Bel Air and Haiti's Civil War

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These days, as I read letters from friends and the odd email from one of the primitive internet cafes powered by gas-hungry generators, my thoughts increasingly turn back to Bel Air - one of the slum neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince with a name rich in irony.

The air in Bel Air is not belle at all. The area is choked by vehicle exhaust, the lakes of standing sewage and a permanent haze of charcoal from cooking fires. On an overcast day the clouds lock in the unhealthy air like an immense glass jar.

It's a horrible place to live, and that life is often tragically short. Two years ago, you could see the bellies distended ever so slightly, in the contours of a crescent moon. The hair of children skipping over the puddles should have been rich and black. Instead: light, fuzzy, sprinkled with orange. All of these facts checked one another: the youth of Bel Air, a nation which hadn't suffered serious unrest in almost a decade then, had the unmistakable signs of malnutrition.

This isn't meant to tug at the heartstrings for political gain. At the time, Aristide was still in office; America had suspended aid but he was, as he liked to be, virtually unopposed in the country. Today, when I hear of still another riot, another round-up, still another natural disaster beating down on this country like the fists of God, my first thoughts go back to Bel Air, La Saline, and some of the shacks where I spent time last March in Cap-Haitien. If life during peace (peace in the mind and bread in the belly was the slogan the government had campaigned on) could be so cruel, I can only imagine how bad it is now with raids on the few aid caravans that still bother coming. These people wouldn't wind up in the tallies of casualties, their corpses wouldn't be counted in the morgue. They'd simply suffer a little more, a little longer, until their bodies gave up.

Sobaka