As I rushed relief supplies from the Pan American Development Foundation through the streets of Port-au-Prince just after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, I could not fathom how Haiti would recover from the worst humanitarian disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Nearly a year later and on the other side of the world, I saw what could be Haiti's future.

In October, I traveled to Indonesia with a World Bank study group to see how that country recovered after the post-Christmas 2004 tsunami, which killed in excess of 200,000 and leveled some 139,000 homes, and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake, which took the lives of more than 5,700 and damaged 175,000 buildings.