The book I brought on the plane with me is Ellen Klages' The Green Glass Sea: it's very beautiful, and I found it very moving. It's a story of two girls growing up at the Los Alamos base during the project to build the atomic bomb in World War II.
On Sunday, I hooked up with a fellow who runs a children's program in Site Soley. We had a quick, lightening tour of Site Soley. A few days before I came down here, he'd put out an urgent appeal for funds to help finance his program, and I gave him some money.
Site Soley is one of the most high-profile sites for MINUSTAH involvement. Since 2004, Site Soley has been under almost constant attack, purportedly because that's where the bandits live, and the bandits are making Haiti unsafe. It's also the heart of Lavalas support -- it's where Aristide became popular, and the people of Site Soley are politically motivated. An activist reading of MINUSTAH's actions, therefore, is that MINUSTAH is trying to frighten the people into staying away from elections.
That idea couldn't help but be on the forefront of my mind, because as I passed many of the buildings in Site Soley, I couldn't help but notice the bullet holes. Buildings come in many forms in Site Soley -- simple shacks that people have constructed out of corrugated tin and wood to more typical Haitian-style brick. The brick ones, especially, bear the marks of so many bullet holes that one must conclude that massive, indiscriminate shooting has gone on there. Some of the people we've spoken to tell me that things have changed since the beginning of the year -- that MINUSTAH now attacks gang leaders' houses more strategically, but that they strikes haven't been especially successful. The gang leaders seem to get tipped off early, and are never home.
It's a bit easy to glamourize the gang leaders of Site Soley as plucky freedom fighters resisting MINUSTAH -- some of that is certainly true. But it's also true that they're people who prey on the poor in Site Soley, using violence to extract money from the people.
Surprisingly, after passing through that section, we ended up in a relatively pretty section of Site Soley. I must confess, I hadn't expected any of it to be pretty. There were a lot of trees, and there was a relatively nice housing project, and a community building where my friend teaches classes. I spoke to some of the people at my friends' project. They had a bit of English and I had a bit of kreyòl, but the conversation was still pretty simple. "Are you American?", "Where in Canada do you come from?", "Don't they speak French there?", "How many jobs are there in your country?", "Do you have a job?", "How many children do you have?", "Why don't you have any children?", "When are you going to have children?", "Don't you have a boyfriend?", "Do you really not have any children?", "Can't you have children?"
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