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National Geographic : 1981 Feb
Contents
HE ROAD out of Port-au-Prince leads one over forested hills and back through centuries. Donkeys outnumber cars, and children run naked. Between the hills are plains carpeted with sugarcane. Bullock teams pull wooden-wheeled carts, urged on by drivers with snakelike whips. The poor live in the hills, growing coffee for meager cash and food for subsistence. The annual rural income in Haiti averages $60, and that includes the few wealthy land owners who grow sugarcane and coffee and make many times that amount. I visited the three-acre farm of a man named Nesmere. He welcomed me, a stranger, and with his machete quickly chopped open a green coconut to offer its sweet milk. We walked the smooth dirt paths of his farm, through a tangled cornu copia of beans, yams, and melon vines climbing stalks of corn. Trees stretching above bore grapefruit, breadfruit, and gua vas; coffee plants grew in their shade. Perhaps it was pride that forced Nesmere to assure me that he and his wife and three children have enough to eat. "Enough" is a delicate balance, and one that was upset for thousands of Haitians when Hurricane Al len lashed Haiti's southwestern peninsula in the summer of 1980. Many went hungry and fought over food and water airlifted in by the United States military. Nesmere's farm survived the weather, but under the best of circumstances his fam ily is undernourished. It is not unusual for women in the Haitian countryside to lose half of all live births to infant diseases. A child of two is called, in creole, youn ti chap--"alittle escapee" from death. "I once surveyed 250 people in that area, asking them if they would leave Haiti if they could," an American anthropologist told me. "Every one of them, except for the very old or sick, said yes. I asked them why, and they would answer, 'Pou chache lavi mouin-to search for my life.'" Thousands have left, many of them in shabby overcrowded boats whose owners promise passage to Florida but often drop them in Cuba or the Bahamas. Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, provides an extreme example of the flight from poverty. But throughout the islands of the Caribbean, people are "searching for their lives." Economic problems, stoked by years of neglect and fired by rising oil prices, are causing them to look for solutions by bal lot boxes as well as leaky boats, and occa sionally by bullets. There are hundreds of islands of the Ca ribbean, curling like an unclasped necklace between North and South America. (See the double supplement map of the West Indies included with this issue.) About 50 are inhabited, (Continuedon page 252) Poverty still cracks the whip in Haiti the world's only republic born of a slave revolt and the hemisphere'spoorest nation. After HurricaneAllen ravaged home and crops last year, a woman awaited medical carefor her son, whose red hair may be a symptom of malnutrition. Haiti's land is as impoverished as its people. As seen in the southwest (facing page), erosion-controllingtrees have been largely cut for firewood, allowing topsoil to wash into the sea. 247
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