CAP-HAITIEN, HAITI — Dabel-Eliana Laforet returned to the place of her birth, and Haiti’s second-largest city, determined to remake her life in this port town that was virtually untouched by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Instead, she listens to the news from Port-au-Prince and yearns to be back in the shattered capital she called home for 20 years.

Even as it lay in ruins, Port-au-Prince continues to starve the rest of the nation of attention and resources. In this northern city of about 180,000, residents say the central government has largely been absent and international aid barely trickles in. Despite Cap-Haitien’s functioning harbor and rubble-free streets, residents say they are reliant on the capital’s crumbled institutions to get anything done.

Unable to find work, Laforet said it frustrates her to hear about aid agencies doling out food and jobs in the capital.

“No one has done anything for us here,” she said, standing outside a pink, one-room shack on the outskirts of town. “Everything is happening in Port-au-Prince.”

Some call Haiti “the Republic of Port-au-Prince” because no other city seems to matter, said Jean-Robert Lafortune, the president of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, a Miami-based organization that has been advocating for greater decentralization. “There has been an unbalanced development of Haiti, and that has an impact in terms of commerce and industrialization in other parts of the country,” he said.

If decentralization was an issue before the disaster, in some ways it has only been exacerbated as the world’s relief agencies have focused their efforts in hard-hit Port-au-Prince.

Three weeks after the earthquake, Tim Traynor, the emergency coordinator of the CRUDEM Foundation hospital, on the outskirts of Cap-Haitien, toured a field clinic with about 400 patients — almost all flown in from Port-au-Prince.

HOSPITAL IN NEEDWhile the hospital has been surviving on donations and volunteers, in the weeks immediately after the earthquake it had not received the full support of the United Nations or the International Red Cross, he said.

“We have not received a thing from the U.N. We are being completely ignored,” Traynor said, as he surveyed a tent full of patients with shattered limbs and missing legs. When he asked the Red Cross and the U.N. about getting food or shelter for the hundreds of family members who have followed the patients to the hospital, he was told, “We’re busy in Port-au-Prince.” “Well, what about us?”

The World Food Program has been bringing in rice through the Cap-Haitien port, but much of it has been destined for the capital, local officials said.

Making matters worse, the region has been plagued recently by heavy rains that have been deadly in some cases. In fact, all schools in Cap-Haitien and neighboring cities to the north have been closed since Feb. 16 — ever since four children were killed when the rains triggered a landslide that sent a boulder crashing into their classroom.

One of the problems hindering aid has been lack of communication, said Valente Perry, the team leader of a U.S. Army Civil Affairs group that recently toured Cap-Haitien.

“There has been a disconnect between [the United Nations], the government and the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]here,” Perry said. “Much of that coordination is just starting to come on line.”

In the days after the earthquake, more than 400,000 people fled Port-au-Prince, according to the International Organization on Migration.

The government encouraged the exodus, packing people on buses and calling “decentralization” a national imperative. No one’s sure how many ended up in Cap-Haitien, but Mayor Michel St. Croix estimates at least 50,000 have sought refuge here.

While evacuees have come, the aid they need has not followed, he said.

“We need housing, sanitation, security — we need everything,” said St. Croix, who worked for the Red Cross before becoming mayor in 2007.

Most importantly, the city needs to able to put them to work, he said. “We didn’t have enough jobs before the earthquake. And we certainly don’t have enough jobs now.”

With the seat of government and the nation’s principal harbor in Port-au-Prince, industry has traditionally clustered around the capital pulling the labor force with it. When the earthquake struck, about one-third of the nation, or more than 3 million people, were crowded into the capital.

Cap-Haitien has always had a complicated relationship with Port-au-Prince. After independence from France in 1804, Henri Christophe, a key leader in the revolution, declared himself emperor of the Kingdom of Northern Haiti, with Cap-Haitien as its capital. The ruins of that era — the Sans-Souci Palace, once considered the Versailles of the Caribbean; and the hilltop Laferrire citadel — still loom on the outskirts of the city and are among the nation’s top tourist draws.

ISOLATEDIn 2004, anti-government forces under the command of renegade police chief Guy Philippe took Cap-Haitien and launched a putsch that ultimately led to the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Although it sits less than 100 miles from the capital, Cap-Haitien is also isolated by poor roads that can make the journey an eight-hour odyssey. And yet it’s still dependent on Port-au-Prince.

Getting a birth certificate, a driver’s license or a passport requires a trip to the capital.

Even the fact that the city has its own port — which never ceased to function even as the main harbor in Port-au-Prince was crippled — means little, said Jimmy Marzouka, who owns the Super Mart grocery store in downtown Cap-Haitien.

Corruption at the installation makes it too costly to bring in merchandise, so he is forced to send trucks every week to the capital to pick up goods.

“When you try to bring goods in through the [Cap-Haitien] port, they can sit there for months and months and you lose money,” he said, echoing a common gripe in the business community. “All the distributors are in Port-au-Prince. Everything is in Port-au-Prince.”

There are efforts to shift the balance of power.

Georges Sassine, the president of the Manufacturers’ Association of Haiti, said there are plans to build a garment-manufacturing plant near Cap-Haitien that could employ 10,000 to 20,000 people; there are also projects to expand the city’s undersized airport and improve the roads that lead to tourist attractions. “There is no reason not to continue with these plans,” he said.

While decentralization may be good government policy, it’s not always seen as a sound business decision, said Robert Krech, an operations officer at the International Finance Corporation who promotes foreign investment in Haiti.

Investors want to be close to the central government and other industries, he said.

“Like attracts like,” he said. “Most of the [foreign] investors we have been speaking to don’t want to locate outside of Port-au-Prince even after the earthquake.”

That sentiment is not limited to investors. The lure of a bustling Port-au-Prince may continue to be too enticing for average Haitians to ignore.

Cradling her week-old grandson, Laforet said she planned to raise the boy in the capital as soon as she collects enough money for the trip.

“It’s very pretty and quiet here,” she said looking at the row of mountains in the background. “But I miss the noise and the traffic. Port-au-Prince is home.”