It’s hardly a Golden Age. But it’s not bad either for a leader who had never held political office and was best known for often-raunchy musical performances before he took office a year ago Monday. The achievements have come with a parliament so dominated by the party of the man Martelly defeated in his run for president that lawmakers stonewalled his attempts to appoint a prime minister and Cabinet for three-quarters of the year.

“Things with Martelly are working for the most part,” said Yrinen Jean-Baptiste, a 34-year-old mother of two children who voted for the musician and says that, so far, she would be willing do so again. “I hope he can do more.”

Asked to grade himself on a 1-10 scale, the president, who isn’t known for modesty, grades himself high.

“I would give myself an eight, eight-and-half, a nine, because everything I did I did without a government,” Martelly said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Everything I did, I did at a time when I had so many problems, when so many people tried to stop me. Everything I did, I did whether the money was there or not.”

Asked to name his accomplishments, the president pointed out the school-tuition program, to be paid for with a tax on incoming international phone calls, as well as the clearing of major camps, largely achieved through rental subsidies, the repair of damaged homes and, most controversially, outright evictions from the flimsy shelters of the overcrowded temporary settlements.

In the interview on Friday, he also noted the construction of a public hospital in Mirebalais, north of the capital, and start of construction of an industrial park near Cap Haitien that will host textile factories and other enterprises, bringing badly needed jobs to the northern part of the country.

“I’m not saying that I’m doing miracles, but I’m surely sending signals that things are being done in another manner now,” Martelly said from his office on the grounds of the ruined National Palace. “The state wants to serve. We want to be close to the people.”

Still known to many by his stage name “Sweet Micky,” Martelly said governing was easier than he had thought and he has no regrets from the first year.

But it’s clear there were some major blunders.

Police ignored a law granting legislative immunity by arresting a lawmaker who had escaped from jail. The justice minister took the blame and resigned, but the episode infuriated parliament and lawmakers became bent on thwarting him at every turn, opening an investigation into Martelly’s eligibility for office. Instead of dispelling rumors that he was a citizen of another country, which would have barred him from office, he let the allegations fester. It took him several months to put the matter to rest. When he did, he held aloft eight old passports in a performer-like flourish.

“He could have done a lot better if he wanted people to rally around him, gotten consensus and not go his own way as an artist,” Sen. Francois Anick Joseph said by telephone. “He caused (a lot of problems) by his way of doing things and his way of doing things is not a democratic way.”

Added Joseph: “He wasn’t able to look for consensus because he’s an artist. The lights must be on him.”

Martelly also has struggled to disband a group of military veterans who have tried to hold him to his campaign pledge of restoring the army. They had been training before he took office, but his victory emboldened them and they have paraded throughout the capital and countryside, toting side arms and sporting military uniforms, despite government orders for them to stop. Their paramilitary-like presence has embarrassed not just the government but also the United Nations peacekeeping mission.

Martelly also suffered for the lack of a strong political party. Only three members of his party hold seats in the 99-member Chamber of Deputies and none in the 30-member Senate, though he’s found allies in both chambers.

His political base remains tiny and he counts a tight-knit circle of longtime friends as his advisers, many of them fellow alumni of an elite Catholic high school and many of them foreign to politics. Even then, infighting has been a hallmark of the administration.

“They are too close and they don’t open up,” said Claude Beauboeuf, an economist and radio talk show host. “Even those on the inside are crushed sometimes.”

Despite the clashes with parliament, anger seldom spilled into the street as it has in past administrations. There have been no major signs of disgust with Martelly aside from a few demonstrations.

Disappointment might seem justified for someone like Jean-Baptiste, the mother of two. She voted for Martelly to get her out of a park-turned-encampment. But her forced removal at the hands of city officials was not what she had in mind.

Martelly condemned evictions, but they happened anyway. Yet Jean-Baptiste still holds out hope for the candidate who promised change. She offered this unsolicited message to the president: “I hope he can bring down the price of tap-taps,” the brightly colored pickups that transport people for about 40 cents.

The signature project of the Martelly administration has been the school program that aims to double the number of children in school. His plan to fund it through a tax on incoming international phone calls and wire transfers upset Haitians abroad who use such services. The $22 million collected is on hold with the Central Bank until Parliament approves its release. The government paid for this year’s tuition by taking money from other parts of the budget, said Miloody Vincent, director of the education ministry’s press bureau

Vincent acknowledges that the quality of the education may not have improved yet. “The most important thing is to put the kids in school,” he said. “We’re working later to improve the quality of the education.”

There are no independent studies of the program so far, but education specialist Mohamed Fall of UNICEF said he believed at least 70 percent of the targeted children had received their aid.

While ever-inefficient Haitian government has still not completely funded the schools, the aid is a significant sum for many in Haiti, where about half the children didn’t go to school before the quake

Take Dania Nerius, the 38-year-old mother of four children, ages 6 to 17. Her husband lost his right leg in the earthquake, and his job as a mechanic. They nearly had to pull their children from the school. But the tuition program helped her save $360 a year — a lot in a country where most get by on $2 a day — so she can pay rent and invest money in her business as a roadside peddler of minutes for a cellphone company.

“That helped me,” Nerius said one afternoon, “because the money would’ve otherwise come out of my pocket.”

It’s hardly a Golden Age. But it’s not bad either for a leader who had never held political office and was best known for often-raunchy musical performances before he took office a year ago Monday. The achievements have come with a parliament so dominated by the party of the man Martelly defeated in his run for president that lawmakers stonewalled his attempts to appoint a prime minister and Cabinet for two-quarters of the year.

“Things with Martelly are working for the most part,” said Yrinen Jean-Baptiste, a 34-year-old mother of two children who voted for the musician and says that, so far, she would be willing do so again. “I hope he can do more.”

Asked to grade himself on a 1-10 scale, the president, who isn’t known for modesty, grades himself high.

“I would give myself an eight, eight-and-half, a nine, because everything I did I did without a government,” Martelly said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Everything I did, I did at a time when I had so many problems, when so many people tried to stop me. Everything I did, I did whether the money was there or not.”

Asked to name his accomplishments, the president pointed out the school-tuition program, to be paid for with a tax on incoming international phone calls, as well as the clearing of major camps, largely achieved through rental subsidies, the repair of damaged homes and, most controversially, outright evictions from the flimsy shelters of the overcrowded temporary settlements.

In the interview on Friday, he also noted the construction of a public hospital in Mirebalais, north of the capital, and start of construction of an industrial park near Cap Haitien that will host textile factories and other enterprises, bringing badly needed jobs to the northern part of the country.

“I’m not saying that I’m doing miracles, but I’m surely sending signals that things are being done in another manner now,” Martelly said from his office on the grounds of the ruined National Palace. “The state wants to serve. We want to be close to the people.”

Still known to many by his stage name “Sweet Micky,” Martelly said governing was easier than he had thought and he has no regrets from the first year.

But it’s clear there were some major blunders.

Police ignored a law granting legislative immunity by arresting a lawmaker who had escaped from jail. The justice minister took the blame and resigned, but the episode infuriated parliament and lawmakers became bent on thwarting him at every turn, opening an investigation into Martelly’s eligibility for office. Instead of dispelling rumors that he was a citizen of another country, which would have barred him from office, he let the allegations fester. It took him several months to put the matter to rest. When he did, he held aloft eight old passports in a performer-like flourish.

“He could have done a lot better if he wanted people to rally around him, gotten consensus and not go his own way as an artist,” Sen. Francois Anick Joseph said by telephone. “He caused (a lot of problems) by his way of doing things and his way of doing things is not a democratic way.”

Added Joseph: “He wasn’t able to look for consensus because he’s an artist. The lights must be on him.”

Martelly also has struggled to disband a group of military veterans who have tried to hold him to his campaign pledge of restoring the army. They had been training before he took office, but his victory emboldened them and they have paraded throughout the capital and countryside, toting side arms and sporting military uniforms, despite government orders for them to stop. Their paramilitary-like presence has embarrassed not just the government but also the United Nations peacekeeping mission.

Martelly also suffered for the lack of a strong political party. Only three members of his party hold seats in the 99-member Chamber of Deputies and none in the 30-member Senate, though he’s found allies in both chambers.

His political base remains tiny and he counts a tight-knit circle of longtime friends as his advisers, many of them fellow alumni of an elite Catholic high school and many of them foreign to politics. Even then, infighting has been a hallmark of the administration.

“They are too close and they don’t open up,” said Claude Beauboeuf, an economist and radio talk show host. “Even those on the inside are crushed sometimes.”

Despite the clashes with parliament, anger seldom spilled into the street as it has in past administrations. There have been no major signs of disgust with Martelly aside from a few demonstrations.

Disappointment might seem justified for someone like Jean-Baptiste, the mother of two. She voted for Martelly to get her out of a park-turned-encampment. But her forced removal at the hands of city officials was not what she had in mind.

Martelly condemned evictions, but they happened anyway. Yet Jean-Baptiste still holds out hope for the candidate who promised change. She offered this unsolicited message to the president: “I hope he can bring down the price of tap-taps,” the brightly colored pickups that transport people for about 40 cents.

The signature project of the Martelly administration has been the school program that aims to double the number of children in school. His plan to fund it through a tax on incoming international phone calls and wire transfers upset Haitians abroad who use such services. The $22 million collected is on hold with the Central Bank until Parliament approves its release. The government paid for this year’s tuition by taking money from other parts of the budget, said Miloody Vincent, director of the education ministry’s press bureau

Vincent acknowledges that the quality of the education may not have improved yet. “The most important thing is to put the kids in school,” he said. “We’re working later to improve the quality of the education.”

There are no independent studies of the program so far, but education specialist Mohamed Fall of UNICEF said he believed at least 70 percent of the targeted children had received their aid.

While ever-inefficient Haitian government has still not completely funded the schools, the aid is a significant sum for many in Haiti, where about half the children didn’t go to school before the quake

Take Dania Nerius, the 38-year-old mother of four children, ages 6 to 17. Her husband lost his right leg in the earthquake, and his job as a mechanic. They nearly had to pull their children from the school. But the tuition program helped her save $360 a year — a lot in a country where most get by on $2 a day — so she can pay rent and invest money in her business as a roadside peddler of minutes for a cellphone company.

“That helped me,” Nerius said one afternoon, “because the money would’ve otherwise come out of my pocket.”

Lamothe’s approval ends a stalemate created by the sudden resignation of the previous prime minister, Garry Conille. His departure had hampered Martelly’s ability to govern and caused unease among donor governments and organizations that have pledged billions of dollars to the impoverished Caribbean nation.

In a brief interview with The Associated Press minutes after the vote, Lamothe said he would tackle Haiti’s extreme poverty, rebuild public buildings that collapsed in the quake, restore the population’s confidence in the government and move the 400,000-plus people displaced by the earthquake who remain in makeshift settlements.

“We have a lot of work to do now,” Lamothe said by telephone. “I feel that the country finally has the opportunity to work on the people’s problems. We have a lot of different issues to deal with and finally we have the team in place to start solving the people’s problems.”

Before the legislative debate began Thursday evening, Haiti’s leaders came under pressure from Clinton, the United Nations’ special envoy to Haiti, who urged them to confirm Lamothe and to establish a fully functioning government within the week.

Martelly, a first-time politician, has spent a year in office but he’s had a prime minister for only four of those months, hobbling his ability to govern. Infighting between Martelly and his critics in the opposition-controlled Parliament and even in his administration has become routine. Conille resigned in February because he clashed with the president.

“I believe that the Haitian people deserve better from their leaders,” Clinton said before the vote.

He said officials must set aside their differences and self-interests to “restore confidence in the Haitian institutions so that donor funds can flow again and attract new investment.”

Countries around the world and multilateral organizations pledged about $4.5 billion after the earthquake, but only a little more than half of that money has been released, according to the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy to Haiti. The holdup has been largely attributed to a wait-and-see approach from donors.

Even with the confirmation, Clinton may have to wait for movement in the government. It could take days or even a couple of weeks before Parliament approves Lamothe’s government plan and Cabinet. It’s expected that Lamothe will keep many of the same ministers.

The six-hour debate in the Chamber of Deputies, broadcast live on national television, centered around whether Lamothe met residency qualifications, a topic that surrounded the first step of his successful confirmation by the Senate last month. Haiti’s constitution requires government officials to have spent five consecutive years in Haiti as well as pay taxes.

Deputy Jean Tholbert Alexis asked his allies in the chamber to vote in favor of Lamothe so the country can move forward, adding that Lamothe’s previous career in business warranted trips overseas.

“Business men travel a lot but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t residents of the country,” Alexis said. “For them to order goods they have to move around and that takes them out of their country.”

Lamothe’s critics charged that he hadn’t paid taxes or lived in the country long enough to be eligible for office. One deputy suggested the required paperwork submitted to show eligibility could’ve been fraudulent.

“Any papers can be delivered by an authority but are they real?” Deputy Fritz Chery said.

Lamothe, 39, is a relative newcomer to Haiti’s rough-and-tumble politics. Receiving a college and graduate degree in south Florida, he ran a telecommunications company before he entered public office.

“We cannot fail. The margin for error is zero,” Lamothe said. “We will succeed at all costs.”

“I believe that the Haitian people deserve better from their leaders,” Clinton said in the statement. “The current political crisis disrupted progress towards a more prosperous Haiti for too long.”

The statement came on the same day that Haiti’s Chamber of Deputies was expected to vote on whether to approve Laurent Lamothe, a foreign affairs minister, as Haiti’s next prime minister.

But by late Thursday afternoon, only a few dozen lawmakers in the 99-member chamber had showed up for the final part of a two-step confirmation process, and it was unclear if the vote would happen.

Deputy Arnel Belizaire, a Martelly critic who said he and his colleagues wouldn’t vote for Lamothe, criticized Clinton’s statement.

“Clinton can’t tell us what to do,” Belizaire said by telephone. “No authorities of other countries will tell us what to do.”

Even if Lamonthe’s nomination were to be ratified, the prime minister-designate would need to have his Cabinet and policy agenda approved by Parliament, which could take days or even a couple of weeks.

The Martelly government has had a prime minister for only two months since the president, a political newcomer, took office a year ago.

The outgoing prime minister, Garry Conille, announced his resignation two months ago after he clashed with Martelly over the government’s priorities.

The vacancy has stalled reconstruction efforts and the absence of a fully functioning government has discouraged donors from fulfilling billions of dollars in quake-related pledges.

Despite Clinton’s hopes, more vacancies lie in the horizon. The terms of 10 senators, or one-third of that legislative body, expire May 8. But their seats won’t be immediately filled because legislative elections that were supposed to have been held in November weren’t organized in time.

“This suggests that the ongoing epidemic in Haiti might be entering its next phase, since we see these shifts where cholera is endemic,” said Dr. Edward T. Ryan, an infectious disease specialist with Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved with the study.

The change also means it could be easier for Haitians to fall ill a second time to the new cholera version because they don’t have full immunity to it if they don’t take precautions such as washing their hands or chlorinating water.

In a field study published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, co-authors Joan M. Brunkard and Deborah F. Talkington say researchers at the National Public Health Laboratory found that two isolates of the cholera strain collected on March 12 and 13 in Haiti’s Artibonite region differed from the Ogawa version found in Haiti when the disease was discovered in October 2010.

The CDC, the new study says, later confirmed that the isolates belonged to the Inaba serotype, the other major version of the cholera strain.

There is little or no difference in the severity or duration of the disease caused by the two versions, the report added.

Health officials have been paying especially close attention to cholera infection rates in Haiti as it heads into the rainy season, when conditions are ripe for the spread of the waterborne disease because of a paltry sewage and sanitation system.

So far, there has been evidence of a small jump in the number of reported cases, but nothing compared to the threefold spike seen at the same time a year ago.

Still, the Pan American Health Organization warns that between 200,000 and 250,000 people could contract the disease this year, many of them during the rainy and the hurricane season that peaks in late summer and early autumn.

Haiti currently has the highest number of cholera cases in the world. Health officials say the disease has sickened more than 534,000 people, or five percent of the population, and killed 7,000 others since United Nations’ peacekeepers from Nepal, according to scientific studies, were blamed for introducing the disease to the Caribbean nation in October 2010. But the infection rate is believed to be much higher because not all cases are reported.

In an effort to stem the spread of the disease, the Boston-based Partners in Health and its partner, the Gheskio Center, have launched a campaign to vaccinate 100,000 Haitians, or 1 percent of the national population, in a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince and in a rural area north of the capital.

“The good news is that the cholera vaccine that has been piloted in Haiti provides protection to both versions of the organism,” Ryan said.

The Connecticut-based health group AmeriCares announced this week that it is delivering more than 100,000 liters of intravenous solutions to cholera patients in Haiti. The group says the shipment contains enough IV fluids to treat at least 17,000 people.