and short-term jobs, but they’re something.

Children and youths are attending ‘psychosocial’ programs run by the International Organization of Migration and other groups, playing games, telling jokes and stories, sharing experiences, learning the science behind earthquakes, dancing, singing, and making kites. It’s not school, but it’s progress.

Movies are projected onto screens in the camps in the evenings. And on Sundays, music is everywhere. At a church service under a tent at Place de la Constitution, young and old took turns singing into a mic and playing tambourines and the Haitian graj, or grater. In nearby tents boom boxes blasted reggae and compas.

Last fall I had interviewed the famous Haitian singer Emeline Michel in New York. She spoke about her homeland’s unique “vibration,” its spiritual strength, and the “bubbly sense of art.”

Over the last few days, I thought about those words. I sensed that spirit and vibration bubbling up from the rubble.

Walls and street edges had exploded into color as art vendors returned to business, displaying scores of canvas paintings and hammered metal sculpture.

Among the countless things that Haiti lost this year was Carnival, with the wild papier maché masks and street theatre in Jacmel, and the all-night dancing on the streets of Port-au-Prince. February was certainly no time to celebrate. But in March people are feeling the need for expression and fun.

Art can’t change the fact that the rains are coming, the schools are defunct and people are enduring unimaginable loss. But it does show that Haiti’s culture and character are very much alive, and a certain rhythmic momentum seems to help people get up in the morning and believe things just might take a turn for the better.

(All photos by Amy Bracken)