Life Without a Net
For a pregnant fisherman's wife and her children, life in Haiti's worst slum is unimaginably cruel.
By Kevin Sites, Sun Apr 30, 11:56 PM ET
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Imagine for a moment desperation like this: you are a 22-year-old woman, pregnant with your fourth child. You are living between four walls framed with tree branches and enclosed by corrugated tin.
There is no running water and the only electricity illuminates a single bare bulb in the corner of your one room.
Your bed sheet is thick with flies. You and your children have not eaten today, and you're not sure when you will.
Welcome to the life of Marijo Joseph, her 3-year-old son Peterson, 4-year-old son Egare and 5-year-old daughter Estella.
Life in Cite Soleil, Haiti's worst slum » View
In one of the poorest countries in the world, Haiti, Marijo lives in perhaps the worst of its slums. Cite Soleil is a teeming shantytown of a quarter-million people living in poverty so abject it is difficult for anyone outside of here to imagine.
Marijo's shack, which the family pays the equivalent of $35 a year to rent, is situated, like so many others, in a field of refuse. The landscape is so covered with garbage in every direction that there are few spots where the ground is even visible.
Near a drainage duct a large black pig roots among the trash.
"My husband is a fisherman," says Marijo, "but he's not working today, because he is trying to borrow a net. His was torn and now he doesn't have one."
There are days like today, she says, where the family may be lucky to eat one meal — usually when her husband can catch some of the small fish swimming in the severely polluted shoreline of this coastal settlement.
Normally the family can get clean water from taps connected to a source installed by international aid organizations, but Marijo says there are days when the taps are dry.
"Then we have to buy water from a local cistern," she says. "It usually tastes salty and my kids get sick a lot."
The poor sanitary conditions around the community mean children regularly get skin conditions like scabies and impetigo. Marijo's daughter Estella has a sunken and drawn appearance caused by illness and malnutrition.
Marijo Joseph and family » View
But if the poverty wasn't enough, the family also has to endure the violence that often plagues Cite Soleil.
After Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in a coup in 2004 — widely believed to have been engineered by the United States, France and Canada — Cite Soleil erupted repeatedly in violent clashes.
United Nations peacekeeping troops are now charged with patrolling the slums and trying to control the gangs that largely rule the streets. But UN troops have also been accused of indiscriminate force, including an incident this past July, when the UN admits to killing five Cite Soleil residents during a raid. Locals put the death toll much higher.
Marijo's son Peterson is one of those affected by the violence. He was in the house, she says, when a stray bullet struck the shack and set it ablaze.
"I ran into the flames to get him," she says, "but by that time the entire right side of his body was burned."
Today he bears a mask of burn scars around his eyes as well as others across his body.
Despite the misery in which she's spent her entire life, Marijo refuses despair.
"I think God will make things better," she says. "I think things will change. There will come a day when there is enough for everyone."
Marijo says she delivered her first three children in the tin shack where we sit to escape the midday sun.
She says she's not sure where her next child will be born. There is a hospital nearby staffed by physicians from the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.
She's heard they will give you free birth control if you ask. She says after her fourth child is born, it will be enough. It will take more than a good net to feed them all.
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