12/16/2004
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After a forty-five minute flight, slammed back and forth by a wind that doesn’t
let up, a small propeller plane from Port au Prince lands on an earthen landing
strip that looks like something from another era. There’s no airport. Everything
is left to chance.
Most of the adults sit along the narrow streets waiting for who knows what. There
is no work in Port au Paix. In Haiti, with a population of approximately ten million
inhabitants (there is no census office), only two hundred thousand have steady
jobs. Foreign volunteers who work in the hospitals and orphanages are few in number
but essential. There are few schools in Port au Paix, as in the rest of Haiti.
Schooling is free but few parents can afford to buy the costly textbooks or uniforms
for their children. Because of this and the shortage of teachers, the schools
are poorly attended; in fact they are virtually empty.
“Ours is not a poor country,” says the bishop of Port au Paix, Monsignor Pierre
Antoine Paulo, without quite believing his own words. “Haiti is not poor. It has
been made poor, above all by its own children, who have attacked each other with
inexpressible violence in absurd fratricidal wars. I think few nations in the
world have had as many presidents (and violent dictators) as we have. Our continuing
isolation also comes from this. Haiti is an inferno. It is the sewer of the Caribbean,
perhaps of the entire Latin-American continent. The neighboring countries don’t
do anything to help us. Sometimes I think it’s useful for them to leave us totally
isolated.”
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A Voyage to Port au Paix in northern Haiti, where everything and nothing are bound together
from our correspondent
Alessandro Grandi
After a forty-five minute flight, slammed back and forth by a wind that doesn’t
let up, a small propeller plane from Port au Prince lands on an earthen landing
strip that looks like something from another era. There’s no airport. Everything
is left to chance.We’ve come to Port au Paix: Hell in a paradise.
Dozens of children with big sad eyes crowd up against the aircraft to see who’s
arrived. Two wings, two rotors, a small fuselage, the luggage piled up in the
tail without the least concern for the safety of the passengers. This is a Haitian
airplane. A mother with two children in her arms stands up to walk down the steps
after having sat on the floor between two seats throughout the flight.
This is the only means of transport available from the capital to this remote
zone, ever since Hurricane Jeanne.
“Blan, Blan! (literally, ‘White, White!’ a typical Haitian expression)” the children
yell, running among the passengers in hopes of earning a few coins to take home.
Here, in Port au Paix, there isn’t anything.
Rather, it is more accurate to say that nothing is all there is here in Port
au Paix.
The dust raised by the plane’s propellers settles white over the fruit stands
at the improvised market that borders the airfield. Chickens and pigeons drink
from the same rivulet of open sewer that children play in.
“Blan, give me an American dollar!” says John, seventeen, who badly wants to
escape this hell but can neither read nor write. “You see how we live? Give me
a dollar. I have to eat,” he says in hesitant French with a strong voice in a
strikingly high timbre. “Do you speak Creole?” he asks, “If you don’t speak Creole,
I can help you get around the city. You know, whites aren’t welcome here.”
Port au Paix is a city-sized shanty-town in northern Haiti on the coast facing
the legendary island of Tortuga, famous for its fantastic stories of buccaneers
who hid their treasures in secret dens.
It is a place forgotten by God, abandoned to its sad destiny. There is no town
government and the situation gets worse every day. The peace missions organized
by the United Nations, sent to halt the wave of violence that followed the coup
against Aristide, cannot be found in these parts, although this is where they
are needed.
The open-air sewers present a problem for whoever wants to travel on foot. There
are no asphalt roads, only paths with thousands of deep, dangerous holes that
the Haitians move around with total ease. Along the roadsides: rubble, garbage,
pigs rummaging, chickens, and dozens and dozens of children, as though it were
a normal playground.
Most of the adults sit along the narrow streets waiting for who knows what. There
is no work in Port au Paix. In Haiti, with a population of approximately ten million
inhabitants (there is no census office), only two hundred thousand have steady
jobs. Foreign volunteers who work in the hospitals and orphanages are few in number
but essential. There are few schools in Port au Paix, as in the rest of Haiti.
Schooling is free but few parents can afford to buy the costly textbooks or uniforms
for their children. Because of this and the shortage of teachers, the schools
are poorly attended; in fact they are virtually empty.And yet the area around Port au Paix is terribly beautiful, with crystalline
waters and zones of uncontaminated nature with trees of breadfruit, mango, coconut,
and banana, despite the deforestation. Life is marked everywhere by the rhythm
of music; it swallows up the daily tragedy and bestows crumbs of happiness.
The revolt of the past months that drove out the president, Jean Bertrande Aristide,
has still not entirely dissipated. Its marks are everywhere.
“Ours is not a poor country,” says the bishop of Port au Paix, Monsignor Pierre
Antoine Paulo, without quite believing his own words. “Haiti is not poor. It has
been made poor, above all by its own children, who have attacked each other with
inexpressible violence in absurd fratricidal wars. I think few nations in the
world have had as many presidents (and violent dictators) as we have. Our continuing
isolation also comes from this. Haiti is an inferno. It is the sewer of the Caribbean,
perhaps of the entire Latin-American continent. The neighboring countries don’t
do anything to help us. Sometimes I think it’s useful for them to leave us totally
isolated.”He continues his story. “My fellow citizens had a lot of faith in Jean Bertrande
Aristide, who won the plebiscite election in 1988. But as time went by he disappointed
everyone, especially after his bloody repression of the student demonstrators.
At that point the Haitians lost all hope. At the end it was best that he left.”
Monsignor Pierre Antoine Paulo is an important figure in Haitii and went face
to face with the guerillas during the revolt, but intelligently. “Everything is
absurd here. We were lucky not to fall into the vortex of protest demonstrations
for and against Aristide. The armed groups in the area, who I know were supplied
arms by the American CIA, were handled by allowing them to believe they controlled
the city, but in substance they were kept out of political and economic affairs.
Unfortunately, Haitians are more accustomed to using weapons than their own brains.”
So the children of Dessalines, the legendary Haitian revolutionary who led the
insurrection against the French in November, 1803, still have a lot to learn and
a lot of work to do.
Despite the widespread negative judgments on the nation, in spite of the total lack of infrastructure which makes life nearly impossible, and in the face of extreme poverty, the people of Haiti have a strong sense of their own dignity. Now they have the hardest job of all: to ferry their country away from political and economic crisis. If only the hurricanes will let them.
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