THERE are two pictures in the mind of Rod Hawes from the summer months he spent in Haiti which bring home the scale of disaster he witnessed.

In the first, a young girl lies in a city street, covered in flies, ignored, apparently dead.

In the second, a vehicle skids off a narrow mountain road and careens 300ft down a cliff.

Rod and other volunteers helped the young girl. The last he heard, she was alive. Still living on the street, but breathing, at least.

He is almost certain the people in the vehicle — he doesn't know who they were — died. There are no rescue services in Haiti.

Recently returned to his home in Barnstaple, 63-year-old Rod, a town councillor who spent 22 years in the RAF and 23 years with South West Water in finance and logistics, is still recovering from the three-month trip, in more ways than one.

A couple of days after getting home, he began to feel unusual. He then spent ten days in hospital with Dengue Fever, a mosquito-born illness which laid him low with severe exhaustion.

Speaking this week as he recovered, Rod painted a picture of Haiti as a place crippled by poverty, natural disaster, incompetence, and lawlessness.

In Port-au-Prince, the capital city, Rod saw the destruction of the earthquake which rocked the island, which also contains the Dominican Republic, eight months ago.

"It stinks, it's filthy, and it's divided between the well-off and the poor areas," he said.

"The dirt and the rubbish were a shock. I didn't realise they had no infrastructure in Haiti. There is no refuse collection, so gangs rake it up and burn it."

Yards from a Red Cross hospital set up by Canadians, Rod and fellow volunteers found a girl, perhaps 13 years old, in a gutter.

Rod said: "She looked dead. I had this bunch of kids following me around and they ran over to her and came back and said she was dead.

"A crime scene investigation officer from Queensland who was with us took her pulse, and she was alive.

"A couple of us picked her up. Her skin was falling off and she had flies on her. We gave her to the Canadians and they put her on a drip. That was like: Hello Haiti."

He later heard she recovered.

Large parts of Port-au-Prince were still in ruins, mayhem, he said, with the presidential palace and the cathedral among the large buildings flattened.

Haitians he spoke to believed God had caused the misery as punishment for their sins. That punishment included bringing down a classical music college, killing 240 gifted children of all ages.

"What strikes you is the damage is very random," Rod said.

After ten days, he travelled to Jacmel, a city in the south of the country.

"The roads are mostly rough dirt tracks, covered in boulders and mudslides," he said.

"We saw a vehicle going off a 300ft drop and the driver said there was nothing we could do about it. They don't have rescue services. That was a sharp awakening."

In Jacmel, Rod saw major United Nations "displacement camps", where thousands of people lived in tents, surrounded by filth.

In more prosperous, and luckier, times, Jacmel would be an idyllic, seaside town surrounded by countryside.

There were no proper latrines and many people used drainage ditches as lavatories. Meanwhile, the temperature and humidity were typically fierce. Disease was rampant. Unemployment was at 70%. Everywhere was lawless.

"There was a lot of rape and sex attacks. Women didn't dare to go out at night," he said.

Rod lived in an unfinished compound, sleeping in a tent on a concrete floor, on the outskirts of Jacmel near a UN headquarters, with other volunteers. The showers were cold and the electricity supply sporadic.

In Haiti, he said, everywhere was squalid, with chickens, pigs and goats roaming free and animal and human filth everywhere.

Despite this, Rod said the Haitian people, including children, mostly wore clean, neat clothes and took great pride in their groomed appearances, much more so than in the UK.

He noted a contrast between the beautiful people and their ugly devastation.

During his 14 weeks there, with the Global Volunteer Network, he took part in a wide range of volunteer work, including helping in an orphanage, clearing rubble, and some administrative work for the UN.

Rod was critical of the UN, saying they appeared to be disorganised.

He also said that aid sent from overseas was clearly entering the black market.

The distinctive ShelterBoxes sent by Rotary International, for example, were being exchanged unofficially for $100 each. And piles of donated clothes, many from the USA, were for sale on market stalls.

Rod said: "Haiti was a mess before the earthquake. It has no economy. The Government had run down every industry.

"It's like taking a step back in time. You can go to their markets and see televisions from the 1960s, still being used. There are carcasses of vehicles in the most odd places."

Back in safe and relatively prosperous North Devon, Rod said his trip had been worthwhile because of the individuals he hoped he had helped.

But he was under no illusion about the progress, or lack of it, being made for ordinary Haitians.

There is one word Rod uses more than once as he recounts his time in Haiti: humbling. It was a humbling experience.