Guns and Mud Biscuits

As we have come to understand, some average Haitians are today obliged to live on a razor’s edge of poverty, hunger and withering despair. Truth, too, is that their countrymen who reside in The Bahamas are wracked in the throes of pain as they wait for more bad news from home.

But despite it all, the vast majority is resilient enough to abide this life’s myriad of fearful vicissitudes. With the help of some who have escaped, the Haitian people somehow –and sometimes just somehow- manage to eke out an existence, proving that human beings are resilient, and that they will survive.

Tragically, the news too is that Haiti bleeds; some of its fearful neighbors take steps to cleanse themselves of the so-called influx. And even as steps are taken to expatriate some and repatriate some hapless others, more desperate refugees make preparations to take the perilous ocean voyage to The Bahamas.

We are today convinced that they will continue to come as long as the crisis in Haiti persists. We also know that the crisis engulfing Haiti includes two key dimensions; one involving security issues; and the other pertaining to poverty and hunger.

Sadly, this already bad situation is today being made worse.

In this regard, we note that U.S. officials in Haiti acknowledged Friday the United States will provide Haitian police with guns and riot control equipment.

We are being told that the arming of the Haitian police is an effort to curtail violence in the Caribbean nation ahead of elections scheduled for later this year.

As U.S. Ambassador James Foley notes, "Given the state of insecurity in this country, the attempts to create chaos, we had to do our best to protect the people from the forces of insecurity and criminality."

We are also learning that the decision to send more arms to Haiti follows a recent report that there are some 170,000 illegal small arms in the country.

Truth today is that while Ambassador Foley has been empowered by the administration he represents to talk about insecurity and criminality and the need for a better-armed police force, he is surely missing the point that the real problem in Haiti is the continuing obscenity of hunger in Haiti.

Thing have reached such a low point in Haiti that some people have resorted to eating mud biscuits, that is biscuits made from mud!

We have learned that "the mud biscuits sold in the markets and stacked high by the street vendors in the most desperate parts of Port-au-Prince are made in a part of the city known as Fort-Dimanche. There, close to the site of a former prison, once used by the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier to lock up political prisoners, women combine clay, water, a little margarine and a scratch of salt. Sometimes they will crumble a foil-wrapped cube of bouillon into the mixture, which they stir, shape into discs the size of a saucer and leave to bake in the Caribbean sun."

We also understand that "in Haiti, these mud cakes are traditionally eaten by expectant mothers who believe they contain nutrients and minerals important to the health of a newborn child. But in recent months they have been sold increasingly to other people, who are too poor to afford anything else. "I have been selling more in the last year. People have less money," says Mafie, the young woman sitting behind a pile of the pale brown mud cakes at Salamoun market."

It is said that "in their own way, these biscuits, known in Creole simply as terre, tell a bigger story. One year after the enforced departure of Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country he was forced to flee, having been long undermined by the US authorities, is in a hellish state of affairs.

"Unstable, deadly, wracked by division and wrecked by a hurricane that tore through the country in September, many of the citizens who voted for the bespectacled former priest with a prayer that he might bring them hope and salvation are forced to fill their bellies with cakes fashioned from mud. Naturally enough, they taste like dirt."

The bottom line –as far as we are concerned- is that Haiti needs help. And for sure, that help could and should come from the United States of America. A way can and should be found for the Haitian people to go beyond dependency on guns and mud biscuits.