It would be hard to overstate the sonic shock of Port-au-Prince, the endless tweaker mix-tape of hammering, sawing, drilling, of rumbling traffic, of horns and music, yowling dogs, crazed roosters, buzzing swarms of cheap Chinese motorcycles, and the riled-beehive hum of millions of human beings talking all at once. My first few days in Haiti, I walked around vibrating like a skeletal tuning fork.

I returned this past January, shortly after the fourth anniversary of the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left another million and a half homeless. The day after my arrival, I was walking down a dusty, noisy street near the center of town and passed a rough-hewn cinderblock church, a cavernous space with crude turrets at the corners and iron bars across the windows. Inside, a choir composed of what must have been visiting angels was singing a Bach cantata, the angels hidden behind the walls and bars of the church but their song floating into the street like a break in the battle, a cool cloth laid over a fevered brow. And that’s how Haiti breaks your heart, with these hits of grace and beauty constantly sailing out of the wreckage.

About that wreckage—mounds of rubble are still everywhere, only now they have eight-foot trees growing out of them. Remember all the grand plans for “building back better”? For remaking the dystopian sprawl of Port-au-Prince? Not happening, though a drive of any distance through the capital reveals nerve-jangling volumes of heavy construction. Around the central plaza known as Champ de Mars, where virtually every government building collapsed in the quake, bright red fences seal off huge swaths of land where the new ministries are going up. One morning a Haitian friend drove me through the area, intoning the name of each future building we passed. Justice Ministry. Interior Ministry. Parliament building. So many new state buildings in a country where the state has been an abiding disaster.

My first night back, I went to see my friend Gary, an ex-pat American who has lived in Haiti for more than 20 years. We sat on his cracked terrace, much reduced by the quake, when a chunk of it went tumbling onto the school below. Gary couldn’t stop coughing, either a side effect of his cheap blood pressure meds or his lungs reacting to all the dust in the air. From the terrace, we could see Corail glimmering in the foothills 20 miles away, a slab of brilliant white light that seemed to float in the darkness like a vast flying carpet. Before the quake, Corail didn’t exist; now it’s a city of some 100,000 souls, virtually all of them resettled from the camps. Tonight, random flames bloomed out of the darkness above and around Corail, shards of hot flickering orange that flared for a minute, then faded out. A striking visual for a jet-lagged visitor on the lookout for signs and portents.

It’s the farmers, Gary said. They’re burning off the stubble from last season’s crop. That old way, I wondered, was it the problem or the solution? To me they were beautiful, those fires, vaguely menacing, but the next morning the mountains sat there looking as bland and innocent as a businessman after a night of S&M. I went to see my friend Nicole, one of the lawyers pursuing Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Haiti’s former dictator, for looting the state, crimes against humanity, and various other sovereign legacies. The case was coming, she said. Slowly. It was a miracle they’d gotten this far. Meanwhile, Baby Doc’s son has a post in the administration of President Michel Martelly, and Martelly himself, who has yet to hold the parliamentary elections that were supposed to happen two years ago, is sometimes photographed in the company of his protégé’s father.