I am lost in Port-au-Prince. This is the city where I was born, where I lived as a child, where I came back to live in my 20s, and where I have returned to visit a couple of dozen times since I started living abroad. But I am bewildered, suddenly not knowing where I am because nothing is recognizable. With the six-month anniversary of the earthquake looming, I had finally worked up the courage to visit Haiti. The journalist in me said that I had to see it for myself. But being lost is the last experience I expected.

I feel as if I am in a war zone, with scenes that remind me of the images of Europe after World War II. In downtown Port-au-Prince, the commercial center of this sprawling city of 2 million people, block after block is marked by broken buildings, three-story concrete blocks tilted at precarious 45-degree angles; buildings collapsed vertically, with a second floor suddenly at street level and others just reduced to rubble in that terrible instant. There are still bodies under those piles, people tell me casually, but it may be years before they are recovered.

The media have already chronicled the destructive moment of Jan. 12, when a magnitude-7.0 earthquake piled misery and 300,000 deaths on top of the misery that already defined life in Haiti, inevitably described as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti and its shortcomings have been dissected and analyzed in the media, with a full dose of regurgitation and recrimination due this week.

This appraisal means something more when the subject is the land of your birth. To me, Haiti is far more than a set of dire statistics. There are memories at every intersection, experiences that took place in houses and churches and schools and backyards: dancing during carnival, spirited arguments over Barbancourt rum and lime, and fearful silences under dictatorship.

Maybe because this visit is so disorienting, I find myself vividly remembering scenes from my childhood: The brown prickly-cheeked uncles from Léogane in their white linen suits, who smelled of tobacco and aftershave, bearing jars of vanilla extract, honeycombs and peaches marinated in rum. The Sunday Mass at Saint-Pierre and the lovely formal plaza in front of the church, where we bought hard candy for pennies before going to the Sunday movie, a Roy Rogers film or an adventure story like Scaramouche -- preceded, of course, by two cliffhanger episodes of Captain Marvel or Commando Cody. Now the plaza is covered with blue tarps and tents, and I see people taking showers in open stalls.