The news coverage of the Haitian earthquake is understandably showing people who are stunned and in agony. But before the disaster, Port-au-Prince was a very different place — poor, certainly, but incredibly busy.
Everyone was working at something, from dawn into the night. The market women, known as "Madam Saras," sat all day in the hot sun behind little piles of fruits and vegetables, or stacks of "Kennedy" — second-hand clothing from the United States nicknamed for the president in office when the first shipments arrived. Other vendors, mainly men, moved through the rundown city all day, ringing little bells to advertise shoe shines, or clinking metal openers against bottles of cold drink.
Still other people lined all the streets, pumping away at foot-pedal sewing machines, fixing bald tires, banging at scrap metal, pushing heavy, two-wheeled carts, clearing out the clogged drains, or sitting behind manual typewriters outside government buildings as, literally, "scribes," who would fill out your official forms for a fee.
Children were everywhere, dressed in school uniforms of every imaginable combination of colors, from the more traditional navy blue with white shirts and blouses to lemon yellow and bright checked green. Their schools had some interesting names: College Rene Descartes, or in the poor district of Carrefour, (which was hit especially hard by the earthquake), a storefront called Isaac Newton.
The children, like their parents, were spotless, the little girls with colored ribbons in their hair, as they stepped over mounds of garbage and gigantic potholes, even in the better-off neighborhoods, and pools of stinking water left over from the rains. At night, you would see students standing under street lights, studying their textbooks outside, because their homes had no electricity.
Over the past few days, certain mainstream commentators have shown more than their usual foolishness to trying to explain why Haiti is so poor. We will have more to say here at this site about this in the days to come. But for now we can at least safely conclude that Haiti is not poor because Haitians are lazy, or do not value education.
James North has visited Haiti many times, his last visit two months ago.
