My assignment was to assist to health care workers in Haiti.  I had two years in chemistry and an Associate Degree in electronics so I was supposed to be a lab and x-ray technician.  During those two years I had plenty of opportunities help save lives and interact with people who had always been told that blancs (white people) would come back to enslave them as the French colonists had in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  That was one of Haitian nightmares.  Another one was their own government.  The vast majority of the population was peasants living on a few dollars a week while government officials and the elite who lived in the hills around Port-au-Prince stole from the treasury instead of using the money for infrastructure, education and health care.  And then there was the line of presidents from the revolution to the present man.

In the United States, we hold a presidential election every four years.  Anyone can run for president and we have elected men who have come from diverse backgrounds, from the richest to the poorest, from slave owners to slaves.  We hold the belief that any natural-born citizen can be president.  Only three times since George Washington first held office has a bullet ended a presidency while in Haiti, the gun has been the preferred method of getting rid of the president; either though forced exile or assignation.  The ballot runs a distant second choice.