20441: (Chamberlain) Life in Haiti's villages (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(NYTimes, 15 March 04)

Life Is Hard and Short in Haiti's Bleak Villages

By TIM WEINER




LAINE DANGER, Haiti, March 11 — Diplomats call Haiti "a failed state," a
nation done in by dictators and disasters.

What that means is a hungry life and an early death for five million people
in Haiti's little villages, places like Plaine Danger, 500 miles from
Florida and light-years from Port-au-Prince, the capital, where President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide fell last week.

Mr. Aristide always promised to make life better in Haiti, where public
health, education and the economy have been collapsing for decades. But he
never did; no Haitian leader ever has, and many made life worse.
Governments and juntas rise and fall, 15 in the last 18 years, doing
nothing to stop Haiti from sliding into the sea.

Haiti is slowly disappearing. The soil slides away from its steep hills,
where all the trees are turned to charcoal, the only thing people can sell
for a profit.

"There are no trees to hold the land and when it rains the earth washes
away," into the river and down to the sea, said Didier Dipera, a farmer and
a voodoo priest in Plaine Danger.

Then Christine Delille comes walking across the Grand'Anse River, and she
is a force that can stop death itself, a slender thread connecting Plaine
Danger to life.

The river runs through the most remote part of Haiti. Two roads connect
Grand'Anse Province to the capital; one is impassable, the other
impossible. Isolation provides some insulation from the armed politics of
Port-au-Prince and the collapse of agriculture in Haiti's heart. But it
provides no protection from 200 years of bad government, going back to
slavery days.

Life goes on, no matter who holds power, and "life is hard," and getting
harder in Grand'Anse, said Mrs. Delille, a barefoot nurse providing health
care to 2,700 people, dispensing medicine and information, saving lives and
bringing some small hope to Plaine Danger and surrounding hamlets.

"Many people are sick with fever, malaria, pneumonia," she said. Many
children are malnourished, and the rains wash down waste from villages
upstream, bringing sickness and death.

Mrs. Delille covers Plaine Danger, her village, and its hamlets as a field
worker for the Haitian Health Foundation, run by a handful of tough nuns in
the provincial capital of Jérémie. In a country where almost nothing works,
the group looks after 200,000 people.

Jeanne Bazard, pregnant with her sixth child, is one of the foundation's
clients. This is how she lives: "When I put a dollar together I walk up the
hill and buy a bag of charcoal and then walk into town to sell it," she
said. "If I leave at dawn I arrive at 9. It might sell for twice as much
there."

She buys roots, sometimes rice and beans. It adds up to one rudimentary
meal a day for herself and her children.

"I only care about whether we can eat," she said. "It doesn't matter who's
in power. We've never gotten anything from anyone in power. The least any
leader could do would be to make jobs so we could buy an animal or two and
find a way for my kids to go to school. It's not possible for my kids to
have a better life than mine, because they can't go to school."

A generation ago, a family here could pay a child's tuition with a pig. But
then a swine disease struck and the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier ordered
that all the pigs in Haiti be killed. Few people have the money to buy
school uniforms or books, much less shoes to walk to school, and illiteracy
runs to 80 percent in the countryside.

Free basic education for children is demanded by Haiti's Constitution. No
government ever has provided it. School fees are the equivalent of two
months' income for the rural poor.

Now the economy is based on burning. "People have no choice but to make
charcoal," said Alexis Charlemagne, 40, a nurse in Jérémie. "There's no
other way to live here. There are no jobs, no factory here, and charcoal is
a quick buck."

The taking of the trees began with the French slave masters who ran Haiti
until they were overthrown in 1804. "The only remaining forests are those
on the peak of the mountains," Girod de Chantrans, a Swiss visitor to
Haiti, wrote in 1782. "All the slopes have been cleared."

The French bought and cut millions of mahogany trees in the 19th century,
export records show; by World War I they were almost gone.

Mrs. Delille goes up the path in Plaine Danger, to the home of Nicole
Bienvil, who lives with her five children and her relatives, 13 people in a
shack.