Bottom of the Heap

For four mothers in Cite Soleil, digging through garbage is the ultimate in trickle down economics.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - This is one example of how wealth is redistributed in Haiti.

It rains.

The rains wash the garbage of the upper class neighborhood of Petionville down to the slums of Cite Soleil.

There is already too much garbage in Cite Soleil. Garbage that doesn't disappear.

Garbage, like despair, that piles higher and higher.

Garbage that breeds disease... and contempt.

White fields of plastic, cups, cardboard. A harvest of consumption's remnants.

There is no beauty in it. None at all.

But to some there is value.

Value for those so far down the food chain that even waste offers rewards, if you're willing to sift through it.

Rummaging for an income » View

Benita Claremont, Nicole Emile, Nadine Paul and Berlange Nicholas are willing to sift. They are mothers — mothers whose children have to be fed, educated, cared for. Yes, they're willing to sift. To sift for hours every time it rains. They use pitchforks and their hands.

Others in Cite Soleil, those a bit better off, ridicule them.

"It's very difficult but we don't have a choice," Nadine says. "It would be nice if we could start a business."

Nadine has four children and is 30 years old.

"The worst is the humiliation from the other people who live here," says Nadine. "They call us 'cocoarats' — little bugs that crawl in the garbage."

Nadine is a survivor — not in a figurative sense — literally. While she was plucking garbage one day, in the midst of Cite Soleil's frequent violence, a stray bullet found her neck.

She shows me the scar. It looks like a puzzle piece. The bullet traveled a crooked path around her jaw line before making its exit.

In a life defined by daily Jobian-sized trials there is no missing the point of this injury's gross insult. 

The mothers work the garbage field as if it were a field of crops. They rake and stoop and bend. It is backbreaking work done in the searing heat of the Haitian sun. It smells of rot — fetid, pungent, inescapable.

It's not an easy place to be when the rewards of your labors are some pieces of charcoal, bottles and wire — and what you get for cashing them in is the equivalent of a buck and a half for a day's work.

"It's not enough," Benita says. She has six children and won't divulge her age. "But we don't have a choice."

Benita

Benita and Nicole are sisters. Both have acquired a sort of blankness behind the eyes. Benita's is dialed all the way up. In Nicole's there is still a hint of sadness. She is 25 and already a mother of four. Life has not been gentle.

"After the rains our house was flooding so we had to leave," says Nicole. "When we came back, we had nothing. It was washed away."

For 20-year-old Berlange it is all about her children — trying to pay for school so they might have a chance to escape this poverty.

"We can't even afford education," she says, "school fees are too high" ... especially when their husbands (with the exception of Benita's, who is dead), like most men in Cite Soleil, are unemployed, with few prospects for work.

"We have experienced so many bad things we can't even dream," Benita says, "We can only hope things will get better."

But today, for these four mothers, what has flowed down from Petionville looks like anything and everything but hope.

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