HIS movements resembled those of an old man, tired from years of toil.
With great calculation, he selected and placed old wine bottles into a cardboard
box. These he would sell for his daily bread. But this is not a man, he is a
boy, perhaps no older than 12 years. Patrice, as he calls himself because he
does not remember his name, works in a quarry sandwiched between two wealthy
neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the Haitian capital, Port au Prince.
Patrice has a memory problem. Not only did he not remember his name, he didn't
know how many brothers or sisters he had or where his parents could be found.
"I have two children and they live in New York," he said to the
laughter of a group of Caribbean journalists visiting the impoverished
French-speaking neighbouring island.
Patrice prefers his fantasy world.
Behind him, in the soft-stone quarry, dozens of Haitian men literally etch out a
daily living. The quarry was once mechanised but the equipment has long gone to
rust, so the men use pick axes on the steep, sheer walls of the quarry and
others shovel the sand into waiting 10-tonne trucks.
"Patrice is very well off compared to other children," one Haitian
colleague told the Caribbean journalists.
And he was right.
At Trutier, the disposal site for the 1.5 million kilogrammes of garbage dumped
daily from Port au Prince, dozens of children and aduls known as shifonyers
or salvagers scour the garbage for something valuable to sell.
"We look for plastics or aluminium," said one young shifonyer who,
like many others, are homeless and sleep on mean streets.
One man said he worked as a shifonyer for seven years and had five children, but
he was embarrassed to tell them where he worked and never brought them to the
dump. He asked us not to take his photograph or publish his name.
"I have responsibilities just like the rest of the population and I need to
buy bread for my family," he confessed.
He is but one of the 75 per cent of Haitians living in abject poverty. The
unemployment rate is estimated around 50 per cent.
There was very little stench on the day we visited Trutier but we were swarmed
by thousands of flies and smoke from the ever-burning piles of rubbish on the
512-acre site. The problem for the Trutier shifonyers is that by the time this
garbage reaches the dump it has already been scoured by roaming shifonyers in
the city, leaving precious little to salvage. In this land of 6.5 million
people, five million live in the capital, generating 3.75 million kgs of garbage
daily, only 40 per cent of which is collected and moved by 100 trucks daily to
Trutier. The remaining 2.25 million kgs are left on the streets or thrown into
canals that eventually carry it to sea. Surveys done on the north coast of
Jamaica turned up large volumes of Haitian plastics, Dr. Barry Wade of
Environmental Solutions in Jamaica told the workshop.
The Haitian Government is seeking to close Trutier, which had been operating
since 1982, because of the negative impact on underground water and a nearby
village and because a new highway is to be constructed there soon. Just a
stone's throw away from Trutier, through the pollution-besieged village of
Duvivier, is a private sector firm with a concession to extract underground
water. This water is taken by tankers to replenish the personal supplies of the
"bourgeoisie". The water is not potable. It is pumped from the aquifer
directly beneath the garbage dump. Private companies treat the water and sell
bottled drinking water - affordable to those in the fledgling middle class and
the bourgeoisie.
A new solid waste problem is the millions of half-litre plastic juice bottles
strewn on every street of the capital. Director General of the Ministry of the
Environment, Carlo Lafond, said this is one of the most pressing problems for
his ministry. There are three bottling companies, one of which produces 288 000
bottles every day.
In the heart of the capital, the solid waste provides another environmental
nightmare. At dusk every day, billows of black smoke can be seen over the
streets as market vendors gather their daily rubbish and burn it. On other
streets, the garbage, soaked with rain, is left to disintegrate into the road.
The waste situation is just a drop in the bucket of the environmental problems
facing Haiti. But the government of President Réne Préval is determined to
tackle it. A Ministry of the Environment has been created and work has started
to systematically address each and every environmental issue. An integral part
of the environmental clean up is an educated Press but what was evident was that
Haitian journalists are in need of assistance, especially in an emerging
democracy and one way could be exposure to the way business is done in the more
developed democracies in the Caribbean.