Hi, this is Manveen.

Louise Callaghan, intrepid foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, has covered conflicts in Ukraine,

Syria and Iraq, where she's been on the front line and documented the human cost of war.

Now based in New York, last month, Louise spent 10 days reporting from one of the most dysfunctional

countries in the world,

where people are at the mercy of gangs and rape is used as a weapon of war.

Her dispatch from Haiti is in today's Sunday times, so we asked her to read it for our listeners.

Inside Haiti, where gangs rule.

My name's Louise Callahan. I'm a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times.

Beatrice was wearing her school uniform the day she disappeared, a yellow blouse and blue trousers.

Her mother, Rosaline, had dropped her off at the bus stop that morning and waved goodbye.

When she got home, she realised that Beatrice had forgotten her dinner money and called the head teacher to ask him to let her get lunch from the canteen on credit. He told her Beatrice hadn't come to school. She'd been taken by the gangs that control almost all of their home city, the Haitian capital of Port-a-Prince. Teenage boys and young men who sit on broken sofas at intersections, leaning assault rifles against their knees, ruling the place after they

pushed out the government a year and a half ago. Beatrice was 15 years old. Her favourite subject was

math, and she was gone. Rosaline called her friends, looked around the neighbourhood. She found out the bus had broken down on the way to school.

Beatrice had been waiting by the side of the road with the other passengers

when masked men came and took her and two of the others, a young woman and a young man.

I was looking everywhere, asking everyone, Rosaline, who's 39, told me at a women's shelter in Porta Prance.

Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Caribbean and Latin America. As a similar GDP

per capita to Bangladesh, half the population do not have enough to eat, hundreds of thousands

of children are malnourished.

In the capital, there is no accountability, no one in charge, no one who can fix things where they go wrong. In most of Port-au-Prince in its suburbs, where about a quarter of Haiti's

12 million population live, the gangs are the only law. Police are scattered through the 10%

...