19583: radtimes: Rebellion means little to Haiti's poor (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Rebellion means little to Haiti's poor

http://www.swisspolitics.org/en/news/index.php?section=int&page=news_inhalt&news_id=4756380

March 1, 2004
By Jim Loney

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) - In a cramped alley in downtown
Port-au-Prince, a stone's
throw from Haiti's stately National Palace, two long orange peels are
draped carefully from a
fence, drying in the sun.

In the home of Marie Rose Paul, nothing is wasted. The peel will be used
for tea and to help
light the charcoal in the brazier in the corner.

"It's good for constipation too," said Paul, who lives with six of her own
children and
another six of a daughter who died as well as her elderly sister.

They are 14 people in three small rooms with two beds. There is no
electricity or running
water in the tiny home of bare concrete walls and tin roof, located in a
warren of dank alleys and
shanties in the trash-filled streets.

"We don't have a good kind of life," said the petite 40-year-old woman,
dressed simply in a
blouse, skirt and plastic sandals, as she casually moved white-hot coals in
the brazier with
callused fingers. "Things are not good for us."

Candles are lighted when night falls. Sometimes they have a meal. "If you
have money, you can
buy food," she said. "If not, you just stay hungry."

The hard-pressed masses care little about political convulsions in the
poorest country in the
Americas. With no television or radio, they get little news.

This crumbling city of open sewers and tumbledown buildings is chaotic even
in the best of
times. Armed rebels who helped overthrow President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
cause few worries for
people who struggle each day to find enough to eat.

Freed from its French colonial masters by a slave revolt in 1804, Haiti has
been plagued by
political violence for many of its 200 years since independence.
International agencies estimate
more than 60 percent of its 8 million people are malnourished and nearly 50
percent are
illiterate.

Decades of dictatorship and brutal military rule have contributed to its
dire economic
straits, experts say. Haiti has few industries -- about 70 percent of its
people are involved in
subsistence agriculture.

Its hungry masses have stripped the mountainous countryside of trees for
charcoal, leaving
less than 5 percent forest cover. As a result, precious topsoil washes into
the sea.

Throughout Haiti, children trudge wearily with heavy 5-gallon buckets of
water and huge wicker
baskets of bread balanced on their heads. Men push rickety wooden carts
laden with bags of rice or
grain through the streets.

In the capital, market women line the streets, neat piles of mangoes and
oranges at their
feet. Many travel long distances to their roadside spots and leave at the
end of their
dawn-to-dusk day with $2 or less. Haiti's average per capita income is
about $350 a year.

Statistics are hard to come by in a country where the government is usually
in shambles. But
international agencies say 80 percent of Haiti's people are under- or
unemployed.

This comes as no surprise to Lyonel Charleus. Trained as an electrician, he
has never had a
job. But he puts those skills to work stealing power from lines in the
streets of Port-au-Prince
so his family of seven has light.

Charleus, 41, picks up an odd job perhaps two days a month. He will earn
about $5 a day.

Between those jobs and money sent from relatives overseas, he might have
$210 a year to care
for his wife and five children. He laughs when asked whether he receives
help from the government.
"There's no way the government would help to feed you."

The two rooms where the family lives have no running water, but there is
one tap in the
building, which is shared by about 40 people.

.