Konbit Pou Ayiti

The press has reported food riots in Les Cayes, Petit Goave and Gonaives on Friday (you can read more about this in the Haiti Report for April 7). We heard that the protests would continue today, and Port-au-Prince would be joining in. Supposedly there is a protest scheduled for here in Jacmel for tomorrow.

For more than a month now, people throughout Haiti have been referring to their hunger as “klowox”, for Clorox bleach. However, over the last week the character of hunger has reached a more severe level, and now it is worse than feeling like your stomach is full of bleach – now the pain is being called “asid bateri”, battery acid.

You may have seen reports in the press that prices of basic food items like rice, spaghetti, and beans have been rising around the world. It is not surprising that Haiti would be the first to feel it here in our hemisphere. In a country where most people go hungry most days any way, the rising costs of staple food items has meant that now people are lucky to be getting one decent meal each day, even here in the most prosperous region of the country.

The people participating in the “food riots,” or hunger protests, are calling on the government to lower the price of food, saying that the government has been too busy playing politics and isn’t paying attention to what really matters. Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis made an announcement that the Haitian Government will immediately release 400 million gourdes (about $10.35 million US) to feed people and create jobs (see www.Alterpresse.org).

We traveled to Les Cayes a few weeks ago and spent hours walking around the picturesque, pedestrian-friendly, and peaceful city. On Friday, protesters burned two UN vehicles and several people were shot and killed. In Petit Goave, the mayor was attacked and yesterday shop owners were padlocking their shops, anticipating looting today. This morning protesters had set up barricades on the main highway from the south to Port-au-Prince all the way into the city.

I have mentioned the hunger in this blog before, but even I did not realize that the crisis had reached these proportions. Yesterday a friend in Jacmel quoted President Preval’s infamous response to questions about hunger a while back. In Haiti, he said, we have households with ten people and ten cell phones, and every phone has a card on it. But we cannot eat phones.

I decided to illustrate today’s post with photos I took at the Jacmel market over the weekend. Women there were asking higher prices for all the produce, complaining about “lavi chè,” the high cost of living. I told them about the Japanese, how their miso costs twice as much as normal right now, and they asked me to pay them to take pictures of their beans and okra. These ladies let me take their picture as well.

Hunger is not something I can truly comprehend. For me hunger has never been more than a temporary discomfort, and although I have complained “I’m starving” countless times, I haven’t got a clue what that is like. My friends here have been helping me get the picture lately though, talking about the battery acid in their stomachs, and I’ve been watching the kids in the neighborhood stealing mangoes from the trees before they are ripe. We find ourselves eating less even though we can afford the food, and sharing more from every meal with our neighbors’ children.

For more on this subject, check out the fantastic site, Haiti Innovation and read Sak Vid Pa Kanpe: Food Rioting Begins in Haiti.