Where Old School Buses Go To Die

I have made several trips to Haiti over recent years. Given the country's desparate poverty and rampant kidnapping activity, I don't get out much while I'm there. Most of what I have seen has been from behind the locked doors of an SUV, or wandering a quiet back street of a rural village.

However, I have seen enough. Haiti has a per capita annual GDP of USD 1316, making it one of the poorest places on Earth. It has been stripped bare of vegetation for consumption and fuel and the Haitians have resorted to digging chalk out of hillsides on the side of the road to thin construction cement to make it go further. Some of the poorest Haitians make a dish which is essentially cookies made of mud which they sell on the street.

Consider for example this map of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, which I took from my hotel room at the Villa Creole. The seashore is on the left. As you move to the right, or uphill, the roads simply end in a giant blank area. This would be where the core of the city lives. Houses are built of whatever material is at hand and roads are unpaved tracks which cannot be mapped.

Until you arrive on the right-hand side of the map, which is Petionville. While we see pictures of starving children, mud cookies and schools buried in mudslides due to deforestation, what we do not hear about is the 5% of the Haitian population which lives very comfortably in relative wealth in Petionville on the mountainsides. These are the educated elite, often with relatives in the United States or France.

For most Haitians though, daily life is difficult. Use of public transportation is common, generally consisting of tap-taps, shiny tricked out vehicles painted with religious slogans very much like the Jeepney used in the Philippines. Where tap-taps aren't available, almost anything imaginable gets pressed into service. Seeing large trucks with people piled on top careening down the street is not uncommon.

This includes our old schoolbuses which are pressed into service as mass transit vehicles. Who knows how their old bones arrive on this impoverished island, along with all the other 10-20 year old cars of US manufacture. But there they are, with their Haitian routes painted on their doors next to their original cities of US ownership. I remember pulling up to my first one and seeing "Petionville-Centreville" and "W. Berlin, NJ" juxtaposed on the same panel. Their drivers make good use of the flashing signals at night; they simply leave them running as they drive as there are no street lights in Haiti.

Haitians are nothing if not enterprising. They have to be to survive. On my last trip I was hustled by a taxi driver at the airport who was looking for a fare. When the airport security guards came to push him out the door, he kept asking if he could have the "blanc" fare; "blanc" being the lone white man in the airport (me). I understand enough French (or Creole) to have figured that one out.

Driving down a street in Port-au-Prince, or over the 6 hour mountain road to Jacmel, is never dull. It is usually a riot of open air markets blocking the road, grade school children in uniforms skipping about, burning trash, tap-taps loaded with bodies, chickens, goats and graves. I have yet to see any signs of voodoo, but I know its practiced by 60% of the population from my survey work. Perhaps next time?