Garry Pierre-Pierre is the editor and publisher of Haitian Times, which he founded in 1999. The English language weekly serves New York’s Haitian community of 500,000. Pierre-Pierre has 20 years of experience as a journalist, including six years as a staff writer at the New York Times. While there, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also worked as a reporter at The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

He is now in Haiti sending dispatches back to the Haitian Times, which is located in Brooklyn. Here’s an excerpt from “A Night on Rue Berne, Living on the Streets:

Dusk had barely set and already, the residents of Rue Berne, were making their beds. These bedrooms were makeshifts arranged neatly on one side of the streets, away from shaky walls and fragile home frames that remain so dangerous.

The men, erected barricades, leaving enough room for a vehicle to navigate the tiny canyon. Soon they share whatever pasta, or rice with smoke herring. A few hours later, mothers tucked their children on near their belly and they started lo listen to the news on battery operated transistor radios and by 8 P.M, some people had already began falling asleep.

“You see what we’ve become, “ said Herold Joseph, who was born and raised in this long time middle class enclave. “The streets have become our home, no different from the stray dogs that we used to chase with sticks and stones.”