Urban Fabric

A friend of mine in architecture school is participating in a capstone seminar that is focused on rebuilding Haiti. I’ve been sharing a lot of descriptions about the neighborhood I live in to help him get a sense of what life is like in this city. I decided to post here the notes I wrote up for him.  They’re not particularly riveting, but they do give a pretty detailed picture of the neighborhood around me, and I thought some of you might be interested. 

One thing to keep in mind - this is just one a description of our particular bit of hillside. There are parts of the city with really nice houses. There are parts of the city that are business districts. There are parts of the city that are just tin and cardboard shacks sitting on a mound of trash extending out into the bay. So this is only one cross-section of the city, but hopefully an eye-opening one.

Streets: Our street is recently paved so it’s fairly smooth and actually has curbs to define its edges. All the other roads are in pretty bad shape. Huuuge potholes, cars get stuck in them all the time. In addition there’s a permanently compacted layer of rubble and trash on most roads, especially intersections. Also any roads in our neighborhood are lined on both sides by vendors, carts, stalls, baskets, etc. There may or may not be room for 2 trucks to pass each other. Houses go up right to he roadside, no yards to speak of. Doors exit right onto the street. In some places the road has risen up faster than the houses, so a doorway contains a few steps down into a house below the level of the road. This is bad for a lot of reasons. Gutters overflow down into house, and sunlight never gets in to dry things up, or kill germs and mold. As far as traffic, not a lot of cars/trucks on our hill. Maybe one ever 30 minutes? There’s a constant stream of motorcycles, probably about 10 per minute. And pedestrian traffic. No sidewalks, so they’re just on either side of the road. Greatest volume between 5:30-7:30 am, with water fetching, people going to school/work.

Food. This is complicated. So for staples like bread, spaghetti, and condensed milk, there are vendors - women with big pannier baskets either sitting by the side of the road, or walking among the houses with the baskets on their heads. Fruit and vegetable sellers set their basket on the side of the road. Also charcoal sellers. Rice and cornmeal are the main food staples, but I am not sure how people get them. I never see anybody selling rice on the side of the road, but that’s what people eat every single day. So they must buy it in bulk from a bigger market? I can’t figure this one out. Down at the bottom of the hill there’s sort of a market lining the road with sellers, more grains, spices, meats, charcoal, live chickens, shoes, cosmetics, cheese, powdered juice mix, candy, matches, candles, medicines, hair extensions - all sorts of stuff. And don’t forget the street food. All afternoon and evening there are little charcoal grills turning out hot dogs and all variety of delicious fried things, and baked corn.

Electricity continues to boggle me. There are power lines but nothing that resembles a meter system, and most houses have spliced their line onto the nearest lamp-post. Occasionally I see people with actual electrical equipment working on the lines, so there must be some sort of authority regulating things. But I’ve also seen a guy leaning off his porch railing in a hard hat, with no shirt, about to attack a live wire with a pair of pliers. Somehow he is still alive. Power is out a lot, probably between 20-40% of the time. We are the only place in the neighborhood with a generator. It runs on gas and sounds like a semi truck. As for phone lines? I don’t think anybody in the neighborhood has a landline. Not even us. It’s all cell phones.

Transportation. Very few people own cars. If you own one, the only place to park it is on the side of the road. Transportation is either walking, motorcycles, or tap-taps. At the bottom of our road there’s sort of an unofficial motorcycle taxi stand, because so many people opt to spring for the bike ride rather than haul themselves up the wicked hill. Like I said, there’s usually about 10 motorcycles a minute up and down the hill, it’s very rare to look up and down the street and not see a bike. And you have to be very careful when crossing the street because often the bikes coming down the hill turn off their motor to save gas, and come flying down the hill totally silent. The other mode of transportation is tap-taps, which is what the buses are called. (google image search “tap-tap”, some of them are amazingly decorated and awesome!). There are sort of “bus stops” all around the city, places where you know there will be tap-taps starting or stopping their runs, or you just try to flag down a passing one if you’re on a bigger road. The tap-taps range from little tiny pickup trucks with a cover on the back, to huge vans that can hold 30+ people. In the heart of the city you’ll also see big school buses, but they are usually for long runs to and from faraway towns. The tap-taps never get up into our neighborhood because the roads are so small and crowded with vendors, they generally just don’t bother. To give you an idea, to get to Delmas to see a doctor last week, we walked from the church clinic about five city blocks to a corner where we stuffed in a big tap-tap (and I do mean stuffed. ‘crowded’ has been completely redefined for me), which took us down to the intersection of the two major roads by the national palace. There we crossed to the other side of the intersection and went from truck to truck asking the drivers where they were headed. Nobody was heading to Delmas, but we found a guy in what was once a minivan (the inside mostly gutted to put in more seats, and the sliding door permanently removed) who said he’d take us there. So we were his first five passengers, and we continued to stop along the way to pick up more people, till we had at least 15, and then they gradually banged on the side of the van to let the driver know when they wanted to get out. On the way back, we joined the mob crowding an already full little pickup truck and managed to all get in/on (Mark and I were hanging off the back, literally, which was in retrospect really dangerous, but so much fun), then he randomly pulled over half-way down the hill and everybody got out. Apparently he was done for the day? So we joined the mob swarming the next truck that pulled over, and eventually got down to the major intersection, switched tap-taps, got back up to within a few blocks of the church, and then walked up the hill to the orphanage.

Water: The orphanage, and two other homes in the neighborhood (as far as I can tell) have a cistern underneath the building, and pay a water-truck to come fill it every so often. The other houses use a bucket to pull up the water. A few houses have a big blue water tank on the roof that they fill bucket by bucket, and thus get a little bit of water-pressure/running water. Our place has a pump that pumps it from the cistern to the tanks on the roof, and then gravity works its magic and we have reliable running water. If the power is on, that is. Everybody else walks up and down the hill with all kinds of jugs and buckets, especially those industrial 25 gallon buckets with handles, and also the blue water jugs you see on office water coolers. Everybody carries water. Old people, little kids (as young as 6 or 7), teenagers, men, women, everybody. At the bottom of the hill is the water source. I’m not clear on what exactly it is, my best guess is that city water pipes come out there? I think there may have been some sort of building there to regulate the water, but that may have fallen apart in the earthquake, because mostly I just see it shooting out everywhere. People have run hoses out to the street, where people line up to fill their buckets, or they climb down the ravine a bit to where water shoots out of…wherever it’s coming out of. I guess it’s possible it’s a spring of some sort, but I doubt it. There’s a great business of people with a big water tank in the back of their pick-up truck getting water there and then bringing it up the hill and selling it. The have a horn on top of the truck that sounds a lot like an ice cream truck, except it plays the theme from Titanic. As far as I can tell, the water is clean and good, which makes me suspect it’s been treated and comes from somewhere in the city. Everybody chlorinates their water (usually by adding a capful of Clorox to every bucket) before using it for anything. For drinking water there are vendors that sell little plastic bags full of water (the equivalent of plastic water bottles). I’m not sure whether people use the water they carry up the hill for drinking, or only for cleaning/cooking.

Sewer/drain system: I have no idea how this works. There has to be some sort of sewer system, and it must work fairly well, because our neighborhood doesn’t smell terrible. Most houses don’t have toilets. I know a lot of people just squat over a bucket, but again, I have no idea where the heck they empty that bucket. Magic? There’s also a sort of gutter/drain system that runs in little channels between houses and eventually to the street, this is how dishwater and washing water is gotten rid of.

Trash collection: There are trash cans on the side of the street, occasionally. But they’re usually overflowing and rarely get emptied, so mostly trash just gets dropped on the street, or if you’re a really admirable citizen, you climb across the empty lot to where you can chuck the trash into the ravine. 

Houses are cement/cinderblock. A mix of corrugated tin and cement roofs. Lots of tarps covering up holes, leaks. All the tin roofs have rocks and random junk piled on top to hold them down in high winds. People build houses one section at a time, because it’s nearly impossible to save up money for a whole house at once. Something would always come up, school fees, doctor visit, funeral costs…and these people are so generous. When someone comes to them with a need, they help without a second thought. So as soon as they have the money for a small part of the construction, they have to do it fast before someone comes along who needs the money more. Houses are super close together!! Sometimes sharing walls. An ant maze of little paths between the houses. Sometimes wide and cement, sometimes barely wide enough for two people to squeeze by each other! (I have this idea that some lady who lives in a house tucked back at the end of a narrow passage will grow old and fat and one day find she’s too large to fit down the passageway and will be stuck in her house!).

There are a kabillion people per house, approximately. Large extended family groups living together. Generally several houses will have a common concrete yard where cooking/washing happens. People bathe by pouring water over their head with a cup from a bucket. Privacy is nonexistent. Cooking is all over charcoal fires. Washing clothes/bedding is a constant activity. Also, even though we’re “in the city” there’s so much livestock. Chickens, pigs, pigeons, pigs, cats, dogs, turkeys. The birds generally live in the common yards, and wander around the alleys and rooftops scrounging for food. People keep flocks of pigeons in little pigeon coops on the roof, let them fly around during the day, and then have food at night to attract them home and lock them up. The pigs and goats mostly live in the ravine, and I have no idea how people either keep track of them, or prove that they own them. All the animals that live in the ravine come up at night to scavenge for food in the streets, it’s very strange to wake up at 2am and look out the window to see the street full of animals instead of people.

I can’t estimate a percentage, but not all the kids go to school. The little kids, (kindergarten starts at age 3) almost all go, and then less and less as they get older. I think because the government subsidizes early childhood education, but not secondary school? Just a hunch, I could be wrong. Massive unemployment. Women are busy all day taking care of their home, cooking, cleaning. Think about the amount of dust in the dry season (every morning there is a layer of dust on my computer so thick I can write my name in it), the fact that there are chickens and other animals living in your small yard, the fact that there are probably 10 people ‘living’ in a 12x12 foot room, and all your cooking is done over a single tiny charcoal stove, and you start to see how cooking and cleaning are literally a constant activity. Men are not expected to be responsible for the cooking and cleaning, but most of them are unemployed, so they sit around all day, usually on the street corners because their wives/mothers/sisters/aunts kicked them out of the house to get some room to move. People spend a lot of time on their roofs, if they have a cement roof. As soon as the sun begins to set, it’s definitely the coolest place to be, as there is actually a breeze. Lots of people sleep on their roofs at night, actually, when it’s not raining.