Haiti has recently become prominent in the public eye following the devastating earthquake early in 2010, leaving over 250,000 dead and more than one in ten of its population homeless, adding to the destitution and despair that has ravaged the country since it became the birth black Republic following a slave rebellion against it colonial master France.

That rebellion, however, led to the island community being shunned by Europe and the trading world and it slowly sank into poverty without markets to export its goods.

The above video provides an overview of the history of Haiti, one of the many places on the Earth ill-prepared for a rare, but nevertheless, cataclysmic earthquake that would all but destroy what little infrastructure there already was. And with nurses, doctors and teachers dead in their thousands, Haiti's slow and already faltering journey to normally is almost fatally wounded.