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Cerca la Source: Let Poverty Flow Down Like Water
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Arriving: September 27, 2005
Our road is a river of donkey shit. OK, it is a bit of an exaggeration to say it’s a river, but the shit is real. Our four-wheel-drive truck bounces, crawling slowly through the water, mud, and dung. Night is falling; a creeping rain is closing in with the darkness. Beside the few people still walking the road at this hour, nearly all in bare feet, most of the traffic on this rural dirt path is on four legs. Donkeys, horses, goats, cows. We did pass one car on the three-hour drive. It was stuck in the mud, showing us, by their spinning wheels and the mud-covered gang of people pushing, a better route to take through an adjacent field.
The humid air is unusually cool for September in Haiti, so we are traveling with the windows open. The constant smell of wet feces travels with us, never overwhelming but never clearing either. As the rain approaches, short gusts of wind blow in cleaner air, only to be replaced by the hanging stench of the road. The smell of animals is universal in rural, poor communities but this road seems special. We wade through puddle after puddle. Such a quaint word, puddle. It evokes (for readers in the rich world) childhood, spring rains, and splashing around in oversized rubber boots. These are not exactly puddles. The muddy brown, bracken water flows over the hood in the deepest of these pits. Rocks and thick mud scrape the bottom of our truck. Any of these muddy spots, which make up about half of the ‘road,’ are large enough to bog us down indefinitely. Sometimes our team of nurses and doctors, pharmacists and midwives, sleeps on the road, waiting for morning and the drying sun to help them get unstuck.
And I haven’t even mentioned the stream crossings. As we left the relative metropolis of Hinche behind us, I asked our driver how many streams we would cross. He didn’t know –despite an intimate and expert knowledge of each mud hole on the road. He preferred not to remember. All stream crossings are the same. There are no bridges anymore – the last was before Hinche. Any stream can swell, anytime, cutting the road, depending only on the rains further up in the mountains. At several, the driver says matter-of-factly, “we spent the night here waiting for the water to come down.”
At the end of this road is the town of Cerca la Source, a rural village and the site of our newest clinic. In town, the muddy road flattens out and is baked to a cracked, brown crust interrupted only by rivulets cut by the daily rains that run through town. Dusty houses surround the road, the Catholic church, and our little “dispensary,” or rural health post. As I arrive, the hulking shadow of what will be a new hospital hangs over the dispensary. Rows of hand-poured cinder blocks fill the courtyard. It’s as much construction site as clinic. Progress is easy to feel here. Despite the late hour, I tour the clinic with the justifiably-proud staff. Two patients are lying-in despite the fact that we have no beds, one with fever and dehydration; the other still bleeding after losing a pregnancy in her second month. She needs an obstetrician but cannot see one until we can evacuate her. For now, she is stable with antibiotics and IV fluids. Tomorrow, if the rains allow, we will take her back down the same miserable road.
The name Cerca la Source is a mix of Spanish and French, meaning “Near the Spring.” I have not been here long enough to know where the spring is – or if there is even just one. And while this place is visibly in extreme poverty – seen in the swollen bellies and yellow hair of its starving children, the gaunt, creased faces of young and old alike, the rags-for-clothing, and bare feet – it has some water, some trees. But if Cerca is any less poor than some of her neighbors, it’s by a hair’s breadth.
From this description, it may seem that a place like Cerca la Source is one ‘source’ of the grinding poverty that affects a majority of the world’s population. People from Cerca la Source and thousands of villages like it – in Haiti, Mexico, Ecuador, India, China, Tanzania, etc. – are streaming to the mega-slums that now hold nearly a billion poor people worldwide. A recent article estimates that the worldwide movement of people from rural into urban poverty is happening at a rate of 200,000 people per day. For example, it is estimated that two-thirds of the 10-15 million citizens of Lagos, Nigeria are poor people living in slums. But this is not the wellspring of poverty; it is a downstream effect.
If we think of poverty like water, and urban migration of the poor as a flood, then where is all this water coming from? The poor caught up in this downpour come from places like Cerca, but the real source, the continuous cloudburst of poverty, is global consumption. There is enough on this planet for everyone – enough food, medicine, school books, potable water, even cash for that matter. But if too much is consumed in one place, it does not leave enough for everyone else. Inequality is the eroding force causing an unremitting runoff, a flash flood that pushes the poor – muddied and battered if not dead and drowned – into even deeper poverty downstream.
This is how Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez saw consumption on his first visit to the United States in September, 2005. In his first interview in the U.S., on the independent news program DemocracyNow, Chavez had this to say:
“5 percent of the world population lives in this country and you consume 25 percent of the [world’s] energy…. Yesterday morning, we were coming from the airport for instance, it was the traffic jam time, it was very packed in the highway coming from the airport here. I talked to the people in my car, looked outside, looked at the cars surrounding us. Out of a hundred cars, ninety-nine were occupied by a single person, the driver only. Cars occupying the highways, and burning fuel, how many gallons of fuel were burned yesterday morning, polluting the environment? That's the extreme of individualism, this is capitalism.
“This planet cannot stand this model any longer. ”
This kind of global environmental argument is very difficult to sidestep. The planet – and least of all, our planet’s poor – cannot stand our pace of consumption much longer. Many already do not.
Perhaps poor health and poverty is a problem of overpopulation, as many well meaning and not-so-well meaning public health experts suggest. If we can agree that overconsumption is one of the most important engines driving poverty, then should we not decrease demand by helping to slow population growth? Especially in a place like Haiti, where poor families tend to be large, access to contraception is limited (both in actual terms and in terms of gender inequality/male control), and childbearing is a dangerous business where there are no medical services.
But from the perspective of the rural poor, the population is not large enough. The fertility rate (number of live births per woman) in Haiti is 4.0. This is compared to 2.0 in the U.S., 1.6 in neighboring Cuba, and 2.7 in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Subsistence farming requires labor; in rural life this comes most often from family members. With no meaningful government or system of social support, children are a form of ‘social security.’ The elderly here rely on their family for subsistence when their backs are prematurely broken from decades of backbreaking labor in the rocky mountains of Haiti. Infant mortality in Haiti is outrageously high, asserting even more pressure on women to have large families in the hopes that at least some children will survive into adulthood to support them.
If we think of the planet in terms of resources, then the rich world is overpopulated, not the poor world. As just one example, U.S.-Americans consume 183 times the electricity per capita than a Haitian consumes (Cuba and the Dominican Republic consume roughly 19 times what is used in Haiti). In our hemisphere, there are simply too many North Americans for Latin America to survive.
Yet it is the poor who die prematurely, in the countryside and in urban slums. It is the poor who are washed away in this tide of consumption, landing in the crowded, sick, and deadly shantytowns of the world.
Here is another way to look at the same thing:
Looking at the earth from above, the United States, Europe, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia glow like the shining stars we collectively take ourselves to be. Haiti is invisible, as is most of Africa, huge stretches of Asia, and other poor places on this planet. If light and the attached energy consumption does not stand in for overpopulation, how else should we measure it?
Nou led, men Nou La: October 4, 2005
The week after I arrived, Cerca la Source celebrated its feast day. The village had been alive and buzzing since before I arrived, preparing for the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of our Catholic church and of this village. The plain, cavernous church is packed shoulder to shoulder, perhaps a thousand people inside. Singing, praying, talking. Several thousand more are outside on the patch of dirt where a town square would be, if there were money to build one. Heavy rains last night turned the square into a mud slick – now matted down by countless feet into a crosswork of busy paths. Haitians have a saying: nou led, men nou la. We may be ugly, but we’re here.
This cryptic proverb makes sense today. The empty, dusty square that greeted us as we arrived several days ago is now a blur of activity, a cacophony of people. Young and old. Selling food, moonshine, single cigarettes, candles, and colorful, intricate ropes to be worn or hung at the alter. Others sit beside the church selling hope in the form of roulette and dice games. Its not the pretty, polished scene one might expect for a feast day but it is alive, human, colorful, and celebrating. Its not the prettiest celebration, but it is vibrant.
From where I sit in our clinic, just behind the church, I can hear the guitar and keyboard and singing of the church service. It has been going strong for two days now. I can hear the faithful praying at their makeshift altars outside. I hear the marchann rhythmically hocking their wares in the street. I hear the drums and bells and singing of worshipers dancing in small circles around the square. Behind it all, I can hear the slow monotonous rhythm of couples dancing Haitian Kompa, a close Caribbean cousin to salsa and bachata.
Vodou healers – some in colorful robes, surrounded by fellow worshipers; some with nothing more than an asor (ceremonial rattle), a candle, and a basin of water for blessings – have taken up places around the church. While the priest inside presides over mass, the healers outside (and inside, for that matter) also pray. The best spots are in the shade beside the church. Hundreds of candles are burning beside them, around the foundation of church. One candle rests with an offering of a hollow gourd on top of a birth certificate, perhaps in memory of a child who died too young.
There is no separation here between Catholicism and indigenous religion, in either direction. An old saying about this country goes like this: Haiti is 100 percent Catholic and 100 percent vodouisant. Catholicism came with the French colonialists; vodou survived the middle passage and lives as direct extension of the African diaspora. The two have been mixing since Haiti’s beginning. Under colonial rule, church was allowed – sometimes with Sunday as a day of rest for the slaves – but independent religious practice, feared then as it is feared now, was not. So the slaves adapted, pulling Catholicism into vodou. Haiti put the faces of the Catholic icons onto the familiar spirits they brought from Western Africa. Saint Patrick, with snakes at his feet, came to symbolize Dambala, the serpent spirit who holds up the four corner-posts of this world. The Black Virgin of Guadalupe came to symbolize Erzulie Dantor, the mysterious and powerful incarnation of Erzulie who is both loved and feared. And so on.
Born under stress, Haitian vodou – indeed all of Haitian culture – still survives the heavy burden it bears on its shoulders. Although weakened, Vodou survived the temple and drum burnings organized during the U.S. occupation between 1915 and 1934. It survived the U.S.-sponsored Catholic anti-vodou campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, as it survived the diffusion of its practice into a sensationalized tourist spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s. Vodou today survives deliberate attempts at misunderstanding, as it survives wave after wave of arrogant evangelical missionaries. Haiti and Haitian culture – however bloodied and bruised – will also survive the overpopulation and over-consumption of the rich world. Human potential – however ravaged and starved by the rigors of deep poverty – will persist.
But Cerca la Source will remain near the source of poverty. A child born here can expect to be poor and to live a short life . Not because of Cerca’s remote location high in Haiti’s Central Plateau, but because of its political and economic proximity to the Great Consumer to the north, lot bo dlo a, on the other side of the water. We are near the source indeed: five hundred years of colonialism; global ecological suicide; the unbelievable heavy price Haiti has paid for the only successful slave revolution in history; one and a half hours by plane from Miami.
1) “Slum Politics,” by James Westcott. Available at www.alternet.org/story/21297 . Two of the books discussed in this article are also relevant: Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (Routledge Press) by Robert Neuwirth and Planet of the Slums (Verso) by Mike Davis.
2) From DemocracyNow, September 19, 2005. A full transcript and broadcast audio/video are available at www.democracynow.org
3) Statistics from the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report 2005, available at www.undp.org Fertility rates are highest in sub-Saharan Africa where many countries have a rate of 6-7 live births per woman. Also of note, just 27 percent of the population has access to contraception in Haiti – as compared to 76, 73, and 70 percent in the US, Cuba, and Dominican Republic respectively. In our own communities in the Central Plateau, we have noted a significant decrease in family size among our employees who have access to contraception and stable wage-earning work.
4) Kilowatt hours per capita per year are 13,456, 1,395, 1326, and 73 for the U.S., Cuba, DR, and Haiti respectively. Available at www.undp.org
5) Life expectancy in rural Haiti is about 50 years for both men and women.
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