The actor serves as an ambassador-at-large for the impoverished nation, which years later is still struggling to recover from the natural disaster. Although at its highest, 1.5 million people were displaced, International Organization for Migration reports that more than 347,000 Haitians are still without homes.

Penn's spokeswoman told the New York Post that the charity will “support the residents of Delmas 32 to demonstrate that something fundamentally different can come from a ‘slum’ in one of the poorest cities in the world."

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I pour the water. My salute to the gatekeeper had been approved. I enter.

“If the spirits aren’t happy they’ll tell me,” he says, smiling slightly. “They’ll tell me what kind of energy you have.

“A lot of people come in just to see what Vodou is about,” he cautions. “The spirits can tell your intentions.”

When I reach for my camera, he objects. “Spirits don’t like pictures. As a priest you don’t do anything the spirits won’t be happy with.”

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Authorities in several countries are still adding up Sandy’s costs, but the storm appears to be one of the most devastating to the region in years. Eastern Cuba and southern Haiti were especially hard hit by searing winds and flash floods.

At least 69 deaths have been reported across the Caribbean so far, including 52 in Haiti and 11 in Cuba. The toll could rise as emergency responders and relief workers reach more rural and mountainous areas.

After battering Jamaica Wednesday, the storm made landfall early Thursday in Santiago de Cuba as a Category 2 hurricane with gusts topping 110 miles per hour. Its ferocious winds shredded roofs in the island's second-largest city (population 500,000) and sent soggy masonry crashing down into the streets.

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Hurricane Sandy is just the latest weather calamity being blamed on gay people. Who is doing the finger-pointing? This time, it's self-appointed biblical scholar John McTernan of Defend and Proclaim the Faith ministries in Pennsylvania, who made the connection between gays and Sandy, writing this week the hurricane is “a huge bucket of vomit in America’s face during the election,” forcing us to choose between “a pro-homosexual Mormon along with a pro-abortion/homosexual, Muslim Brotherhood promoter, Hard Left Fascist.”

Here are five other natural disasters mankind suffers because of the gay agenda:

1. Hurricane Katrina, August 2005. The grand dame of gay gales! This storm resulted in flooding 80 percent of New Orleans and 1,833 deaths, causing untold damage and the public shaming of President George W. Bush and his administration. In 2006, Megachurch Pastor John Haggee of San Antonio, Texas, said “God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before and was filled with sexual sin.” What Pastor Haggee doesn’t know is that New Orleans has a gay pride parade every weekend! God should have wiped this town out long ago starting when that French ninny Napoleon Bonaparte was marching about in his culottes and passing out copies of “Madame Bovary.”

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Cuban authorities have not yet estimated the economic toll, but the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported there was "severe damage to housing, economic activity, fundamental public services and institutions of education, health and culture."

Sandy killed 11 people on the island including a 4-month-old boy, making it the deadliest since 2005's Hurricane Dennis, a category 5 monster that killed 16 people and did $2.4 billion in damage. More than 130,000 homes were damaged by Sandy, including 15,400 that were destroyed, Granma said.

The storm also is blamed for the deaths of 52 people in Haiti, two in the Bahamas, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in Puerto Rico.

Sandy's center came onshore early Thursday just west of Santiago, a city of about 500,000 people in agricultural southeastern Cuba.

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To my taste, the greatest of these writers is Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American who has worked in many genres: the novel, the short story, the memoir, the children’s book.

In "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work," Danticat is interested in history, in politics, in culture, in memory, in violence, in risk, in bravery, in reading, in writing, in what it takes to make things true, and most of all in understanding how the circumstances in which things are made can give rise to whatever great power they might achieve.

In mid-career, she has achieved a clear, singular and strong voice that would require something special of an audiobook narrator who wished to do it justice, and, fortunately for listeners, Kristin Kalbli, whose delivery is equally clear, singular and strong, is up to the task.

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There, at this moment, a gigantic “supermaritime” cargo ship called the Sarine is off-loading more than five metric tons of rice that has just arrived from Miami.

If you think of the rice as post-earthquake assistance money — the individual grains as donated dollars — you might get some idea about what’s happened since the earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010. Not to mention a sense of where the individual rice grains (or the dollars) have gone.

And, like the grains of rice aboard, the dollars mount into the hundreds of millions; even billions. According to some reports, the United States government, American individuals, families and humanitarian groups donated approximately $3 billion. That’s just from America with a total of something like $12 billion coming from all donor nations for funds to be disbursed.

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Joe Mignon, senior program director for Jean's Yele Foundation, says Jean was shot in the hand after 11 p.m. local time Saturday in the city of Delmas, just outside Port-au-Prince.

Jean's brother, Samuel, confirmed the musician was shot. Neither he nor Mignon had additional details.

The shooting comes on the eve of presidential elections in Haiti. Jean is supporting fellow musician Michel Martelly.

A spokesman for the Haitian National Police could not be immediately reached for comment.

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Aristide, addressing reporters and a Haitian public that clustered around TVs and radios throughout the country, said the decision not to allow his Lavalas Family party disenfranchised the majority in a sharply divided nation.

"Excluding Lavalas, you cut the branches that link the people," he said in remarks that were otherwise largely devoted to thanking supporters who stayed loyal to him during his exile and helped engineer his return over the objections of the U.S. government. "The solution is inclusion of all Haitians as human beings."

Haiti's electoral council barred Lavalas from the elections for technical reasons that its supporters say were bogus. Many of its members are boycotting Sunday's runoff election. Still, several people affiliated in the past with the now-less prominent party ran in the first round of the election.

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On most days, I'd say they're all about the same. Your standard Trojan in the burnt orange package fits the same specs as the Durex, which is about the same as the Lifestyles, etc., etc. Unless you're allergic to latex, into contraceptives that glow in the dark, or like your rubbers to look like an ice cream cone, the basic condom is effective at least 90 percent of the time. But what consumers overlook in price and quality they find in marketing. Enter the cottage industry in luxury condoms.

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Defense attorney Gervais Charles says the case is now in the hands of a judge of instruction who will decide whether there is enough evidence to go to trial.

That process can take up to three months.

Duvalier left court after a day of questions Tuesday and is headed back to his hotel.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier is leaving court after spending much of the day answering questions before a judge.

Duvalier was not in handcuffs as left the court Tuesday with his longtime companion, Veronica Roy.

He is expected to head back to his hotel. Hundreds of people cheered him as he got into SUV with a police escort.

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A contingent of police led the former dictator known as "Baby Doc" through the hotel and to a waiting SUV. He was not wearing handcuffs.

Duvalier, 59, was calm and did not say anything. Asked by journalists if he was being arrested, his longtime companion Veronique Roy, laughed but said nothing. Outside the hotel, he was jeered by some people and cheered by others.

The SUV drove in a convoy of police vehicles to a courthouse, even as dozens of Duvalier supporters blocked streets with overturned trash bins and rocks to try to prevent the former dictator from going to prison.

The courthouse was thronged with spectators and journalists trying to get in to view the proceedings. It was not immediately clear whether the session would be open to the public -- or what, if any, charges had been filed against him.

His removal from the hotel came after he met in private with senior Haitian judicial officials met inside his hotel room amid calls by human rights groups and other for his arrest.

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Duvalier's arrival at the airport Sunday was as mysterious as it was unexpected. He greeted a crowd of several hundred cheering supporters but did not say why he chose this tumultuous period to suddenly reappear from his exile in France -- or what he intended to do while back in Haiti.

"I'm not here for politics," Duvalier told Radio Caraibes. "I'm here for the reconstruction of Haiti."

His longtime companion, Veronique Roy, told reporters at one point that he planned to stay three days, but gave no further details.

Spokesman Henry Robert Sterling said Duvalier was inspired by the earthquake to come back to Haiti and would discuss his reasons at a Tuesday news conference.

"He wanted to come back to see how is the actual Haitian situation on the people and the country," Sterling said outside the hotel in the hills above downtown where Duvalier and Roy were secluded.

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Immigration authorities had approved requests from 55,000 Haitians to join relatives in the United States before the earthquake. But because the U.S. caps the number of visas it grants per country annually, it can take a decade for an approved request to produce a visa.

Supporters want the State Department to waive the visa limit and thereby bolster the ranks of expatriate Haitians.

The argument is based on more than compassion: Haitians abroad already send more than $1 billion back home each year, about a sixth of the gross domestic product for the hemisphere's most impoverished nation.

"They'll be able to send money to help their families back in Haiti," said North Miami Mayor Andre Pierre, whose city of 57,000 is roughly a third Haitian and would anticipate absorbing thousands of the visa-holders if they were bumped to the front of the immigration line. "Then (their families) won't have to be constantly asking the United States government and other international communities for help, constantly trying to get aid from them when they can help themselves."

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Thousands of protesters took to the streets, erecting barricades and setting fires, furious that government-backed candidate Jude Celestin, the protege of unpopular President Rene Preval, apparently will go on to a runoff vote while carnival singer Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly finished third in official results and is probably eliminated. Protests have also broken out in Les Cayes, Cap-Haitien and other cities.

Associated Press journalists saw flames leaping from the roof of the Unity party headquarters, the center of Celestin's campaign. Witnesses said the building in central Port-au-Prince was on fire for an hour.

Protesters said security guards shot demonstrators as they assaulted the building, but there were no confirmed injures in the fire or demonstration. Several fire trucks tried to control the blaze -- an unusual scene in a city with few reliable public services.

Preval urged the candidates to call off the protests.

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Renaud Piarroux says in a report that the most likely explanation for the outbreak is that Haiti's Artibonite river was contaminated by a base of U.N. troops from Nepal.

The scientist conducted his research on behalf of the French and Haitian governments. The Associated Press obtained the report on Tuesday.

Cholera had not been detected in Haiti until late October. Nearly 100,000 people have been infected so far. The U.N. has denied that its peacekeepers were to blame for the outbreak.

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Dr. Thomas Torok of the Florida Department of Health said Wednesday the case involved a woman who had visited family near where the outbreak began last month. It has killed more than 1,000 people in Haiti.

Torok said the woman returned to Collier County and has recovered. Health officials said privacy laws prohibited them from releasing more information about her case.

The health department said other suspected cases of cholera were under investigation. Florida has a large Haitian community and doctors have been asked to report possible cholera in people who recently visited there.

But the department says the disease is unlikely to spread because of better sanitation in the U.S.

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Haiti's police chief, the health minister and other Cabinet officials headed to Cap-Haitien, the country's second largest city, where protesters erected barricades of flaming tires and other debris and clashed with U.N. troops. At least two demonstrators died, one of them shot by a member of the multinational peacekeeping force that has been trying to keep order since 2004.

The cholera outbreak that began last month has brought increased misery to the entire country, still struggling with the aftermath of last January's earthquake. But anger has been particularly acute in the north, where the infection is newer, health care sparse and people have died at more than twice the rate of the region where the epidemic was first noticed.

The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review.

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Hundreds of people suffered the cholera symptoms of fever and diarrhea in hospitals and shacks built along the putrid waste canals of slums like Cite Soleil and Martissant.

At least 73 cholera cases had been confirmed among people living in Port-au-Prince. Physicians with the aid group Doctors Without Borders reported seeing more than 200 city residents with severe symptoms at their facilities alone over the last three days.

Following Monday's confirmation that a 3-year-old boy from a tent camp near Cite Soleil had contracted the disease before Oct. 31 without leaving the capital, the Pan-American Health Organization said the epidemic's spread from river towns in the countryside to the nation's primary urban center was a dangeorus development.

Damage to Port-au-Prince's already miserable pre-earthquake sanitation and drinking water systems make the city "ripe for the rapid spread of cholera," Dr. Jon K. Andrus, the organization's deputy director, told reporters Tuesday.

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