In Haiti, their shantytown will rise and fall again
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The bidonville isn’t on any map, but the shantytown is in plain view along the Canape Vert road, a gray hive clinging to the steep ravines above Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
People dig out little square shelves on the most marginal pieces of tilted earth, half-perching their homes on the roofs of their neighbors, houses made of concrete blocks so porous they almost look like they’re made entirely of sand.
They pray that the rains won’t carry them to oblivion. When their prayers fail, they search for the dead, bury them and move on.
And so this time, when it was the earth itself that betrayed them, and their homes crumpled down into the ravine in countless little landslides, the people of the bidonville set about the task they knew was theirs alone.
The Edner family dug six of their dead out of the rubble of their cluster of homes. They laid them out on the dirt, and then carried them one by one up to the ridge to be buried in a communal grave.
Continue reading ‘In Haiti, burying the dead, rebuilding the shantytown.’
-- Joe Mozingo in Port-Au-Prince RELATED:
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