CARREFOUR, Haiti -- Having traded his designer suits for jeans and a T-shirt, the Washington-based international lender surveyed the fruits of a $50 million loan, peppering his Haitian hosts with questions in his quick-study French.

Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombian diplomat turned Inter-American Development Bank head, looked out of place to the Haitians tracking his every move as he toured the new yellow and mint-green market complex. He passed bathrooms with gleaming flush toilets, a rest area for workers, clinic, a kids playground -- and a slaughterhouse to prepare fresh meat for the market.

In a country where promises are broken and donor contracts take years to execute, the $1.2 million Mariani Market on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince illustrates the steady pockets of progress being made in this fragile Caribbean nation.

``There is some momentum,'' Moreno mused. ``It still has a long way to go. But at least there is a sense that the security situation is better, which means a lot of things can start to happen.''

Tentatively, cautiously, a mood of optimism is replacing a sense of endless chaos and uncertainty in places like Carrefour, a city buffeted by natural disaster, hunger riots and decades of political turmoil.

Its streets are still clogged with mind-numbing, horn-honking traffic. But, look around Haiti and you can see new schools being built in once-gang-ridden slums, paved streets replacing rutted roads and crops growing in once storm-wrecked fields.

As Moreno and countless Haitians know, nothing is irreversible here. The country is a modern-day Sisphyus, a Greek tragedy plagued by ups and downs as it struggles with grinding poverty and volatile politics. Even now there are concerns that upcoming elections, political disagreements within the government and debates over revising the constitution and increasing the minimum wage could derail the momentum.

But if there is cause for optimism these days in Haiti, it is because of the arrival of some good news.

• In the last three weeks alone, $1.2 billion in foreign debt, including $511 million from the IDB, have been forgiven, saving the country $50 million a year in repayments.

• Canada and the United States both revised their travel advisories and no longer warn citizens to avoid ``nonessential travel'' to Haiti.

• And within a span of 10 days, the country that couldn't raise $100 million in foreign aid after last summer's back-to-back storms, hosted three of the world's most highly sought-after development pitchmen: former President Bill Clinton, now U.N. special envoy to Haiti; renowned Columbia University anti-poverty economist Jeffrey Sachs; and the IDB's Moreno.

``We all want to be here and help,'' Sachs told Haitian Prime Minister Miche`le Pierre-Louis during a dinner toast, calling this a ``singular moment'' for her nation.

The IDB, which is celebrating 50 years since its founding, chose Haiti as one of four countries to mark its anniversary, bringing its highly influential board of directors here this month along with the prime ministers of the Bahamas and Barbados, and the assistant secretary general of the Organization of American States.

Two days of meetings ended with a tour of several long-delayed IDB-financed projects including the market, a $46 million rehabilitation of an irrigation canal to put an additional 19,768 acres of agricultural land back in production in the Artibonite Valley and National Route 1, the 155-mile stretch linking the capital in the south with Cap-Haitien in the north.

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