"A mid-level slum..."

Pascal Dorien was living in Bel Air--the Baghdad of Haiti, some people called it, but that would be Cité Pendue, an even more destitute and brutal neighborhood, where hundreds of middle-school children entering a national art contest drew M-16s and beheaded corpses, and wrote such things as “It’s not polite to shoot at funeral processions” and “I’m happy to have turned in my weapons. What about you?” Bel Air was actually a mid-level slum....

-- From "Ghosts", new fiction by Edwidge Danticat in this week's New Yorker.