14814: Kathy S. Grey Re: 14801: di dola pou yon dola (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Racine125@aol.com

It's back down to 50 gourdes for one US dollar today in Jacmel.

The problem isn't really the rate of exchange, the problem is the rate of PAY that most majority-class Haitians are working for.  If wages followed prices, it would be fine.

Agricultural work here in Jacmel is paid at the rate of fifty gourdes a day, plus a little bread and coffee for breakfast and some cornmeal at noon, IF the worker is lucky.

Now, four miserable oranges sell for ten gourdes.  A cup of beans is twenty gourdes.  I just bought a quart (or maybe a liter) of oil for sixty gourdes.

A sack of "son de ble", which I think is wheat husks, that is, animal feed, used to sell for 200 Haitian gourdes, just a few months ago.  Now it is just shy of 500 gourdes.  When your pig eats a sack of the stuff every week, what can you sell that pig for to make back your money?  You can't!  So now all the little pig farmers are being forced out of business - it's not mango season, it's not breadfruit season, there is nothing for the pigs to eat.  And since over 95% of Haiti's meat is produced by small farmers, this means that pork, at least, is about to go sky-high.

Reports I've heard from Port-au-Prince say that you can't dare say, "My God things are expensive" in public, you don't dare utter the words "lavi cher".  If you do, you get a beating. From whom?  I don't know, and I am not sure if this is true or not, but enough people say so.

Meanwhile blame is being directed at the Middle Eastern community, the Syrian businessmen and so forth; and of course at that mysterious BLAN who is to blame for everything that goes wrong in Haiti, but who has never once been seen!  And apparently some people here think that every non-Haitian in Haiti has a direct line to the mythological BLAN, and call that BLAN every evening for instructions!

With warm greetings from Jacmel for all Corbetteers,

Kathy S. Grey