Few Haitians Hold Jobs, but Many Are Hard at Work : Caribbean: Street-market entrepreneurs keep poor nation going. Some inspired by Aristide, others by need.

There are few empty streets when dawn illuminates this tumbledown but picturesque city on Haiti’s north coast. From every direction and seemingly all at once, thousands of Haitians are up and about, even before first light.

Some are fetching water, with pitchers, buckets and small barrels perched on their heads. Others look for firewood to cook breakfast, while children head for the first part of a three-session school day. But most people go to work--in a country where almost nobody has a job.

Only about 15% of Haiti’s 7 million people have real employment, and most of the rest have never drawn regular wages. It shows in the statistics. Haiti’s annual per capita income is estimated at $320, with many people earning as little as $50 a year.

Yet in Cap Haitien and throughout Haiti, people go to work with an energy that belies the misery and poverty of this nation, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

Some experts say this drive reflects a hope instilled by the restoration of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the populist priest who was overthrown by the military in September, 1991, and returned from exile following the U.S. intervention in Haiti last year. Others say Haitians work because they have no choice and that Haitians have traditionally accepted hard labor as their lot.

Whether their perseverance is born of hope or resignation, Haitians are in constant motion. Too poor for cars and lacking adequate public transit, people walk to their work. They crowd the sidewalks and clog the streets, sidestepping people unloading goods, stacking fruits and vegetables, filling street stalls.

A few Haitians work in stores and offices, and there are agricultural laborers who do seasonal planting and harvesting. Others wash cars, usually without permission and mostly without getting paid. Still others offer themselves for day labor in exchange for a meal or clothes rather than cash, and some simply beg.

But the majority of Haitians are street vendors whose lively markets, foreign economic experts say, account for 90% of all Haitian retail sales and are the second-largest component of the country’s tiny $2-billion-a-year economy.

These merchants sell everything, from rubber sandals to dented cans of Canadian herring to blond hair dye.

In downtown Port-au-Prince, the capital, a favorite mix of wares now is chewing gum and bicycle pumps. One recent day, seven men, one after the other, approached a car stuck in traffic. All were selling identical packages of gum and a pump. An eighth man suddenly appeared with a pump and auto-interior deodorizers.

What is sold is less important than how. Fishmongers sit knee-to-knee with identical pans of odorous, fly-covered red snapper and sea bass, chattering at passersby and sniping at each other if a potential buyer stops in front of one pan rather than another.

In cities and at rural crossroads, the sides of the streets are choked with women selling fruits and vegetables--the same fruits, the same vegetables, the same prices. Here in Cap Haitien, a shopper might stop in front of the foot-tall pyramid of mangoes being sold by Nature Regis--or walk down the street to select, for less than a dime, a mango from one of seven other identical pyramids.

Such selling tactics may violate the competitive theory of the free market, but it has always been done this way, people say.

“We always come here,” said Lude Chery, a watercress vendor who sits next to watercress vendor Esteline St. Aute, who sits next to watercress vendor Verilien St. Cyr. “If we tried to move to where they sell meat, we would be driven away.”

Melta Monpremier, who sits among the fruit and vegetable sellers, has another reason: “We sell the same things because we are all in this together. We all work together like family. If I don’t sell anything, or if my neighbor doesn’t, then we pool what we’ve made so everyone gets something to eat.”

Very occasionally, there is something less benign driving the merchants’ sameness. In Port-au-Prince, for instance, if a money-changer along Rue Pave, the city’s informal financial center, offers a better rate than his neighbor he is likely to be punished.

“People have been killed for cutting the rates,” said a U.S. aid worker whose office once overlooked Rue Pave. “So the rate stays the same until they all are told to change.”

More often, someone trying to undercut the competition in food or clothing is likely to find his or her spot occupied by another merchant the next day.

The merchants who remain produce the din of an amplified aviary. Their sales pitches have led people to call them “Madam Saras,” after a chattering bird of that name. Among the most famous Madam Saras are the “Kennedy” sellers along Port-au-Prince’s national highway just outside the city port.

They are the dozens of women who daily unload bales of used clothes into waist-high piles, one Madam Sara’s shirts flopping over onto another’s pants. The street vendors buy the clothes, bundled and covered, from a middleman who gets them from a wholesaler in New York. The bundle covers are usually stamped “John F. Kennedy International Airport.”

The sellers seldom know what they will find in a bale until it is opened. “That is one of our problems,” said Beatrice Alexandre, a skinny 23-year-old Madam Sara. “We can’t see the quality of what we’re getting.

“This is worthless. I haven’t got a gourde [the Haitian currency] all day,” she said, pointing to a cluttered collection of frayed work pants, shredded blouses and other scruffy clothes that shoppers were busily rejecting.

When the selection is better, Alexandre said, she can make 600 gourdes a week, about $42.

Most of the time, according to nearby clothes seller Jeanne Pierre-Charles, “it is 10 gourdes, 20 gourdes a day.”

Most of the time, that’s just enough to buy food. A woman who sells turkey parts imported from Rutledge, Ga., said, “I arrive at 6 a.m. and leave at 6 p.m. . . . and I don’t make anything. I have to borrow to buy the turkeys, and most of the time I can’t pay it back. Usually I can’t do more than buy food to feed my children for that day alone.”

When there is no option, the turkey seller, who declined to give her name, and the other food vendors eat what has spoiled and can’t be offered anymore.

Women are the center of street commerce here--men are the car washers, money-changers, shoe shiners, spare-parts sellers and beggars--and account for about three-quarters of the retail business, the experts say.

“The men historically were farmers and laborers, and the selling of whatever goods were produced was traditionally left to the women,” said Harold Maas, a journalist and former anthropologist who has lived and worked in Haiti for years.

For many there is a belief that the hard work of today will lead to a better life for the country’s children. “If I work hard,” said Pamalita Jacques, a banana vendor in Port-au-Prince, “I can send my children to school, and if they go to school they will have jobs.”

Why does this 37-year-old mother of five think so? “Aristide,” she said.

“We’re suffering,” said St. Aute, the watercress vendor in Cap Haitien. “But I know things will get better one day, because Aristide is one of us.”

It doesn’t seem to make any difference that Aristide has failed to make their lives much better since returning in October.

“We have all kinds of problems,” said Lycius Percival, a seller of dried fish and one of the few male food peddlers in Cap Haitien--”no electricity, no safe water, garbage piled in the streets. There is no steady work. I have six kids, I’m healthy, and I can’t get a job. But . . . I am full of hope for my children. It is Aristide--that is all I can say.”

Even Haiti scholars have difficulty explaining this optimism. One of the most distinguished, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, could only say in his study “Haiti, the Breached Citadel” that “Haitians are survivors. And despite temporary setbacks, in which the hopes that flourished . . . are dampened, Haitians go on to fight yet other battles and perhaps to win the war.”

“I don’t understand it,” said Michael Tarr, a longtime resident of Haiti. “I have lived in Cuba and all over the Caribbean. Nearly everywhere else, people this poor give up. They sit on the curb and stare into space. But here they get up every day with . . . hope.”