22329: (Hermantin)Miami-Herald-Haitian settlements feel turbulence of national events (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Tue, Jun. 08, 2004


Haitian settlements feel turbulence of national events

By JOE MOZINGO

Miami Herald


GAUDO, Haiti - They work the rich soil of this mountain until their fingers
grow as rough as the landscape, their nails thick and splintered. It is a
hard and isolated existence, perched in a setting of staggering natural
beauty.

Blue spires of smoke twist up from endless folds of green - a scene
unchanged since their ancestors torched their slave owners' plantations 200
years ago and came here to re-create the life they once had in Africa.

The majority of Haitians still live like this - in remote, self-sufficient
settlements called lakous, often miles from any road, governed and policed
only by themselves.

In the recent months of insurrection that swept through this country, the
village of Gaudo never saw a rebel, never saw a U.S. Marine, never saw a
murder.

But the events of urban Haiti always catch up to them.

"You see we're not cooking rice right now," said Manasa Dorisma, watching
his wife shell a type of string bean they had grown. "This is all we have to
eat."

Inflation over the last few months has put the price of main staples such as
rice and cooking oil out of their reach and rendered them unable to eat
anything they cannot grow themselves.

But Dorisma is in some ways lucky. He has plenty of fertile land in an area
that gets plenty of rain. The mountainside is so lush that a breeze sets the
whole place aglitter.

In other parts of the country, hungry peasants have ravaged the land,
cutting trees for charcoal until little is left but desert and famine.

Dorisma has been planting trees since he was a child. Coconuts, mangos,
oranges, cacao, avocado, gourds, chestnuts.

His arms are wound as tight as cable. But he is getting older - over 60, he
figures. And his only son has left to work in the city.

He struggles to keep the gnawing away from his family's bellies.

"I can't say that things are going to get better," he said. "I can't say
anything because I thought things were going to get better last time."

"Last time" was the election of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who
inspired the poor, from the slums of Port-au-Prince to these mountains on
the north coast, but ultimately did little to help their lives.

"The government was taking all the money," chimed in Dorisma's cousin,
LeJess Dugere, who stopped by Sunday to help plant sweet potatoes.

The two smoked homemade cigarettes in front of Dorisma's stick hut as his
wife, Marie, and her ebullient 85-year-old mother, Lamaty, sorted beans and
danced to their little Sonivox radio inside.

Normally, they would have been selling their food in town that day. The
marketplace in the valley below is their connection to the outside world,
where national events ultimately filter down to their hardscrabble lives.

But this month, the market bears only bad news - high prices for rice. So
only one of Marie's daughters made the trek.

The journey to the market is rough. They load up a donkey with fruit, sugar
cane, corn and other vegetables until its back sags. They prop buckets of
fruit on their heads and descend four miles of steep trail - past mud huts
and plots of corn and playing children - to the flat valley floor.

At the bottom, they wade through a river, the Grande Riviere du Nord, to get
to the old plantation town of the same name.

When the river runs high, there is no way to cross. Those who try sometimes
drift away forever. During the rainy season, Gaudo can be cut off for weeks,
and fruit rots in the fields.

The market sits on a muddy road, blackened by the sale of charcoal and
riddled with heaps of trash. The women sell their fruits and vegetables,
hoping to get enough to buy some rice and food for the pigs.

These past few months, though, inflation has racked the nation, with the
violence having made the transport of goods nearly impossible for weeks.

So far, the new government that replaced Aristide has opted not to intervene
and force wealthy importers to lower prices. Rice - the main staple of the
Haitian diet - now costs twice what it used to.

That's an insurmountable obstacle for the people of Gaudo. There is no
margin of error in their lives, no way to pinch a little here to buy a
little there.

So Marie has had to return home recently with no rice. All the money she
earned, she had to spend on food for their three pigs - because if the pigs
starve, they will lose their only investment.

Remarkably, the reason Marie has to spend her money on her pigs is a result
of a decision made in Washington, D.C., more than 20 years ago - and a prime
example of how global politics, in strange and insidious ways, reach hamlets
like Gaudo.

In the early 1980s, the U.S. government feared that the black Haitian pigs
carried African swine fever and might infect U.S. herds. So they pushed the
Haitian government to eradicate them. By 1983, the native pigs were gone,
and the U.S. Agency for International Development began a program to replace
them with American pigs.

But while Haitian pigs survived on fruit rinds and whatever refuse they
could find, the U.S. pigs are pickier.

"The pigs from the United States have to be fed," said Dorisma. "The creole
pig ate anything."

The move hit the region so hard many people fled to the slums of Cap-Haitien
and Port-au-Prince looking for work. Things have been stagnant ever since.

"The mountain has been bad for years," said Marie Dorisma. "I want things to
get better, to have a road, or just a bridge to walk across."

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