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Markets What,
no Stop-and-Shop? In Saint Marc we see the equivalent - roadside tables. In
Deschapelles, the small town next to HAS, there is a tiny corner
store with beer and pop. For
fresh foods people go to market.
As early as 5:00 a.m we hear vendors walking to set up
in "The
Corridor," the dirt road which runs from Deschapelles
down to the highway, and beside the HAS campus.
From stands built of poles,
with sometimes the luxury of an unsteady table or chair, they
sell items such as sugar cane, bananas, charcoal for cooking,
fried plantain (like banana chips) and fried, cubed meat.
Families of HAS patients may come here to purchase meals
for themselves, or to supplement the one meal per day which the
hospital provides for patients.
The early-morning squeals of a Haitian black pig being slaughtered for market pervades the
campus. The night market here is beautiful, each vendor's
stand lit by a candle making a row of isolated points of light
in the night; there are also lottery stands. For Saturday market we walk more than an
hour along a gently inclining dusty rocky road to the nearby town
of Verrettes (Vèrèt) . Along
the way a solitary woman
is selling the odd combination of whole breadfruit and fresh hot
cups of coffee. The breadfruit
tree was imported to provide an additional food source,
but it seems to lack status from overabundance.
Some like it, others say it has no flavor; our cook never
serves it. In the central town square, all of us jostle
between the crowded jumble of stands where vendors are
selling fabric, used clothing, hats, books, sugar cane stalks,
sorghum (molasses, a sweetener dipped with a ladle from a 5-gal
drum into old coke bottles), grain (rice, millet
and cornmeal in piles on mats), blood
pudding, sausage. The most
common food in rural areas is beans and rice, both of which grow
well in the Artibonite valley. A striking young woman with a basket poses
when she sees my camera, and I am happy to oblige. In this rural community where people know each other, I can send copies of these market photos to our
cook Lucienne for distribution.
We return to HAS via taptap - a total of 21 passengers in a small
Nissan pickup, with five men of our group either standing behind
the cab, or clinging to the rear. To
supplement the staples she can find at the HAS commissary, our
cook Lucienne travels an hour by taptap
each Saturday morning to the town of Pont Sondé, returning with
heavy baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables. Although fresh bread is also available for sale, Lucienne bakes
bread weekly. One
day in ESL class I discover there is no Creole word for garbage;
food wastes are fed to the animals.
Chickens, goats and Haitian
black
pigs are common foods, as these animals forage and do
not require extensive care or feeding.
Evidence of their roaming is just one of the hazards on
the five-minute walk across campus to the hospital.
Conscientious owners put a halter on their
goats to prevent the goat's entering private yards, where they
consume all plant life, including carefully tended flowers and
banana trees. High in
the hills, small horses
also forage. Boldface
within
text= photo links in progress 6.26.01 |
