Our driver, Samuel, who is one of the prospective university students we are here to meet, manages it with practiced finesse. The ride is an impromptu business meeting for Richmonder Danny Yates and the Rev. Jean Navarre Bordeau, the pastor of Sacre Coeur church in Hinche. A thick binder documents Danny's efforts to bring Haitian college students back to the United States, where they can continue their education. Bordeau clicks his tongue appreciatively as the car barrels through crowded streets. A motorcycle taxi misjudges his distance between our car and an oncoming "tap-tap" bus, clipping our mirror and narrowly avoiding becoming another casualty of these streets.

These streets reveal very little about the lives beyond them. It is custom here to build high concrete walls that seem to run the length of the roadway until the city ends at the countryside, creating the impression of a claustrophobic but open-air tunnel. The streets echo with almost constant honks. At first, to the unaccustomed, this seems like aggressive, angry driving. It is aggressive, but it is rarely angry. The blare of the horn has simply supplanted the quiet, genteel turn-signal blinker more familiar to Americans.

At one unusually wide intersection, a Haitian police officer hails us to yield to cross traffic, and a throng of children rush forward. Faces are pressed to the glass. "Blanc, blanc," they say, Creole for white, a term which is applied liberally and affectionately to all foreigners. "My friend, my friend!" We drive off. It is our first interaction with Haitians other than our hosts.

In breaks in the concrete walls — some by design and others by collapse during January's earthquake — there are blurred glimpses of Port-au-Prince. The homes, where they can be seen, are makeshift. Many people are still too haunted to sleep inside anything concrete. And the walls, where they are broken, often look as though they might melt back into the jungle that was conquered here long ago. Scrub palm and thick bougainvillea vines with their bright pink flowers cascade over untended debris piles.

And lining the undamaged wall, in harrowingly close proximity to weaving cars and buses, are the street vendors. The stalls are built in an almost biblical fashion: rough sticks as corner posts supporting a tattered canvas or tin awning. Anything can be bought, though nearly everything looks like rummage-sale leftovers. Furniture, art, scrap metal, stalks of cane sugar and used shoes.

Most of the walls we pass are drab, unfinished block, often topped with wire or shards of broken glass. Occasionally, sections of wall have been transformed with bright paints into advertisements or striking graffiti. We pass former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's compound. Its walls are pasted nearly entirely in posters bearing his likeness. "There are still many people who support him," Danny says, "there's still a movement."

Suddenly the concrete wall on one side has a huge gap, and we see a field choked with tarp-draped poles. This is one of Port-au-Prince's now infamous tent cities. The people living here look fierce. Haitians are said to be a culture that lives outside, but not like this.

Fully half of this airport — Aeroport International Touissant Louvreture — was left uninhabitable by the January quake. Walls are cracked and stucco is flaked off in chunks, so the processing of visitors has been moved to a nearby open warehouse. Oscillating fans move warm air over the throng as we file past officials presenting our passports and push our way through toward our luggage.

Among that throng is Marie Sanon (pictured), a native of Haiti now living in Atlanta. She wears a stack of hats — fedoras of the style favored by a young Frank Sinatra — that she is bringing home. It is common on flights from the United States for Haitians to double, triple, even quadruple up hats to save on baggage and to keep these popular expressions of personal fashion from being crushed. "I got them at J.C. Penney's — they were $20," she says, her wide smile matching the wide brims. "We stack them. It's the only way to keep them in shape. I keep my hats safe."

It's hard to tell who works for the airport and who is freelancing for themselves. The line is blurry: Friendly men in what seems to be a uniform take your bags before you can pick them up. "Let me help you, let me help you," they say insistently. Tips are expected.

Outside, something that looks like a rough approximation of Mogadishu is on display just beyond a high, chain-linked perimeter fence. But even amid the feral sense of danger and disaster in this city of a million, there is a returning sense of normal.

Billboard signs that tower above the debris advertise for perhaps the only consistent utility left in this country. Cell phones are owned by nearly everyone, even the tent-city dwellers, and many agree that Digicel has done perhaps more than any government or NGO to rebuild the country and provide jobs.

There's something else working, too. Brightly colored trucks overflowing with passengers rush by, defying all standards of modern traffic safety. These are the famous tap-taps, Haiti's privately operated public transportation, nearly 5,000-pound works of art that compete with a rolling stock of cars and trucks that ended their first lives totaled out by insurance companies and were sent here as donations to be resurrected by the endlessly resourceful Haitians.

Welcome to Port au Prince, a city so recently dominated with death, where life rushes onward, swerving only slightly to avoid the rubble.

That finding, released today (click here for a PDF of the report), is similar to one drawn by Richmond City Auditor Umesh Dalal more than three years ago in a partial audit of the entire school system, in which he found inefficiencies and some lack of internal controls.

More recently, City Councilman Marty Jewell has sought to allow Dalal's office greater authority to audit the school district. "I know that RPS has had a horrendous ugly record of ADA spending — and capital spending, I should say,” says Jewell, who first proposed a measure to City Council in February that would allow Dalal’s office freedom to audit Richmond Public Schools functions. "We’ve got all these serious questions with regards to school finance." Jewell says he was asked by Mayor Dwight C. Jones’ office to table his paper in favor of mediated negotiations by the mayor’s office.

Late last month, those negotiations began, says Jewell. “We did meet, and essentially … what is clear is that ... they have anticipated a bunch of areas that Umesh would be interested in and have included them in their own audit schedule, which they have not yet shared with us and which they have yet to approve."

"We need to reform public schools," Jewell says of his call for Dalal's independent audit of the district. "I'm not here to blame anybody, but we can't keep whistling past the graveyard pretending we don't have a problem."

School Board Chairwoman Kimberly Bridges confirms the meeting with Jewell, Dalal and city administration officials, but says the effort has been one of cooperation toward a common goal.

"The School Board is interested in continual oversight and ongoing improvement — that's why we've been at the table for these and other consolidation/sharing resource discussions," Bridges wrote in an e-mail the day after the meeting, insisting that reforms within the schools' audit department have largely answered Dalal's past concerns. "We're tracking follow-up on all audits — city, RPS and external — regularly and ensuring that we learn from every recommendation and implement whatever we can to make the organization more efficient and effective," she writes. "After all, improvement is what effective auditing and oversight is all about."

Today's audit reveals a number of inadequacies in the ADA remediation efforts, but as early details of that audit's findings began making the rounds, Jewell said it's also a reminder that Dalal's office may be better equipped to undertake a full review of the projects.

Those projects, undertaken as a result of a massive settlement agreement being overseen and enforced by a federal court judge, have so far cost the city in excess of $4 million, with many millions more set to be spent to retrofit the district's infrastructure with such basic requirements as parking, ramps and bathrooms for people with disabilities.

Among RPS internal auditor Debora Johns' findings in ADA:

• That a Northern Virginia company hired to oversee the projects had concerns over the qualifications of the architectural and engineering firms contracted by the district to design and oversee construction of the projects.

• That the difference between projected costs and actual costs is not being accurately tracked by the district's procurement and purchasing department.

• That the regularly updated progress report on projects completed or in progress is "not verified by RPS management" at any point to confirm that the work is completed satisfactorily.

• That the proposal process of seeking bids from design and construction firms has in many cases asked for bundled bids for multiple schools without a breakdown of individual project costs, allowing lump-sum bids to be submitted that fail to account for individual project costs.

• That as these multischool projects were completed, the costs were charged "against only one of the school's budget lines instead of being broken down and properly charged against each of the schools' budget account lines."

• That more than $333,600 was "directly paid to vendors without referencing the purchase order," meaning the district was unable to track the actual cost of construction per project.

• That there was an overall lack of clarity in the job description and responsibilities of the district's own ADA coordinator and its contracted oversight firm, MBP.

• That "due to a lack of expertise in [architecture or engineering], we cannot express an opinion on the quality of work performed or cost charged by vendors."

The “lack of expertise” conclusion mirrors the process, says Carol A.O. Wolf, a former school board member who has since continued to investigate the district's ADA compliance efforts at her blog.

Under former mayor Doug Wilder, Wolf called for an audit of schools by Dalal, and she says one is certainly necessary now. "If a private business — or any other branch of government — were to receive repeated audits detailing incompetencies and confessing this kind of ignorance, lack of transparency and cooperation, shareholders and citizens would not hesitate to demand a change in leadership."

According to an opinion issued by the City Attorney’s Office in 2007, the "City Auditor has an ability to audit independent legal entities supported by the City funding, including the Richmond Public Schools."