Lausanne World Pulse – Cite Du Peuple—Cap-Haitien, Haiti: The Community and the Challenges
By Glenn Smith
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Eighty percent of the population in Cap-Haitien lives in |
It seems we tend to treat neighbourhoods of poverty like disposable places. Places like Cap-Haitien (Haiti), my adopted city. Established in the early 1700s, its present infrastructure was built near the turn of the twentieth century for ten thousand people. Today, some 750,000 residents call it home. During the 1990s, the local electrical power company, Électricité d’Haïti (EDH in short), connected twenty new bidonvilles1 to the network. The largest of these taudis (slums) is Cité du Peuple.
The phrase “poorest of the poor” describes the vast majority of city dwellers here. Eighty percent of the city lives in absolute poverty, surviving on less than $150USD per year. Health challenges are innumerable. The World Health Organization (WHO) uses an indicator for nutritional caloric intake. In Cap-Haïtien, the daily caloric supplement is eighty-four percent of recommended United Nations levels. This means there is a deficit of three hundred calories and forty-two grams of protein on a daily basis. More than one author attributes the high birth rate to the medical consequences of these facts. They claim that the simple lack of protein alters the functions of the liver, especially folliculine, therefore stimulating reproductive capacities.2 Maybe, just maybe, the high synthetic birth rate of 4.6 children per adult female is not a moral issue but a justice issue due to the health issues involved. Imagine, one in thirteen children die within the first year of life in Cap-Haïtien. In Montréal, Canada, where I live, it is one in 166.
For the past four decades, the average annual rate of growth in the agricultural sector of Haïti (which employs seventy-four percent of the country) has been stagnant. From 1965-1973 there was a 0.3% decline; from 1973-1983 there was a 0.7% rise. In the two turbulent decades since the overthrow of the Duvalier regime on 6 February 1986, chaos has reigned, as evidenced by the inability of the World Bank to report verifiable figures in the World Development Report.3
Every social indicator now places this nation as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere; Haiti is referred to in Canada as part of the Fourth World.4 The World Bank states that less than one percent of the population control forty-six percent of the national revenue; 2,700 families receive seventy-two percent of all revenue in the country.
All these factors surface in the Haitian urban context. More than eighty percent of urban dwellers live in absolute poverty. The causes are extensive unemployment and underemployment; inadequate and unaffordable housing; and inadequate municipal infrastructure (only twenty-one percent of city dwellers have access to sewers and drinking water). Automobile emissions, open waste and persistent use of charcoal continue to make ecological concerns a large preoccupation of non-governmental agencies involved in transformative community development in cities.
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Glenn Smith is senior associate for urban mission for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization and is executive director of Christian Direction in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is a professor of urban theology and missiology at the Institut de théologie pour la Francophonie at the Université de Montréal and at the Université chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti. He is also professor of urban missiology at Bakke Graduate University in Seattle, Washington, USA. |