When the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, travelled through Haiti, he heard one constant refrain: “We Haitians, we’re like reeds. We bend but we never break.”

Yet, as he tells Helen Pidd, it is a phrase that is being tested like rarely before, as ordinary Haitians are caught up in violence all over the capital, Port-au-Prince, between warring gangs vying for control. The government, meanwhile – already fragile after one prime minister was overthrown by the gangs in February – is struggling to reassert its authority.

It is an extraordinary situation, he explains, where daily life is punctured by the sound of bullets. And one so unprecedented that few in Haiti or beyond seem to know what could happen next.