Dispatches This Old Palace

By AMY WILENTZ/IN PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI

Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidential palace was in a state of wild disarray all last week, though the Haitian government did manage to put on a fairly elegant reception for some 500 distinguished visitors and guests on the Saturday of Aristide's return -- a triumph all the more remarkable for the palace's lack of running water. The President's people had been especially nervous since a number of the invitees supported the 1991 coup d'etat against Aristide and were no doubt looking forward to a social debacle. But the Americans arrived with six portable toilets, and the Haitians lugged water up two flights of stairs to the reception level, and the party came off more or less without a hitch.

That was the new government's first taste of what awaited it inside the palace, Haiti's seat of government. The ritzy residential floor, decorated by Michele Duvalier in the slickest French style of the late 1970s, had not been occupied since Aristide's quick exit in 1991 and was, according to a member of Aristide's kitchen cabinet, "unlivable" -- dusty and moldy and smelling faintly of sewage. The beautiful granite bathrooms had all been destroyed, their fixtures removed.

Upstairs in the President's offices, the situation was worse. The computers Aristide had left behind when he was booted into exile had been stolen. Every last bit of office equipment was gone -- Aristide's staff members were still begging pens from journalists on the day after he arrived -- and only a very few electrical outlets were working. As late as last Wednesday, there was still just one functioning phone in the entire palace.

Aristide wanted to spend his first night home at his private residence just outside town, but he was told by his security people that his safety there could not yet be guaranteed. So he chose to remain in the palace and slept in his office on a pull-out couch sent over by a helpful friend. There was no working shower; the President had to bathe a la paysanne -- peasant style -- using buckets of water and a sink.

The President's discomforts, however fleeting, reflect some of the more basic needs his government will have to address in its first few months in power. Schools languish in disrepair. Garbage is piled high around the capital, and the municipal dump is an unsightly waterfront horror that breeds disease. Roads are barely navigable; in some places, the potholes have grown so large and deep that they are known in Haitian Creole as tonmbo, or tombs. At midweek, gasoline had still not made it to the nation's pumps, and the stockpiled supplies of street dealers were dwindling. It was a characteristically Haitian irony that only when the embargo was over did the gas shortage begin.

Despite all the problems facing his country, and despite his difficulties bathing, Aristide is plainly delighted to be home. "Look," he told Time, "obviously we're not going to solve everything in our first few days, and if we just don't shoot ourselves in the foot, we'll be doing a good job."