Poverty

In a typical day, I will wake up at around 5am when the goats start screaming. Usually I manage to fall back asleep for a couple hours, but this depends on the number of mosquitoes in my room. When I get up I do some work (data entry, creating enrollment forms, etc.) before eating my spaghetti breakfast. Then I will shower and head down to the Hope on a String center to either teach a class or attend the day’s activities. Hope on a String is putting on a big soccer match today and we’ve been training people how to “chofe” (pronounced “show-fay”), which is essentially Haitian cheerleading. We have cheers, intimidating dance moves, and an awesome song that one of the professors wrote—all for the Hope on a String team. The other guys don’t stand a chance. After the activities, I walk back to the house, talk with friends for a bit, grab some dinner, and go to sleep.

The HoaS center and our house are both on the main road in the village. Though it’s only dirt and loose rocks, this road is the only way for cars and motorcycles to get into the village and is the center for vendors and bustle. Only the wealthiest (least poor) villagers live on the main road. As a result of this setup, I never really have to face the most impoverished parts of the village, and so it’s easy to let myself believe that most of the people here are doing just fine. They seem well clothed, bright-eyed, and generally healthy. Some people even have designer jeans and cell phones. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written about the local poverty yet—it’s been so easy to focus on the other facets of my experience here while ignoring this particular one. However, once you decide to confront the abject poverty all around, you quickly begin to see the strife and struggle underlying each day.

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. This designation gets thrown around a lot in conversations in the US, but what does this level of poverty actually look like at ground level? I definitely wasn’t expecting designer jeans and cell phones, but what was I expecting? Maybe I imagined I would walk into a National Geographic episode: nobody can afford clothes, sickness and death are rampant, every child has a swollen belly due to malnutrition. That isn’t to say that these conditions are nonexistent. Far from it. The further you get from the road, the closer you get to National Geographic-styled poverty. On my walks to the ocean, I’ve seen a nine-year-old child too weak to move herself without help from her mother, an entire family of six sharing a fistful of white rice for dinner (which has no nutritional value to speak of), and many kids and adults with clear mental disabilities (most likely due to the combination of incest and infant malnutrition). Between the scattered homes in the poorer part of the village are large plantain fields where farmers perform stupendous feats of physical labor all day long. The land here is coarse and unyielding, fatigued from so many years of bad farming practices and deforestation. Work in the fields is tremendously grueling—believe me, I’ve become well acquainted with Patrice’s plantain trees—and pays barely enough to feed a small family most days of the week. These workers are the lucky ones. In various clearings scattered throughout the fields, whole families sit all day long outside their plantain-leaf huts, wishing they could work and wondering when they will eat next.

Beyond the expectations I had, I had not anticipated the deep-set, nearly tangible sense of abandonment that weighs on every place my walks take me. For the more impoverished of the community members, there is rarely any trace of hope for the future. Most of these families are unable to find any sort of work and are only able to get by because of the small amount of money their “rich” cab-driving family members send home from the US.

There are others, however, that have high aspirations for the future. Some of my friends here have dedicated themselves entirely to their studies in school. It’s been inspiring to see the fire that drives them. They are determined to do whatever it takes in order to succeed. Unfortunately, this is usually not enough. Even with all the passion, intelligence, and dedication in the world, in Haiti you need a miracle to go along with it if you’re going to get anywhere. This is perhaps what I’ve found most striking about the poverty here. It’s more than a matter of malnutrition and disease. Things like that are curable with a few NGO’s and plenty of money. Here, poverty is fully integrated into the society and the society has fully integrated itself into poverty. The general outlook on life is itself impoverished. There are so few opportunities and there is so little hope.

Yet during classes and at the other activities, there are so many smiles. As you’ve seen in the pictures, the kids are full of delight and energy. It’s pretty incredible. I’d like to think that their smiles are a result of Hope on a String’s work here, and to a certain extent I think this is true—HoaS’s presence in Corail has definitely begun to lift that air of abandonment I was talking about. But the real truth is that these children are just amazing. They have an inherent strength and an inherent joy that allow them to giggle while pounding on a keyboard or while learning to play recorder in spite of the world they’ve been born into. Regardless of how irrelevant these instruments may be to their basic survival, the children cherish the opportunity to learn. I truly think that whatever we can do to nurture this inner fire is worthwhile. And, as my stay here comes to it’s end, I know that I’ll leave here content, having added my small stick to their flame.