Mian Shakeel Aslam— The guard wearing a Haitian Football Federation T-shirt paces nervously in front of the heavy, blue steel door, his pump-action shotgun held tightly in his right hand.
He presses his finger against the trigger when anyone bangs loudly on the metal to enter the Stad Sylvio Cator in downtown Port au Prince, pulling the door slowly open and gingerly peering his head out to see who it is.
Usually they are met with a firm volley of abuse in Creole, but this time it is the guests he has been expecting.
The Haitian national football team bus has arrived for training the day before one of the most important matches in the team's history: a 2014 World Cup qualifier against the minnows of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
It is also the country's first home football match since as many as 300,000 people were killed when a massive 7.0 earthquake reduced much of the city to rubble.
"It's 46 degrees on the pitch, we just measured it," lamented the team's Brazilian coach Edson Tavares. It is three in the afternoon, the same time the match is due to be played 24-hours later.
"It's crazy. FIFA [football's world governing body] agreed to move the match to this time. CONCACAF [the governing body for the Caribbean] said no. What do they know? They work out of New York and know nothing about the heat in the Caribbean."
But the change in time was a necessity as much for the Haitians as anyone else. Electricity is scarce in the city, too scarce for the expensive but impotent flood lights that had been installed.
Soccer salvation: How Haiti is healing after its earthquake
Haitian football, like virtually every aspect of Haitian society, was almost terminally injured when the earthquake hit in January 2010.
The Haitian Football Federation's headquarters were leveled, killing more than 30 of its staff. Its president, Yves Jean Bart, was one of only two survivors.
The stadium itself had become, like any other scrap of spare space in Port au Prince, a makeshift camp.
Hundreds of families lived here until being moved out in July when a new pitch was laid. A torn blue ribbon of despair still surrounds it.
Workers busily paint the steps inside blue, yellow and red -- the colors of the Haitian flag -- to erase the memory of its temporary incarnation.
The smell is of paint, excrement from the nearby open sewers and burning trash. The HFF president, knowing that the game has such a place in Haiti's heart, went on to rebuild the federation and hired Tavares to achieve the dream of emulating Haiti's golden generation who qualified for the 1974 World Cup.
"My first impression was to take my flight back to Brazil," Tavares explains a few hours before traveling to the stadium.
"The country was completely devastated. Today is a paradise compared. If you compare with last year ... you could be walking the street and find the [severed] legs of people, the arms of people."
Tavares began by paying for his own flight to Europe, where he hired a car and visited the professional players of Haitian descent who play on the continent.
"I rented a car to travel to five countries to persuade the players to play for his original country. Only one refused. We contacted 20 players. And they are here. Most of them don't speak Creole. One only speaks Italian. One only German."
The squad for the U.S. Virgin Islands' game was full of talented new professionals gleaned from the diaspora, like Jean-Eudes Maurice who is on Paris Saint-Germain's books and goalkeeper Steward Ceus, a New Yorker born and raised who plays for the Colorado Rapids.
"I was in college when I heard a buzz about Haiti being interested in seeing me," explains Ceus, whose grandmother used to be a baker for the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Posted By: Mian Shakeel Aslam
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