20682: Lemieux: AP: Bus Trip Shows Different Faces of Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Bus Trip Shows Different Faces of Haiti

JOSEPH B. FRAZIER
Associated Press

CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti - The electric blue bus sat with its
diesel engine warbling softly and spreading a gray exhaust
that matched the dawn.

That's as quiet as it got this day for the Apocalypse 4, a
resurrected school bus setting up for a damn-the-torpedoes
dash across Haiti.

At 5 a.m., hymns and brimstone radio sermons in Creole
blast from its open doors and ticket sellers begin
squabbling for the business of arriving passengers.

This fading northern seaport of 500,000 inhabitants, whose
once-elegant boardwalk is long gone, was seized Feb. 22 by
rebels who made it their headquarters. Weeks of fighting
have left it an armed camp - battered, looted, partly
torched and on edge. For days in February, the road to the
south was a dangerous no man's land.

Apocalypse 4 was tracing the route to Port-au-Prince, the
capital, of dozens of rebels who triumphantly journeyed
south once they heard news of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide's downfall and Feb. 29 flight.

It was off across a Haiti most visitors never see - not the
numbing poverty of sweltering urban slums nor the hilltop
opulence of the few.

The bus has seats made for two children. For the next six
hours or so they will hold three adults in conditions so
cramped that people who can afford to buy two seats.

Around 7 a.m., the Apocalypse, with far too many people and
a sense of urgency not often seen, lurched onto the road.

Meanwhile the Aleluya, Truth, God the All-Powerful,
Beautiful Soul and others had pulled out first. There
seemed to be a need to catch up.

Caustic graffiti for and against Aristide vanishes as
Apocalypse barrels up the narrow road past sugar cane,
pastel concrete houses with vegetable gardens, banana and
coconut trees, coffee plants and clusters of goats, and
heads for the Bishop's Bonnet mountain.

Passengers share their hopes, dreams and frustrations - but
these tense days, not their politics.

"I live by the grace of God, I'm not in politics," said a
woman who gave her name as Michou. "I'm going to see my
friend, I have no job, I have nothing. Send us some rice
and beans."

"Oh-oh, poor Haiti," said Marcel Morreau, who has a son in
the capital and whose hole-in-the-wall grocery was sacked
in Cap-Haitien. "Nobody has made it different. When do the
Marines come?"

That's by no means a universal view in Haiti, where some
consider the U.S. Marines an occupation force. But it's not
all that scarce, either.

The radio evangelist was getting hoarse, so the driver
changes to softer Haitian ballads - while leaning on a
shrill air horn.

On one steep curve up Limbe Slope, Apocalypse blares a
warning, gets an answer and is looking at a twin, just as
big and just as blue, right in the eye.

Both drivers lean on their horns. Neither slows down. A
petrified passenger looks out the window and sees only
emptiness down the mountainside.

Highland towns flip by. Limbe. Plaisance. Ennery. The
streets look clean, the houses colorfully painted, flashes
of red bougainvillea hang over walls. Shops and some
government offices are open. There's a cool breeze.

There is, no doubt, grinding poverty here as well. But if
the hopelessness that dominates some urban areas is here
too, it seems hidden behind the walls.

A nearly deaf and retired Catholic bishop in white sits at
the front of the bus and gets deference. "He's higher than
Aristide (a former priest) ever got," confides a passenger.

In the hot dusty lowlands, green hills are replaced by
barren mountains and cactus.

Pressed for time, the driver skips a customary stop in
dusty, rebel-held Gonaives and makes a furious dash over a
rough corduroy road toward St. Marc.

Passengers riding in the roof rack amid baggage and produce
hang on, somehow.

Apocalypse finally makes a lunch stop in the quiet coastal
town of Mont Rouis, where Club Med tourists once frolicked.
It's swarmed by people selling boiled manioc root, plates
of beans and rice, barbecued corn on the cob, roasted
peanuts, soft drinks.

Flashes of turquoise sea and white-sand beach.
Port-au-Prince isn't far. Passengers laugh. Talk flows more
freely.

As Apocalypse glides through its outskirts, passengers call
out "Chofer, Chofer," hoping he will drop them in their
neighborhoods. No such luck. Insults fly toward the front
of the bus.

It pulls into the roadside terminal and some people, miles
from homes they just passed, give the driver a dirty look.

It doesn't matter. "God is my boss." It says so right on
Apocalypse's front bumper.






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