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GlobalPost begins a year-long effort to answer an elusive, multi-billion dollar question: "Two years after Haiti's devastating earthquake, where did the aid money go?"

USAID rice Haiti
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Haitian women get sacks containing rice in Port-au-Prince on March 6, 2010. The World Food Program launched a food 'surge' in Haiti to boost rations for nearly two million people in the impoverished quake-torn country, a spokeswoman said.

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About This Project

Where did all the money go?

The question rises up from the dust of the still-crowded tent camps and the mud of still-impassable roads and from desperate parents still struggling to feed their children.

Two years after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that ravaged Haiti, less than half of the $3 billion the U.S. has committed to rebuilding the country has actually been disbursed. Reconstruction is by just about all accounts taking far too long. Why?

Haiti is a place of unanswered questions, and perhaps unanswerable questions.

In this GlobalPost 'Special Report,' correspondent Donovan Webster and photographer Ron Haviv start GlobalPost on a journey through Haiti to find as many answers to this question as we can. Or at least to hear the questions that Haitians are asking of their own country and of the many donors who have promised more than they deliver.

Webster and Haviv are joined by GlobalPost correspondents Mildrade Cherfils, who is writing on the diaspora, and Jacob Kushner, who is based in Port-au-Prince. As a reporting team, they found that some reconstruction efforts are succeeding while others are failing. Most of all, they found resiliency and resourcefulness among the people. But they also found cynicism about an aid effort that seems to be enriching big non-governmental organizations (NGOs.) Haitians now call their country ‘the republic of NGOs.”

The stories they tell in "Fault Line: Aid, Politics and Blame in Post-Quake Haiti" reveal searing images and complex characters through whom truths emerge, if not exactly answers to the big question: Where did all the money go?

It's a question that GlobalPost plans to keep asking through this ongoing series of reports.

Additional Special Reports

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