Travelogues

A bit of an update from Haiti.

March 2009

By Ian White,

As soon as you get of the plane the heat hits you and so does the smell of sewage because the airport is stuck close to the two slums of St Matin and Cite Soleil. There is no sanitation, running water or electricity in either of the slums which are home to about 2.2 million people or there abouts. I suppose it is diffficult to count people when they live in such overcrowded squalor.Here are a few street scenes to give you a flavour of what its like. Not all of PAP is like this only about 99% of it.

A fruit market in the upper class suburb of Petionville. The traders often walk for as much as 10 miles every day carrying their basket of produce on their head.

When I arrived there had been a cock up. I was supposed to be staying in the Catholic Relief Service guest house where I have stayed before (only because there is no Presbyterian one I hasten to add!!). Unfortunately nobody in Concern had booked it so they booked me into the Hotel Kinam 

which still had some space. This is Charles who served me my breakfast at 7.00am and then served me my night cap at 10.30pm. It was not a split shift. He has 5 kids who go to school some weeks when he can afford it some weeks he cant . I stayed here for 5 days and watched him every day.

I suppose Charles is luckier that these couple of guys who wait by the side of the road and then when the traffic stops come up to your window with their hand out. I have given before particularly to the children but once your window is open you get inundated. No different really to other developing countries.

    

I have spent a couple of days working in St Martin among the most resilient and powerless people I have ever  met. When you have nothing to do you just sit and hope. These people have retained great dignity in the face of great disadvantage. There is also a class structure in the slum however and some people I met in the lower class, near the canal which acts as a sewer as well as a cemetery had not clothes and they had been stripped of their dignity.

One of the parts of our work is to take gang members and others in the community and if they join the process, we offer them a bit of a peace dividend, usually a small investment to set up a sustainable income for themselves. I was walking through St Martin and heard my name, it was Wallings who was so proud that he now had a motor bike and was acting as a taxi/courier. My fear is for the time when the bike breaks down. Profit margins are slim and I hope he has the possibility to repair it.

All of the work has been constructive and with the 1st phase of St Martin work coming to an end, I have been doing a fair bit of evaluation.

We have prepared an approach which could see us start a project of dialogue in Cite Soleil. And tomorrow - an implementation meeting for our new programme in the morning and in the afternoon, a bit of peace building between two participants in the dialogue process, one is from the baz. They have had a confrontation which could damage the work. One zone is threatening another zone as a result of this personal fallout. 

A demonstration that while out work is productive, things are always fragile and we have a long way to go.

And now that I am safe inside the Catholic Relief Service guesthouse, I thought I might close with a photo which demonstrates the type of security that is standard here if you can afford it. An armed guard and high walls with razor wire on top around the compound.

See you soon,

Ian

**remember, we do serious work, but don't take yourself too seriously!**