Mirlande manigat biography for kids

By Tim Padgett and Jessica Desvarieux / Port-au-Prince Monday, Nov. 15, 2010

The woman who could be the next President of Haiti — and the first female to be elected to that office — doesn't strike you as an insurgent when she walks into a room.

But Mirlande Manigat, a smartly dressed, soft-spoken, 70-year-old Sorbonne Ph.D., insists she's after nothing less than a "rupture" with Haiti's dysfunctional political establishment.

"Not one that's violent or brutal, but there must be change," Manigat said in an interview with TIME at her campaign's Port-au-Prince headquarters. "We can't leave so many millions of Haitians abandoned anymore."

So far, her message is resonating inside the western hemisphere's poorest country, which was ravaged in January by an earthquake that killed some 230,000 people — and is beset now by a cholera outbreak that has claimed almost 1,000.

Two weeks before Haiti's Nov. 28 presidential election, voter poll