In Haiti, burying the dead, rebuilding the shantytown

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti — 

The bidonville isn’t on any map, but the shantytown is in plain view along the Canape Vert road, a gray hive clinging to the steep ravines above Port-au-Prince.

People dig out little square shelves on the most marginal pieces of tilted earth, half-perching their homes on the roofs of their neighbors, houses made of concrete blocks so porous they almost look like they’re made entirely of sand.

They pray that the rains won’t carry them to oblivion. When their prayers fail, they search for the dead, bury them and move on.

And so this time, when it was the earth itself that betrayed them, and their homes crumpled down into the ravine in countless little landslides, the people of the bidonville set about the task they knew was theirs alone.

The Edner family dug six of their dead out of the rubble of their cluster of homes. They laid them out on the dirt, and then carried them one by one up to the ridge to be buried in a communal grave.

Then they had no choice. They had to keep trying to survive.

On Thursday afternoon, they were plucking a chicken some boys had found in the rubble to cook in a pot. Three young women returned with five-gallon buckets of water on their heads, wending their way on trails no wider than a person through the village, past tin fences, hedges of candelabra shrubs, banana and breadfruit trees. They had been walking for two hours round-trip.

“We don’t sleep here anymore,” said Silfida Edner, who lost two children and two grandchildren in Tuesday’s earthquake. “We just come here in the morning, because we have nowhere else to go.”

Like many Haitians, the Edners are sleeping in parks and fields, where it’s open. Where it’s safer.

The story of the bidonville is the story of Haiti -- everyone has to hustle to get by.

Even the wealthy make do. If they want reliable power for their homes, they buy generators. If they want TV and Internet, they buy satellite dishes. They drive big four-wheel-drives to get over rutted roads that the government never repairs, and hire security guards with shotguns to keep them protected, because the tiny police force would never suffice.

This earthquake leveled any semblance of authority that years of political turmoil had not. The National Palace is a wreck. The president has all but disappeared. The United Nations peacekeeping mission is in disarray; its headquarters collapsed, killing nobody knows how many.

Haiti is a country privatized by its ruin.

The bidonvilles, like the vast slums on the tidal flats, are at the bottom of the process. They’ve been growing for years, gathering in thousands upon thousands of peasants as the city’s light industry disappeared, and Haiti’s rugged and once-lush countryside grew ever more denuded of forest and soil. Now it’s one big sprawl; there is no line, really, where one bidonville ends and another begins.

Up on the ridge, men were digging under a flamboyant tree. In a small plot of loose tilled dirt, maybe 20 by 10 feet, lay about 60 bodies, they said.

Conseillant Julbert, who gave his title as a police official -- which means counselor -- instead of his first name, paid to have his four children buried in their own grave, paved with concrete.

“The first day the government said we have to bury the people ourselves,” he said. “They can’t help.”

He lived in the middle floor of an apartment building on the other side of the ridge. He was at work when it toppled. His five children, ages 9 to 24, ran to escape. Four of them were found near the front door, under a massive jumble of broken concrete. The fifth has not been found.

Julbert keeps thinking of his 12-year-old boy telling him not to forget the pizza on the way home.

“I’m dead,” he said. “I’m just walking.”

Julbert’s wife came to the grave as Ritz Princivil finished smoothing out the pavement with a trowel. She started crying, nearly fainting.

Princivil did his work with his own tragedy inside him. His daughter, a nurse, died when a hospital collapsed. Every day he treks downtown to the morgue to look for her.

“There are so many dead bodies, I can’t find her,” he said.

Fifty yards past the graveyard sat what was once a dirt soccer field. Now it was a tent city, made of sheets and a few tarps. When it rains, which is possible almost any day in Haiti, it will be a bog. Everyone, everything they rescued from their homes, will be soaked, if not destroyed.

Children cried and slept in the faint shade. A young woman, Maelle Francois, carried her baby. The 23-month-old girl, naked but for her pink Dora the Explorer shoes, had a terrible weeping burn on a big swath of her back. During the earthquake, her grandmother, holding her, had tripped over the cooking fire trying to escape.

She had been taken to a hospital two times. All the nurses could do was give her some antibiotic ointment and ibuprofen. That was more treatment than most people have received.

Above the Edners’ homes, a trail cut a notch across a small cliff, then through an alley filled with rubble and into some fields, where men slashed at the brush with machetes, and others carved out square plots in the red earth with hoes -- to build new homes.

“We’re going to make them out of plastic,” said Donavil Vanel, 31.

They had no money to buy concrete and rebar. But they could pick through the dump for plastic.

In Haiti, homes are made of concrete. Shacks are made of everything else.

Did he have any fear about rebuilding on an eroded hillside so steep that if you tripped, you could roll down and plunge off a cliff?

His answer: “We don’t have a choice.”

joe.mozingo@latimes.com