Franketienne had just been rehearsing a play about an earthquake. Suddenly for him, dark fiction had come to terrible life. "For our people things have never been worse; there is an apocalyptic atmosphere." Speaking before the earthquake, Franketienne critically surveys his country's 200year history of rebellion, dictatorship and extreme poverty, and claims a lack of responsible governance has left Haiti impossible to help. After the earthquake he is no less admonishing of his compatriots. "It should be a lesson to us that we cannot continue to have the world's poorest, most corrupt country...because its all so terrible here."