Haiti has been through a lot in the last 10 plus years. And yes, I realized that is putting it incredibly lightly. Catastrophic earthquakes, a Prime Minister assassinated, gang violence, paralyzing city streets. But it wasn't until somewhat recently that it felt like things had gotten truly out of control, like we were staring down a failed state. My guests this week are CNN's David Culver and Kaitlyn Who. Last month, they traveled to the country to see the chaos for themselves and were on their way back this week when the Prime Minister said he would resign. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Reind. Where are you guys right now?

We are sitting in a hotel room in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Our intention over the past few days has been to try to get into Haiti. Obviously, it's a place right now that is dealing from the US perspective with a high level, if not the highest level, Travel Warning and Advisory Do not go. It's made it a bit tricky, quite frankly, David, for us to get back to a place that we were in only a couple of weeks ago, but now is a very different place, even given the two weeks that have passed.

Yeah, I should say we're speaking on Tuesday afternoon here, but where did all this start to pick up?

The now outgoing Prime Minister Erian Reve was supposed to hand over power to a new elected government on February seventh, but the problem is he never held elections before that, so there was no government to hand over. He's been on popular throughout his entire term, but it was that day that things really started to kick off with people out in the street saying, This guy has got to go.

........ When we were there just a couple of weeks ago, it genuinely felt as though it was about to explode. I mean, this tension was building up. We want the Prime Minister out. Yeah, the Prime Minister, Ariel Holey, leave this country because my country is very broken. We were so limited even in where we could go from a security perspective, getting around the capital Port-a-Prince, because 80%, that's the estimate, of the capital city was gang-controlled. We're not talking about one gang. We're talking about dozens of gangs. Yelling towards the police, saying, These are criminals, criminals.

The gangs have also been attacking police directly. Whereas they used to fight each other, now they're going out and burning police stations. They're killing police officers. They're attacking the National Palace. This is an attack on what remains of the Haitian state.

But right now, do you feel safe here? Does it feel safe right now? No, no. It doesn't. No, it doesn't. It doesn't feel safe. You say your country is broken? Yeah, My country is broken right now. All I do where you are, and my country is broken. And to Kaitlyn's point, I think people were expecting February seventh to be that day, where at least, Hongri would turn over the keys and step down, but obviously, that didn't happen on that date.

That's what caused folks to not only be frustrated towards the gangs and the violence and what they feel like has just been in total lawlessness, but now towards the government itself.

State of emergency declared when thousands of inmates escaped from Haiti's largest prison. Prime Minister's whereabouts are uncertain.

And so as all this chaos was unfolding, where was the Prime Minister in all this?

That's a question a lot of people were asking for quite some time. He had been in Kenya, where he was trying to secure this international foreign military mission that would come and help support the police in combating the gangs. But while he was in Kenya, literally signing the deal that would underpin this mission, the gang violence erupted. As soon as that happened, no one saw him. He was missing for days. People could only speculate whether he had left Kenya, whether he was trying to return to Haiti, whether he might be going to a third country. We later found out that he had attempted to reach Haiti through the Dominican Republic and was turned back by Dominican authorities, finally ending up in Puerto Rico. We do have new developments just in the CNN.

Haiti's Prime Minister has resigned as the violence in his country just gets worse. Officials of-The most recent comments from the Prime Minister is that he would resign. Obviously, that's a big sigh of relief to folks on the ground if it meant immediately and if it meant some stability would follow. But it doesn't seem to be leading to that right away. My government will leave immediately after the inauguration of the council. We will be a caretaker government until they name a Prime Minister and a new cabinet. There's a promise towards a transitional presidential council, and yet that raises even further questions as to who's going to be part of that council.

He's saying the international community is complicit in all of this, and he wants the international community to lead.

He wants the Prime Minister to lead. He says the community here has been terrorized, and And I think that the biggest frustration from folks that we spoke with just a couple of weeks ago, being on the ground, was that it was everyone but Haitians who had a say in this. They were pointed to several folks who they feel like are controlling their country. And they say, We've been through that for generations. It's our turn to have a voice here. But the problem is, how do you have a consistent, if not secured, election if stability is still in question?

When you were there a few weeks ago, what does daily life look like for people amidst all this unrest?

For us, as journalists, trying to get around, obviously, we felt the constraints, but you have to imagine what it's like for those who live this day in and day out. We saw people who were just trying to make do with their situations. I mean, there's still a desire for some sense of normalcy. I think you also get a sense for this level of desperation where sometimes you can flee a situation, and we met one family. We'll step in here. This is their home. The Caldó family, who had fled two years ago because of the gangs, their home was torched. They lived on the streets for about five months. Eventually, they made it to a makeshift camp, and they thought that would be a safer place. It was for a year and a half. Until their eight-year-old daughter was out playing with some friends.. They heard some gunfire. She almost was ashamed as she was telling us, I just didn't hear it, and I didn't hide quick enough.. She was shot in her back, a bullet exiting through her abdomen. They had to pay a lot of money to go through a five-hour surgery.

You could see she has the scars that are still fresh. This was only a few weeks ago. When we met her, she was lying down on the family's only bed in a very cramped space, recovering. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing.

Merci. Merci.

Her parents seemed just incredibly overwhelmed by the situation. I think adding to just the tragedy of this is we found out a couple of weeks after we were with her that gangs again, came through that area and torched it off. So they had to flee and go somewhere else. But that's just their reality right now.

Most of Haiti is not controlled by gangs, but most of the capital is. When the capital, which is where the international airport is, where the international port is, where the humanitarian organizations are based, that means the rest of the country starves. Kids who would get maybe their one meal of the day from school through the World Food Program, for example, aren't able to get that anymore, either because they're afraid to go in the streets or because the WFP itself may not be able to get its food stocks around the country anymore.

David, nice to meet you. A great example of that, David, was when we went to this coastal community, Jeremy, and the World Food Program took us through to one school that hadn't been open for about a month and a half. To Kaitlyn's point, if that school wasn't going to be open, those kids weren't going to get food. Yesterday, you tried to reopen and no children showed up? Yeah.

We sat down with a Catholic priest who runs it, and he was very stoic at first.

He took us through several of the classrooms, showed us the empty shelves where they normally would stock up for food, and just said, Obviously, this is not the vibe of the school that he and the staff so love. I asked him, I said, How is it being here? Do you think about them in what's been now more than a month that they haven't been here? Do you think about their situation? It's very sad for them, for us also, because I know He stopped for a minute and said, It's tough. But then he had a total breakdown. He couldn't even really catch his breath for probably a couple of minutes.

I know they are at home, they are hungry. They have nothing. Maybe they are going to steal.

He said he knows they're at home, he knows they're hungry, they're kids, they need to eat. And also knows they're going to resort to things that may not be good, including stealing and committing acts of violence just to feed themselves. And he goes, I can't blame them. He would do the same.

I would do the same thing. Maybe you also. When we need to eat, when we need to drink, we need to live. You can do everything to have something to survive. It's very sad for us also.

It's like this instability and this violence creates this cycle where people are in such desperate need. They resort to extreme measures, and then it's hard to break out of that.

Yeah. I think even, I don't know your thoughts on this, Kaitlyn, or a bit what stood out to us, too, is you can't even look at the gangs as bad guys, right? Because there are victims within that.

Yeah, and you have to look at this in the historical context. That's not old history. It's not colonial history or American occupation history. It's since the 2010 earthquake. Some members of the gangs were kids when that earthquake happened. They lived through that chaos, the devastation of their city. When David talks about the priest breaking down in tears because he can't feed them, there are people who have spent decades trying to set up systems to recover from catastrophe, to at least give kids a chance to break free of this cycle and to see things break down again is heartbreaking. The Biden administration is now considering using Guantanamo Bay to handle migrants fleeing Haiti. As US officials are for a mass exodus of people fleeing the escalating gang violence that has really taken over the country.

David, I will say there's another element to all of this, and that is from the American perspective, I think folks are just tired of conflict and Americans being involved in everything, be it Ukraine and Russia, Israel, Gaza. Now you look at Haiti, and the question that we pose to even the country head of the World Food Program is, Well, why should Americans care about this? And as he points out, there's two main reasons. One is the humanitarian. Look at your heart and look what people are going through. But two, perhaps the more practical aspect of this, especially during an election year, is if we see what's happening at the Southern border, and I've covered that extensively, and we look at the folks from all over the world who are I mean, Haitians are a big part of that, too. If we think it's all isolated and it's not connected, we're wrong.

David, Kaitlyn, thank you.

Thanks, Kaitlyn.

Thank you. Okay, Kaitlyn here. So we finally made it to Port-au-Prince today.

A few days after I spoke with David and Kaitlyn, they reached back out as CNN became the first major news network to get back to Haiti's capital.

We had tried at the Dominican border at Daha Bon. We tried at a different border crossings bar at Himani. We tried to get on helicopters. We tried to walk. We tried everything. And it It seemed like we were never going to make it. But on Friday, we did finally manage to get everything squared away, and we took off in this tiny helicopter. And as soon as we got out...

Do you hear that? There it is.

We could hear gunshots, and I guess that's why we came.

We were here three weeks ago, and at the very least, there was activity on the streets. There were people selling things. There was heavy traffic. Now, it's eerily quiet. People are sealed inside their homes. Communities have barricaded themselves and created these self-defense brigades, armed neighbors that are taking turns, watching every entrance and exit, making sure that the gangs don't try to stretch into their territory even further. And there have been many of confrontations between these communities and gang members. I think the question that many ask is, who's running Haiti right now? Nobody, essentially. The gangs know that, and it seems like they thrive off that dysfunction and chaos. And yet at the same time, in a public-facing way, they're trying to portray themselves as of the people, representatives who want to make life for everyday Haitians better. The thing is, while the gang members and everyday folks here may share a common frustration, that being the government and the outgoing Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, it doesn't mean that they are united. Quite the opposite. Many of the community folks are incredibly frustrated with the gangs and are angry of what horror they have caused and the devastation that they're spreading throughout Port-a-Prince and really around this country.

One Thing is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our Senior Producer is Fez Jamil. Our Supervising Producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan D'Zula is our Technical Director, and Steve Ligtai is the Executive Producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manessari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhart, James Andres, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Caroline Patterson, Avelio Contreras, and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Sunday with another episode. Talk to you then.