Haiti: Mothers in Cite Soleil dig through garbage to survive

[Mekeda7]

http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs4257

Bottom of the Heap
For four mothers in Cite Soleil, digging through
garbage is the ultimate in trickle down economics.
By Kevin Sites, Wed May 10, 6:37 PM ETEmail Story IM
Story

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - This is one example of how
wealth is redistributed in Haiti.

It rains.

The rains wash the garbage of the upper class
neighborhood of Petionville down to the slums of Cite
Soleil.

There is already too much garbage in Cite Soleil.
Garbage that doesn't disappear.

Garbage, like despair, that piles higher and higher.

Garbage that breeds disease... and contempt.

White fields of plastic, cups, cardboard. A harvest of
consumption's remnants.

There is no beauty in it. None at all.

But to some there is value.

Value for those so far down the food chain that even
waste offers rewards, if you're willing to sift
through it.

Benita Claremont, Nicole Emile, Nadine Paul and
Berlange Nicholas are willing to sift. They are
mothers — mothers whose children have to be fed,
educated, cared for. Yes, they're willing to sift. To
sift for hours every time it rains. They use
pitchforks and their hands.

Others in Cite Soleil, those a bit better off,
ridicule them.

"It's very difficult but we don't have a choice,"
Nadine says. "It would be nice if we could start a
business."

Nadine has four children and is 30 years old.

"The worst is the humiliation from the other people
who live here," says Nadine. "They call us 'cocoarats'
— little bugs that crawl in the garbage."

Nadine is a survivor — not in a figurative sense —
literally. While she was plucking garbage one day, in
the midst of Cite Soleil's frequent violence, a stray
bullet found her neck.

She shows me the scar. It looks like a puzzle piece.
The bullet traveled a crooked path around her jaw line
before making its exit.

In a life defined by daily Jobian-sized trials there
is no missing the point of this injury's gross insult.


The mothers work the garbage field as if it were a
field of crops. They rake and stoop and bend. It is
backbreaking work done in the searing heat of the
Haitian sun. It smells of rot — fetid, pungent,
inescapable.

It's not an easy place to be when the rewards of your
labors are some pieces of charcoal, bottles and wire —
and what you get for cashing them in is the equivalent
of a buck and a half for a day's work.

"It's not enough," Benita says. She has six children
and won't divulge her age. "But we don't have a
choice."

Benita and Nicole are sisters. Both have acquired a
sort of blankness behind the eyes. Benita's is dialed
all the way up. In Nicole's there is still a hint of
sadness. She is 25 and already a mother of four. Life
has not been gentle.

"After the rains our house was flooding so we had to
leave," says Nicole. "When we came back, we had
nothing. It was washed away."

For 20-year-old Berlange it is all about her children
— trying to pay for school so they might have a chance
to escape this poverty.

"We can't even afford education," she says, "school
fees are too high" ... especially when their husbands
(with the exception of Benita's, who is dead), like
most men in Cite Soleil, are unemployed, with few
prospects for work.

"We have experienced so many bad things we can't even
dream," Benita says, "We can only hope things will get
better."

But today, for these four mothers, what has flowed
down from Petionville looks like anything and
everything but hope.