where 16 year old Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents...and the cycle continues...
Posted on 01/29/2008 3:25:32 PM PST by decimon
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud.
With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies.
Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.
The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.
The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.
At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.
Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.
Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.
"Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it," said Dr. Gabriel Thimothee, executive director of Haiti's health ministry.
Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.
"I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me."
Is that from Weird al yankovich?
Let them eat dirt. We need the biofuels to keep our import economy going.
A sad mess.
I have friends who used to go down there on missionary work 25 years ago and things were dire then, too.
I can’t recall a time in my lifetime when Haiti wasn’t a crumbling disaster in the making.
Gives a new meaning to chitting bricks.
I think that is the least of any food shortage problem they have.
Seems that I read somewhere that they have an astronomical crack addiction rate there as well.
“The only cure to Haiti will be to invade, completely take over the country, and run it as a territory of the US for at least 2 generations.”
The US Marines did that early in the 20th century and stayed there until at least the 1930s. It didn’t seem to help, though.
This is going to sound cold-hearted, but I have to say ...
I think one is very lazy to BUY DIRT to make cookies,
where 16 year old Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents...and the cycle continues...
It’s terrible and it’s sad, but the problem isn’t those of those who “have”. “Have not” is the natural order of things for the bulk of humankind and human history. With a capitalist system, the rule of law, and relatively low corruption, societies can pull themselves out of this state... unfortunately, with the encouragement of the world’s intellectual elite, more emphasis is placed on maintaining “culture” and “fairness”.
To be fair it seems to be some special kind of dirt that is trucked in. Not sure why it’s special beyond being yellow though.
I would hope that if we went in, it would be more along the lines of rebuilding Germany, Japan, and Iraq. The early escapades were more a means to keep others out, rather than strengthening Haiti itself.
Maybe you'll be lucky enough to have them take over your neighborhood.
Would that make AP happier?
Raising Arizona was one weird movie. Bill Rosz was even in it!
Put the U.N. in charge .... move their HQ there.
empty the local markets of every person that seems to understand running a business and issue them some land and all the supplies they need to start a farm... immediately plant every piece of gov’t owned dirt with citrus , mango’s , papayas and every other kind of fruit tree...
I suspect eating dirt in Haiti is more tradition than starvation.
Taking over Haiti isn’t the answer. We don’t need to mix that level of poverty into our society. (see tagline)
I recently saw cruise boats are returning to Haiti and I thought to myself WHY? I am thinking of booking one to show my kids how good they have it.
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