The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

The strongest narrative source on the January 12, 2010 earthquake and the international response that followed, written by the only full-time American wire-service reporter based in Haiti when the earthquake struck. Katz argues that the disaster response was not undermined by chaos or lack of good intentions but by a humanitarian system structurally geared toward outside actors rather than Haitian institutions — routing reconstruction through donors, contractors, UN agencies, and the IHRC while bypassing Haitian public authority, and introducing the cholera outbreak through MINUSTAH's contamination of the Artibonite watershed.