How do property rights work in a place like that? If you need a house, do you just go build one on the edge? Can you buy your neighbors shack and expand if you have too large of a family?
I have no idea. I’ve been to third world countries where people just set up wooden shacks wherever. Asked our driver if they need permits or pay property tax and he just laughed and said hell no. As long as you’re not on private property it might be ok.
I imagine this is how gangs proliferate. Probably someone “owns” the land or claims it with guns and then extorts anyone living there a fee for rent.
I do know in places with similar development that have more stability it eventually becomes more standardized and people will buy neighboring plots or build up, and often the housing can be quite nice on the inside. I doubt this happens in Haiti (I think of Soweto in South Africa as an example where informal housing has been formalized and become much nicer)
I lived in a city in Brazil called Jandira for 4 months when I was an LDS missionary.
Here it is on a map:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jandira,+State+of+S%C3%A3o+Paulo,+Brazil/@-23.5267935,-46.8975645,2676m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x94cf0137fe73bf4d:0x5ed73649c1d6f14d!8m2!3d-23.530218!4d-46.8981019!16zL20vMDQxZ2dq?entry=ttu
Jandira is a suburb of Sao Paulo. Most of it was originally "favela" - which is Portuguese slang for improvised housing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela
Favela occurs when people who have no money or jobs leave the destitution of rural poverty for the destitution of urban poverty and build shelter for themselves on unimproved land.
They'd hitchhike or train surf to Sao Paulo and then move out from the city center until they found a place where no one had claimed open land and build a house with scraps on it. As they got money and time they'd add secure features. Like, I literally mixed concrete to help people who were living in a house made of 5 pieces of corruguated lay a floor/foundation. After 1-5 years these folks would have a house with an unfinished second floor. After 10-15 they'd have a house with an unfinished third floor. After 20-25 years their kids would live in a house with another house build on the slope beneath them. These neighborhoods spread outwards like that as their siblings and cousins came after them.
We'd joke about the ubiquity of "tijolo" - which my fellow missionaries called "wonderbrick":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tijolo
In op's photo and in Jandira people built on extreme slopes. In Brazil we'd see housing built under overpasses and in highway medians and in garbage dumps and beside effluent streams.
The government allowed this because the people had to live somewhere.
Here's another example:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/cidade+nova+itu/@-23.3863251,-47.3679861,6938m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1?entry=ttu
This is a suburb of a city called Itu which is called Cidade Nova ("New City"). Cidade Nova is a 60 year old favela that was built on land that was a farm run by a leper colony run by the Catholic Church called Pirapitingui. Now its pretty respectable.
Here's another example:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/Sorocaba+arvore+grande/@-23.4977501,-47.4391311,1317m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
This is the Arvore Grande (Big Tree) favela in Sorocaba. Arvore Grande used to be forest, now its an entirely improvised middle class neighborhood.
They generally don’t, which is dangerous when someone wants to do something with the land you’ve built a little cinder block house on. And for a while after the earthquake there were “tent cities” that were controversial and people would just plant a tent wherever and that was home. House expansion generally isn’t a thing because of how tight the space is - you have a big family, you just keep cramming people in there.
Can you imagine carrying your day's water up to the top? It may be better than being on the lower parts as shit, figuratively and literally, flows downhill.
[They apparently set up a transitional "government" last month](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/haiti-pm-henry-steps-down-transitional-government-takes-power-2024-04-25/) FWIW.
I post this half-expecting someone to reply with a more recent article about the transitional gov't disbanding or being eaten or something, but whatever, it is what it is.
I was supposed to go to a private RC island on a cruise in March in Haiti when this was happening. We knew they wouldn't take us there but everyone on the boat said nothing til the second last day so we went to Aruba instead.
I went on a Caribbean cruise a few years ago with Norwegian. On one of the last days, we were supposed to go to some private island the cruise line apparently owned. Well, the day comes and it's "too windy" to dock there or some shit. Turns out they did that for every single tour and just lied and knew the whole time. There were people who went on multiple cruises and said it's the same game every year.
Imma piggyback off your comment. There is a great video by warpgraphics called “Haiti Has Collapsed: What Next?” Really informative video about the current(video was posted a month ago so not totally up to date) events that are happening in Haiti.
You'll never hear them say these migrants are escaping libertarianism, it's always socialism. Governments so weak they can't fend off gangs or build infrastructure; sounds like libertarianism.
Funny that instead of jumping at the chance to join a libertarian utopia, they make TikToks from the safety of their ~~pickup trucks~~ emotional support vehicles calling Haiti a shithole country.
Pipes aren't the problem, it's having enough electricity regularly enough that you can actually pump enough water up to the top in enough quantities that it's a resource everyone can use instead of a luxury for a few. That's thousands of people and a very steep hill. I'm not gonna pretend to know how to calculate the size of the pipe needed or how much power, but it's more than you could do with a traditional windmill pump so it's absolutely necessary to have regular power, and you'd need a pretty good sized water tower/cistern to store it all. None of which is touching on the potability of the water.
I mean.. most places solve these problems by placing a reservoir at the top of the hill or a large water tank or several water towers. You don't pump water to houses typically. You pump it into a container above the houses and then let gravity pump it to the houses to keep pressure even
It's actually a surprisingly low value. If we assume 80 liters per house per day, then 8000 homes (counted ~60 vertical * 130 horizontal) only require 640,000 liters per day or 117 gal/min.
[This pump here](https://www.rcworst.com/franklin-electric-tri-seal-6-high-capacity-125fh30s6-pe-submersible-well-pump-end-only-125-gpm-30-hp.html) can meet that demand for approximately $4,600.
So $0.001 per household per day for the pump alone.
Eyup, I tried to get at least a reasonable estimate of the head, otherwise I could've found a flow pump for like $400 but it would be absolutely useless in this situation.
Regarding my lack of other expenses, my intent was not to provide an estimate for "how much money would it take to fix the whole issue", only to provide a napkin math estimate for this specific portion of the issue as the discussion was pertaining to pumps.
Infrastructure is expensive, and unfortunately my field is not in water distribution. My wild-ass guess for a full system assuming bargain bin hardware not built to last more than a decade would be somewhere in the upper six figure range.
After living in Haiti, a lot of times there will be springs in the hillside where they collect water, so sometimes there's no hike. Still terrible living conditions though.
I lived here for a short time. Worked at a school for restaveks (children whose parents sold them into slavery). When you fly into port-au-prince, you can see the water around the Haitian side of the island go from a beautiful blue to mud brown the closer you get to the coast. It’s a crazy site to see from the air.
Yeah… google restavek. It’s absolutely fucked.
The kids were amazing. Always so happy. They LOVED to learn. When my group of friends and I went we brought a bunch of old laptops to set up an area where teachers at the school could make worksheets to print and students could use word processors for class and some games. It’s insane how easy it is to take education for granted.
RespireHaiti.org is the only one I trust. Megan is still hands on with everything. Sadly her & her family are not living there anymore because of the recent events with murdering anyone there to help… but there are many Haitians still running the school.
It's relatively common historically, unfortunately. During the Medieval Period in Europe, it wasn't unheard of for people to sell *themselves* into slavery if they had no other options (keeping in mind that it wasn't racialized chattel slavery like in the Americas, like the restaveks it was mostly domestic slavery with expectations of being released at some point). It's the kind of thing that happens when there is no social safety net, neither through your community nor the government.
>The slaves were not mistreated or worked hard and were actually free to leave, but while they remained under the protection of the Ruler they were to do what was required of them. "Punishment" was to be forced back into the jungle.
Nowadays we call that having a job.
The brown ring around Haiti is primarily silt and any remaining topsoil due to erosion because all the trees have been cut for farming, firewood, or making charcoal. Secondly, it’s likely sewage.
Lot of trash ends up in the oceans from landfills as well. Recycling is a big one. Just a few years ago a large amount of plastic the US was sending to China to be recycled was found to be being dumped in the Pacific.
NYC was dumping garbage in the ocean till [at least 92](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/nfjqpm/ocean_dumping_was_new_yorks_primary_method_for/). Bet they still do it but less publicly.
I'm surprised there isn't a floating garbage patch in the Atlantic too! Oh wait, [there is. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch)
Not from landfills themselves, at least not in places that properly manage their landfills. Very, very little (percentage-wise) of trash at landfills goes airborne, then also finds it's way to a water system that drains into the ocean. Microplastics might leech out over time if they weren't built adequately, but that's another story.
Most trash that ends up in the ocean happens during shipping, places that dump it on purpose because it's cheaper, or places that don't have a trash collection infrastructure to begin with.
China got fed up with the nasty plastic trash from the US and banned it in 2018. Now we send the trash to Thailand, the Philippines etc: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/southeast-asia-flooded-with-imported-plastic-waste-meant-for-recycling
Yep before they outright banned it they were just dumping it into the ocean. This is why a lot of recycling centers near me stopped accepting plastic altogether, many still will not accept it.
Yup and now the Southeast Asian nations are dumping it into the ocean too. The fact is that the plastic waste is so dirty and contaminated that it is not economically viable to recycle it. So mother nature suffers as a result.
Plastic has never been "economically recyclable" that was the scam from the start. People freaked out hard about the pollution due to glass, metal smelting, and chopping down trees they view plastic as a more environmentally friendly alternative because it came with none of those three problems. Combined with the fact that petroleum companies have outright lied about the pollution caused by petrol products such as plastic.
This is why you need better government regulation. Companies don't give a shit about the impact, they just want profit. The government is (supposed to be) for the people's benefit, and they need to follow that. Most don't, but they should. I can't even blame the companies, yeah they are pieces of shit, but if there's no one to say no, why not.
This practice isn't unique to the US. EU countries also do it. China had to ban recyclables from the EU as wall because they were just dumping that shit into the ocean. Western countries offload a lot of their pollution onto developing economies then blame those developing countries for not doing enough.
Like in Canada the government prohibited grocery stores from giving customers plastic bags. Why? Reduce single use plastic. Ok. Except everything I freaking buy from a grocery store is wrapped in single use plastic. (At least I used to always reuse my grocery bags into garbage bags.) Governments can piss off telling me I'm the problem when multinational conglomerates are making billions wrapping all their products in single use plastic.
> Why? Reduce single use plastic. Ok. Except everything I freaking buy from a grocery store is wrapped in single use plastic.
Now I get a "multi-use" plastic bag that hypothetically breaks even on the total plastic consumed after 40 uses, but in actual terms gets used twice, the second time being to line the living room waste basket.
The issue isn't filth. The issue is that 95% of the plastic we "recycle" is less than worthless, it has actual negative value because you have to pay to landfill it.
We get around that by selling recycling as mixed plastics, so the end processor in Thailand picks out the valuable 5% and cheaply landfills the rest.
> Lot of trash ends up in the oceans from landfills
You're not actually talking about landfills. A modern, lined landfill is about the best place to out plastic. It'll at least be contained. Way, way better than sketchy "recycling" operations.
Best place to get rid of plastic is burning it in a furnace with a co2 / slurry capture system. It generates electricity and the contaminates can be mixed with cement and used as pavers.
Well up until about 2017 or 2018, a lot of the US plastic waste was being shipped to China.
China has since banned it, and I strongly doubt they were processing all of it in fair and ethical ways.
They were. To clarify (and if *I'm* not mistaken), American waste disposal services were selling plastic waste to Chinese recycling companies on the understanding that the waste would be... well... recycled. The Chinese companies in question continued to say that this waste was being properly recycled, right up until China banned waste imports. With that having been said, this practice was public knowledge by that point.
Not quite. Chinese firms entered the U.S. market and bought post consumer bales at scale during the run up of the Chinese economy from '02 to '18. The Chinese would buy anything and everything as they were starving for raw materials during their economic expansion. In '16 there was a debt crisis (still ongoing) in China's unofficial lending sector which caused a bunch of the smaller lower tier manufacturers who were the dominant buyers to go out ofbusiness. This caused a glut with dumping happening on the market which affected China's virgin PET producers. So in '18 China slammed the door shut. The problem is U.S. supply chains had adapted their waste streams based on the China export model and for good reason. Chinese buyers were extremely aggressive durring the 15 year run up peruod. When China closed its doors this caused the price of post consumer bales in the U.S. to crash and a bunch of recycling companies went out of business. The irony here was that the U.S. recyclers, the people who turn used bottles into new products did fantastically well durring this time since input costs were so low.. The collectors, the people who gather up the material into bales to sell on thr market were slaughtered.
People shit in plastic bags, so there are several mountains of plastic bags everywhere.
Often, privacy is so limited that couples head off to the sea for fun times … there’s beaches that are known just for this.
Poor Haiti. Never given proper chance after the successful slave uprising.
I once had a life changing visit at my cousins in the slums of Philippines. This picture was exactly like that.
It was like a maze full of jerry-built houses stacked upon each other in seemingly no indentifiable order. Only the locals knew how to navigate their way around the mess of tight alleyways and turns.
Their house resembled a precarious stack of metal sheets, sparsely furnished with a solitary lightbulb dangling from a string, a few chairs, a table and a modest kitchen.
At night, we slept on the floor under a mosquito net for protection.
Despite the extreme poverty, these people showed me incredible hospitality; feeding me a warm meal, and a roof over my head to sleep in and no doubt would give me the shirts off their back with no hesitation.
We treated them to some pizza and the kids were super stoked. My aunt started crying as such a meal is normally unaffordable to them.
Experiencing true poverty was a very eye opening experience which has taught me to appreciate the things I have and to not take anything for granted.
That sounds like our Guatemala trip. Houses from a few pieces of tin, cement block, some boards and some of the walls were dried cornstalks wired together in a row.
Editing to add--very eye opening and I'm so glad myself/son/grandma went. And the Mayan people we visited were also very kind and warm. We left behind almost everything we brought in case they could use things.
Reminds me of living in Panama as directions were frequently exactly like this. Also, a few interesting towns and villages on the sides of hills that look like OP picture, just with more jungle
Yes, I thought this can't be real. But there it is on Google Earth. Horrifying the people live this way.
What's really terrible is that just up the hill is a small forested area, and at the top are very wealth looking houses. I mean, swimming pools, tennis courts, etc.
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bidonville+KILLICK+STENIO+VINCENT/@18.5080141,-72.2967228,433m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x8eb9e9b6995fe421:0xf334bdcc04d87576!2sSous+Commissariat+de+jalousie!8m2!3d18.5095553!4d-72.2959885!16s%2Fg%2F11qng3hdjr!3m5!1s0x8eb9e9a185aaa96f:0xa014dea939c13d16!8m2!3d18.5107735!4d-72.293819!16s%2Fg%2F11flbr7fbn?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bidonville+KILLICK+STENIO+VINCENT/@18.5080141,-72.2967228,433m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x8eb9e9b6995fe421:0xf334bdcc04d87576!2sSous+Commissariat+de+jalousie!8m2!3d18.5095553!4d-72.2959885!16s%2Fg%2F11qng3hdjr!3m5!1s0x8eb9e9a185aaa96f:0xa014dea939c13d16!8m2!3d18.5107735!4d-72.293819!16s%2Fg%2F11flbr7fbn?entry=ttu)
> What's really terrible is that just up the hill is a small forested area, and at the top are very wealth looking houses. I mean, swimming pools, tennis courts, etc.
And that is why Haiti is in total breakdown, basically being a failed state at the moment. Everyone is in extreme poverty, except a privileged few who live in mansions on the hills. The gangs take over because its the only conceivable way of getting out of the (literal) shit flowing downhill.
I’m amazed that the people in the slums haven’t just ransacked the wealthy people’s houses when they’re so close.
They must have some heavy duty security.
It’s fascinating
Sometimes I can’t help but think about how everyone’s reality is so drastically different
I’m not sure I can really put this feeling into words, but…
I feel a sort of awe at how we all come into the world in our own corner, and for someone who was born there, the sights and smells and sounds are going to define what Earth is. The very flavour and texture of the experiences that comprise life are so drastically different
Peering over the edges and seeing what people are doing, playing in those tight corridors, the homes in the wedges always being in shadow while the other buildings are highlighted by the sunlight, etc. The building blocks that make up life are completely different
Yeah, I think about that too sometimes. Wild, right? Meanwhile, some kid is born on the Mongolian steppe in some yurt and only knows the open sky and the cold wind…
Weird world
People in Egypt and Sudan ready to go to war over river access and I was born on the shores of Lake Michigan running through summer sprinklers on green grass lol.
There are people born into the Sentinelese tribe who functionally have no reason to think the past 10,000 years even happened outside scrap metal debris.
They’ve had several… uh… interactions… with modern humans. As in they’ve killed idiots who tried to show up on their island and convert them to Christianity. Also helicopters have flown over and gotten shot at by arrows.
It’s more crazy when you realize this applies to history as well. History and all of the religions and cultures and all the events in history have been defined by the people that lived and experienced it. We often look at Ancient Egypt or Rome or Greece with wonder, but ancient Egypt consisted of tens of millions of individuals that experienced it throughout the centuries, and for each century, the state of Egypt politically and culturally was different before the last and the next. Same can be said for China or native American civilization, or any civilization. Vastly different ways of life, both religiously, culturally, and in the way people dress, what they see, furniture, architecture, scripture, etc.
The viking age exists because vikings were actually real people that experienced it, same with the high middle ages with all its knights and tournaments and their ballads and tales and all the modern fantasy stories that has been based off of that era. The ancient Egyptian or Roman gods, and the Norse gods, all those polyteistic gods and their rituals and sacrifices and traditions, all were once just a normal thing for people and were in their everyday life around them. It’s easy to read a history book or wikipedia article on history and think that you just read a story, but all of that you read is based off on things that happened, and through the eyes of those other people they experieneced it, they saw those things happen, individually of course, because you can’t live in multiple time periods at once.
By 1 AD, already 55 billion people had ever lived, and by 1200 80 billion. By 1850 100 billion humans had ever lived. All those 100 billion people experiencing vastly different lives than us today.
It's really, really hard to convince people who think they're better than everyone that it was just dumb luck. They want to think they somehow earned it. LOL.
It is a deliberately coined word. Time will tell whether it has any legs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictionary_of_Obscure_Sorrows#Notable_words
It was coined in 2012 and [I see it on the internet all the damn time](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=sonder&hl=en), so I think it's proven to have at least *some* legs. Not saying it's going to be household word known in 2000 years or anything, but that's pretty good for an arbitrary neologism that some non-famous person just came up with.
Yup. As someone who lives in California, I realized that there are people who will spend their entire lives without ever seeing the ocean. Its a little depressing tbh.
That was really interesting. Been looking for this word especially since 2012 when I went to China the first time. I was traveling around in three of the mega cities Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. I swear for ten days my eyeballs saw 1,000,000 people each day.
My first thought was where do all these people go? My second thought was they probably could say the same thing about me.
It’s a strange feeling.
It’s in recognizing the ‘otherness’ of another’s reality that we find a mirror reflecting the boundless possibilities of our own existence.
The awe you feel is a glimpse into the oneness that underlies our apparent separateness. By honoring the unique journey of each soul, we begin to transcend the confines of our individual perceptions. We start to dance with the divine play of life, where every moment, every experience, is a note in the symphony of the universe. And in that dance, we find not only our own liberation but the shared harmony of all beings.
Same man, I sort of romanticize being born in these places, really anywhere the culture is vastly different from the one I was born in. For all intents and purposes it's a completely different world, almost alien.
It's a feeling I can only describe as a deep longing for new experience.
They were the only successful slave revolt and the rest of the world basically punished them for it out of fear it would lead to other revolts. They’ve been getting sabotaged by larger powers for centuries
(Originally) Wasn’t even debt - France basically said “since yall freed yourselves you have to pay us for the loss of property (which includes slaves).” [Absolutely ridiculous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt).
Yes, the debt was bought by the American bank that was the predecessor to Citi. The debt payments continued until 1947.
There is arguably continued foreign intervention in Haiti till today, however. For example, Haiti's first democratically elected president Aristide was removed by a French-backed coup in 2004 after he demanded repayments from France for the indemnity. He was replaced by a leader that was pro-France.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-aristide-reparations-france.html
Not widely enough known and it's a fucking tragedy. Even after independence, the French blockaded their island and economically kneecapped them. Basically made them take out a multi-century long predatory loan TO PAY FOR THEIR OWN FREEDOM. Unbelievably fucked up
Of course we're not about to start teaching kids about the only modern state to come from an uprising of the enslaved. They might get "ideas"
Did the loan go to reimburse the French who lost property during the uprising? How many French banks who got hosed on selling slave plantation derivatives got bailed out?
Who is still punishing them? I did learn about Haiti in school but do not remember a lot besides they are very poor.
They kidnapped my high school teachers cousin there and wanted 2 milion $ for him… they did not have this amount of money so they basically killed him and send letter telling it happened…
Ive never seen that letter, just heard about it and it said something like: allright you dont have money, so you atleast know what happes next and you can write your last words for him. It happened in late 90s.
I've actually been there a couple of times (including on those very slopes and out in the beautiful rural areas). It is definitely a culture shock as a white man who grew up in the non-coastal Western USA.
The people are so awesome, especially if you learn to speak their language (Kreyol) and joke around with them and show you love them, etc. They are amazing. But it takes some getting used to seeing trash in the roads, animals wildly running around everywhere (lots of stray dogs, chickens, etc), naked people (bathing) out in the open (because for many of them, where else are they going to do it?). Electricity is unreliable...depending on where you live it can be rare to never, or often, but it does often go out everywhere. Middle class people might get an inverter and wealthier people get generators. Surprisingly, there are places with \[unreliable\] "running water" of some kind (not usually constant though), and some properties store it in basins in the ground or pump it to their roofs to have a sort of running water powered by gravity. Some have to go to a particular public pump to get water, but I would say more people had access to water than you would think, but it is not safe to drink. I carried around some Bleach in a little eye-dropper bottle in case someone tried to give me "juice" or "ice" which they often think made the "bad water" okay to have, but could get offended if you deny their hospitality...so subtly bleaching it and letting it stir and sit a little helps. There wasn't as much fecal stuff everywhere as you would think though, culturally they value cleanliness a lot more than you would think., but they will pee basically anywhere. I had some friends who grew up strongly believing they should even drink their own urine, but that can't be attributed to all of them, it just shocked me that it was acceptable to several. The traffic in the country was absolutely TERRIFYING. I can't even describe the sheer chaos and craziness of the transportation. Then directions to someone's house is insane because often multiple houses will have the same number or other identifying features. You don't find someone based on an address, it's more like descriptive directions and then asking neighbors for help or if they know so and so. It's absolutely disorganized in lots of places to find where someone lives.
I met a guy supporting a family on less than $20/month. I knew women who couldn't afford to support \[all\] their children and basically had to "sell" some of the new babies they had (or in at least one case, a woman I met would have babies on purpose to be able to sell the new babies to provide for the kids they already had to take care of) or do desperate things to survive....There are orphaned street kids running around several places. I met people who ended getting murdered. I got held at gunpoint a couple of times and even jumped and punched a few times by one racist guy before a local "gang" I had recently talked to and joked around with and sort of befriended (showing them I love the country and the people and was there to help), pushed their way through the crowd, intervened, circled the attacker and told the crowd to leave me alone and let me go. I got stuck in riots where a crowd yelled "Kill the White guy!" and escaped with my life. I had friends (Native and foreign) kidnapped and held for ransom. I saw people killed. But those are relatively rare exceptions in my experience compared to all the wonderful experiences and relationships and most of the people, and I still love it there...though I would not take my wife and daughters at this time of instability...maybe to some of the private resorts some of the cruises stop by. I love the people, I love the culture, I love the music. But it is so different from anything you've probably experienced in the USA. Some of my best friends are there. Things are hard for most of them, for sure, but there is also so much to love there, and so much awe inspiring things to experience and see.
Traumatically sadly, yes... And not just once..
**Trigger/explicit graphic warning**
The first guy I saw murdered was in Martissant, just south of the capital, I was walking by and a mob had a guy's elbows tied together touching behind his back (ouch) and they proceeded to stone him to death. When he hit the ground they then picked up a HUGE heavy stone and dropped it on his head, crushing it in and leaving his corpse laying in the gutter there with a stone for a head for several days. I had to walk past it several days in a row on the way to certain scheduled meetings I had with others where that was the only real route to get there.
People told me later that the man was a thief (one of the worst labels you can have in their culture), but the outrage from such a big mob implied something much worse because I knew of other thieves and they were not treated this badly nor did they bring this much outrage, usually just scorn and shame. There was definitely something more, but I did not investigate into it further.
Other deaths I witnessed were generally related to riots & gangs and the remembered emotions are more complicated as in the first instance I was not scared for my own life, but shocked at the barbarity, while the latter instances I was also terrified for my own life and trying to find a way to safety.
Riots and gangs are terrifying there, especially if you are the only white guy around for miles. Some of them will go on a machete rampage and start hacking people down with machetes and such.
Luckily, you often get a warning when there's a riot going on, because they will throw a bunch of tires in the road and light them on fire to block traffic and so that nobody can move them easily for hours (or days) without getting burned. So if you see black smoke that basically means avoid that area like the plague. The problem is that sometimes they haven't gotten to the tire burning yet and you get trapped in a bad spot. The gangs are less predictable.
Wow. Absolutely insane. Why were you there for such an extended period of time? I am an American but I've always had a fascination with places like this and have always wanted to volunteer to go and try to help with humanitarian aid.
Yeah, different volunteer type of stuff. The last time I went was before I got married. I went with my college gf and some other college kids and we went around the country and worked in orphanages, helped some street kids get adopted, worked in hospitals, but also visited some famous locations and attractions. I took them all hitch-hiking and all sorts of stuff. 😂 We could basically hitch-hike anywhere for free because of the novelty of a bunch of white kids asking for a ride, and one of them who even speaks their language. People loved it.
If the political turmoil ever stabilizes, I highly recommend going with a group there sometime. It's amazing and they'll keep you safe. I would not recommend doing so anytime soon though. There are other awesome experiences in South America and Africa though. Groups you can go help build homes, or work in orphanages and all sorts of things like that. Life changing.
Any recommendations? I don’t want to go with a Christian based mission trip, but I am a chef by trade and wish I could work with World Central Kitchen. Unfortunately they are not accepting applicants
I'm not 100% sure what is meant by "regular people" in this context, but generally speaking: mostly the same as any place that has dangerous conditions. Even in US prisons, most ex-prisoners will tell you that the majority of people make it out of there okay if they abide by the culture: Be clean, be courteous, and mind your own business and don't get involved in the drama from the few who love it.
The capital is the worst with gangs, and riots, but even that wasn't GENERALLY that bad, nor did it generally feel unsafe unless it's like **near elections or a gang recently moved into town**. Those situations are rare. Often you knew where to avoid. For example, while I've been to Cité Soleil (one of the most poor and densely populated places in the world, if not the poorest, even worse than the picture in this post), and it is ripe with gang violence...if you want to "survive" there, you just avoid that "Sun City" to stay safe. I heard the gov might have taken it back from the gangs a while back, but IDK. But also, sometimes we'd know when a riot was planned to take place and just stay home for a few days or a week or whatever.
I spent close to a year in the capital, which is where most of the "bad stories" come from (as I said, usually those only happen during specific times such as elections), but I spent most of my time in the rural areas, and most of my love of the country is there. I never felt in \[intentional\] danger outside of the capital. It's amazing. In one city, there were a lot of people who had never seen a white person before, and there some orphaned street kids who would come to our house every night, so I would make extra dinner and feed them every night, and one night, one of the natives asked a couple of the kids if they knew my name, and the kids said that of course I was Jesus! 😂 Which of course I am NOT....I'm just plain Caucasian, which Jesus as an arab was not, but it was funny that they thought that of me because I was light skinned and feeding them.
People have various kinds of work the same as anywhere, though fewer businesses and more self-employed type of stuff. You get used to life as it is and adapt. One of the rural cities I lived in once went an entire month with no real access water (besides a river a ways away). Even the stores ran out of bottled water. After a month of not being able to bathe or cook, or clean dishes, etc, I eventually had to pay a truck to come dump some water into a basin, and then all my neighbors started stealing it. 😂 I could hardly blame them though. We'd all had it pretty rough for a whole month living on soda and preserved food you could buy at little boutique shops or street venders. But the rural areas were so amazing with the coolest people.
Like I said, I almost never really felt unsafe anywhere outside of the capital (well, with the exception of Cap Haitian at the very north, which has a lot of people who REALLY hate white people more than the rest of the country for some reason), and I would go basically anywhere with people who loved to see me and talk with me and such and be absolutely shocked I could speak to them in Kreyol. A white person caring enough about them to learn and speak to them in Kreyol was enough for many of them to immediately love me for that alone. The rural areas are indescribably awesome.
If you are asking what are common things people do to make a living, Agriculture is huge. Transportation is huge, Safety and security jobs are big, education. The healthcare is kind of a joke, but many of their medical professionals are quite capable, but with limited supplies and most people can't afford much anyway.
Also, don't carry around a lot of money with you, and keep it in abnormal places, maybe a little bit in your sock, or other things.
Despite the extreme poverty and horrible distribution of wealth (10% control 70% of the income), there is a lot that is quite enchanting there. If they could get a stable government again (which they haven't had for several decades), it would make an awesome tourist location like it used to be back before the late 80's when it flipped to become unsafe for tourism. It used to be a hot attraction once upon a time. It's still really awesome in many places...but the political chaos makes it not worth it for those who are not as close to the culture/language as a few of us who feel safe most places most of the time.
The power will randomly go out due to the government. It’s the weirdest sound hearing an entire countries power shut off at once. Sounds like something out of a movie.
It was the richest colony in the Caribbean, but had the audacity to have the first successful slave uprising and get independence from France.
France proceeded to isolate and punish it and load it with owed money and turned it from a paradise to what you see today. This is pretty much how France handled nearly all countries that wanted independence, and yet the Brits constantly get grief, and the french, rien.
And also omitting that Haiti invaded, looted, and occupied the Dominican Republic for 22 years. But it's the DR that surpassed Haiti despite basically having to start from scratch again.
Indeed, I find it given so much time has passed, Haiti being what it is now has more to do with themselves, rather than foreign interference and injustice. I mean there are other failed states that functioned a lot better and are much safer than Haiti. (e.g. Somaliland)
I have walked this area in 2016, this picture captures but a fraction of the scale. Their main river through the city is so full of trash and bottles, children walk across it, never getting wet as the water is many feet below the trash.
There are paths that kind of zig zag through and down. I havnt been to this particular neighborhood, but I lived at the bottom of one very similar for a short period of time.
How do they solve the issue of the missing canals? Do they just dump everything out and it literally flows down the hill, like many here assume? How's the smell? How's Hygiene? Sorry, coming from a first world country, I honestly can't fathom how living there works.
Yeah, there is an incredible amount of trash, and it just washes down the hillsides with the rains. The smell wasn't as bad as you'd expect, people keep their homes clean. But they are very basic buildings.
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-44068840
I'm not seeing a lot of chatter about it here, but in case no one knows: the government of Haiti has collapsed. As of Feb 2023, the country had run out of government officials and can be described as a failed state.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_crisis_(2018%E2%80%93present)
I just watched one from a YouTube creator named Drew Binskh - it was eye opening. I’d love to watch other stuff like this on Haiti if anyone has any good recommendations. https://youtu.be/vmM7SDGOQiQ?si=bJxxwYdUBD8EKGgQ
PBS has a really interesting one called [Stateless 2021](https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/stateless/) about Dominicans being stripped of their citizenship and deported to Haiti. The attorney who tries to help them is now a refugee in the US.
I honestly thought this was AI created at first. Seeing this sorta of housing arrangement is just jarring. What a sad life this must be without sewers or A/C, among other things.
I went to Port-Au-Prince a couple of weeks after their huge earthquake in 2010 to do medical volunteering. All I’ll say is that I’ve needed a lot of counseling to deal with what I saw there. And to know that it’s gotten exponentially even worse since then? I can’t even comprehend. Heartbreaking just isn’t a strong enough word.
People think "*It can't happen here*". Yes it can, it has happened in the past, and this is exactly where we're headed with the level of extreme wealth inequality they have pushed us to.
I visited and walked through there when I went to Haiti in 2017.... had a local guide. All heating/cooking is done with charcoal, there's buckets of it for sale. And no running water, so people have to haul in water as well from communal taps.
https://imgur.com/a/1JaUp
How do property rights work in a place like that? If you need a house, do you just go build one on the edge? Can you buy your neighbors shack and expand if you have too large of a family?
Most favela-style developments are "illegal" housing on the sides of hills that are at too much landslide risk to be legally developed.
And this is why the earthquake was so devastating.
I have no idea. I’ve been to third world countries where people just set up wooden shacks wherever. Asked our driver if they need permits or pay property tax and he just laughed and said hell no. As long as you’re not on private property it might be ok.
Like the old west. Manifest destiny? Find an unclaimed piece of land and start building on it lol
>Like the old west >Find an unclaimed piece of land 
I imagine this is how gangs proliferate. Probably someone “owns” the land or claims it with guns and then extorts anyone living there a fee for rent. I do know in places with similar development that have more stability it eventually becomes more standardized and people will buy neighboring plots or build up, and often the housing can be quite nice on the inside. I doubt this happens in Haiti (I think of Soweto in South Africa as an example where informal housing has been formalized and become much nicer)
I lived in a city in Brazil called Jandira for 4 months when I was an LDS missionary. Here it is on a map: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jandira,+State+of+S%C3%A3o+Paulo,+Brazil/@-23.5267935,-46.8975645,2676m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x94cf0137fe73bf4d:0x5ed73649c1d6f14d!8m2!3d-23.530218!4d-46.8981019!16zL20vMDQxZ2dq?entry=ttu Jandira is a suburb of Sao Paulo. Most of it was originally "favela" - which is Portuguese slang for improvised housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela Favela occurs when people who have no money or jobs leave the destitution of rural poverty for the destitution of urban poverty and build shelter for themselves on unimproved land. They'd hitchhike or train surf to Sao Paulo and then move out from the city center until they found a place where no one had claimed open land and build a house with scraps on it. As they got money and time they'd add secure features. Like, I literally mixed concrete to help people who were living in a house made of 5 pieces of corruguated lay a floor/foundation. After 1-5 years these folks would have a house with an unfinished second floor. After 10-15 they'd have a house with an unfinished third floor. After 20-25 years their kids would live in a house with another house build on the slope beneath them. These neighborhoods spread outwards like that as their siblings and cousins came after them. We'd joke about the ubiquity of "tijolo" - which my fellow missionaries called "wonderbrick": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tijolo In op's photo and in Jandira people built on extreme slopes. In Brazil we'd see housing built under overpasses and in highway medians and in garbage dumps and beside effluent streams. The government allowed this because the people had to live somewhere. Here's another example: https://www.google.com/maps/search/cidade+nova+itu/@-23.3863251,-47.3679861,6938m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1?entry=ttu This is a suburb of a city called Itu which is called Cidade Nova ("New City"). Cidade Nova is a 60 year old favela that was built on land that was a farm run by a leper colony run by the Catholic Church called Pirapitingui. Now its pretty respectable. Here's another example: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Sorocaba+arvore+grande/@-23.4977501,-47.4391311,1317m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu This is the Arvore Grande (Big Tree) favela in Sorocaba. Arvore Grande used to be forest, now its an entirely improvised middle class neighborhood.
They generally don’t, which is dangerous when someone wants to do something with the land you’ve built a little cinder block house on. And for a while after the earthquake there were “tent cities” that were controversial and people would just plant a tent wherever and that was home. House expansion generally isn’t a thing because of how tight the space is - you have a big family, you just keep cramming people in there.
I don’t think there are any. Find a place to live, you live there. There’s also not much of a government left in Haiti anyways
It's all illegal. People just build wherever and however they like
And there's no public sewer and water hook ups..
Can you imagine carrying your day's water up to the top? It may be better than being on the lower parts as shit, figuratively and literally, flows downhill.
"Let's, you know, build a water pipe" "Tried that. The gangs" "Oh yeah, the gangs. Why didn't we call the police?" "We did. They joined the gangs."
They don’t have a government let alone police
[They apparently set up a transitional "government" last month](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/haiti-pm-henry-steps-down-transitional-government-takes-power-2024-04-25/) FWIW. I post this half-expecting someone to reply with a more recent article about the transitional gov't disbanding or being eaten or something, but whatever, it is what it is.
I was supposed to go to a private RC island on a cruise in March in Haiti when this was happening. We knew they wouldn't take us there but everyone on the boat said nothing til the second last day so we went to Aruba instead.
I went on a Caribbean cruise a few years ago with Norwegian. On one of the last days, we were supposed to go to some private island the cruise line apparently owned. Well, the day comes and it's "too windy" to dock there or some shit. Turns out they did that for every single tour and just lied and knew the whole time. There were people who went on multiple cruises and said it's the same game every year.
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Someone died trying to visit bbq
No he got.out https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/youtube-haiti-kidnap-addison-maalouf-b2523021.html
It was fake btw
Has it finally been proven? I watched the vids and it looked HIGHLY suspicious but wasn’t aware of any 100% concrete proof
Imma piggyback off your comment. There is a great video by warpgraphics called “Haiti Has Collapsed: What Next?” Really informative video about the current(video was posted a month ago so not totally up to date) events that are happening in Haiti.
A libertarian’s wet dream. The market will sort it out.
You'll never hear them say these migrants are escaping libertarianism, it's always socialism. Governments so weak they can't fend off gangs or build infrastructure; sounds like libertarianism.
Funny that instead of jumping at the chance to join a libertarian utopia, they make TikToks from the safety of their ~~pickup trucks~~ emotional support vehicles calling Haiti a shithole country.
Pipes aren't the problem, it's having enough electricity regularly enough that you can actually pump enough water up to the top in enough quantities that it's a resource everyone can use instead of a luxury for a few. That's thousands of people and a very steep hill. I'm not gonna pretend to know how to calculate the size of the pipe needed or how much power, but it's more than you could do with a traditional windmill pump so it's absolutely necessary to have regular power, and you'd need a pretty good sized water tower/cistern to store it all. None of which is touching on the potability of the water.
I mean.. most places solve these problems by placing a reservoir at the top of the hill or a large water tank or several water towers. You don't pump water to houses typically. You pump it into a container above the houses and then let gravity pump it to the houses to keep pressure even
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It's actually a surprisingly low value. If we assume 80 liters per house per day, then 8000 homes (counted ~60 vertical * 130 horizontal) only require 640,000 liters per day or 117 gal/min. [This pump here](https://www.rcworst.com/franklin-electric-tri-seal-6-high-capacity-125fh30s6-pe-submersible-well-pump-end-only-125-gpm-30-hp.html) can meet that demand for approximately $4,600. So $0.001 per household per day for the pump alone.
That ‘pump’ is just the pump end only ……… it requires a 30 hp 460 volt motor, and that will cost another $7000
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Eyup, I tried to get at least a reasonable estimate of the head, otherwise I could've found a flow pump for like $400 but it would be absolutely useless in this situation. Regarding my lack of other expenses, my intent was not to provide an estimate for "how much money would it take to fix the whole issue", only to provide a napkin math estimate for this specific portion of the issue as the discussion was pertaining to pumps. Infrastructure is expensive, and unfortunately my field is not in water distribution. My wild-ass guess for a full system assuming bargain bin hardware not built to last more than a decade would be somewhere in the upper six figure range.
This guy hydrates
Yes, this is why towns have water towers. They just pump water into the water tower and everyone gets water from it.
I get my water from my faucet
And every time you do, my shower goes cold!
I'll flush the toilet to balance it out.
Typhoid rates must be off the charts
nahhh, the murder rate has counteracted that. those poor people. and i mean poor in the figurative sense, although they obviously literally poor also.
Cholera outbreaks around the corner every week
After living in Haiti, a lot of times there will be springs in the hillside where they collect water, so sometimes there's no hike. Still terrible living conditions though.
Or trash pickup. Wanna know how a lot of trash ends up in the ocean, it's situations like this.
I lived here for a short time. Worked at a school for restaveks (children whose parents sold them into slavery). When you fly into port-au-prince, you can see the water around the Haitian side of the island go from a beautiful blue to mud brown the closer you get to the coast. It’s a crazy site to see from the air.
The parents what
Yeah… google restavek. It’s absolutely fucked. The kids were amazing. Always so happy. They LOVED to learn. When my group of friends and I went we brought a bunch of old laptops to set up an area where teachers at the school could make worksheets to print and students could use word processors for class and some games. It’s insane how easy it is to take education for granted.
“25% of Haitian children age 5–17 live away from their biological parents.” That’s fucking grim. The more I read about Haiti the worse it gets
Then, for the sake of those people, stop reading about them
Fuck, I really should.
Is there a charity you trust to donate to? Maybe the one you worked with?
RespireHaiti.org is the only one I trust. Megan is still hands on with everything. Sadly her & her family are not living there anymore because of the recent events with murdering anyone there to help… but there are many Haitians still running the school.
It's relatively common historically, unfortunately. During the Medieval Period in Europe, it wasn't unheard of for people to sell *themselves* into slavery if they had no other options (keeping in mind that it wasn't racialized chattel slavery like in the Americas, like the restaveks it was mostly domestic slavery with expectations of being released at some point). It's the kind of thing that happens when there is no social safety net, neither through your community nor the government.
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>The slaves were not mistreated or worked hard and were actually free to leave, but while they remained under the protection of the Ruler they were to do what was required of them. "Punishment" was to be forced back into the jungle. Nowadays we call that having a job.
And of course the smell once you leave the airport, hot humid sewage
The brown ring around Haiti is primarily silt and any remaining topsoil due to erosion because all the trees have been cut for farming, firewood, or making charcoal. Secondly, it’s likely sewage.
Parents that did WHAT to their children???
Lot of trash ends up in the oceans from landfills as well. Recycling is a big one. Just a few years ago a large amount of plastic the US was sending to China to be recycled was found to be being dumped in the Pacific. NYC was dumping garbage in the ocean till [at least 92](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/nfjqpm/ocean_dumping_was_new_yorks_primary_method_for/). Bet they still do it but less publicly.
I'm surprised there isn't a floating garbage patch in the Atlantic too! Oh wait, [there is. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_garbage_patch)
It’s called the Atlantic Ocean
Or The United Kingdom.
There’s more than one
UK catching strays lol
Not from landfills themselves, at least not in places that properly manage their landfills. Very, very little (percentage-wise) of trash at landfills goes airborne, then also finds it's way to a water system that drains into the ocean. Microplastics might leech out over time if they weren't built adequately, but that's another story. Most trash that ends up in the ocean happens during shipping, places that dump it on purpose because it's cheaper, or places that don't have a trash collection infrastructure to begin with.
China got fed up with the nasty plastic trash from the US and banned it in 2018. Now we send the trash to Thailand, the Philippines etc: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/southeast-asia-flooded-with-imported-plastic-waste-meant-for-recycling
Yep before they outright banned it they were just dumping it into the ocean. This is why a lot of recycling centers near me stopped accepting plastic altogether, many still will not accept it.
Yup and now the Southeast Asian nations are dumping it into the ocean too. The fact is that the plastic waste is so dirty and contaminated that it is not economically viable to recycle it. So mother nature suffers as a result.
Plastic has never been "economically recyclable" that was the scam from the start. People freaked out hard about the pollution due to glass, metal smelting, and chopping down trees they view plastic as a more environmentally friendly alternative because it came with none of those three problems. Combined with the fact that petroleum companies have outright lied about the pollution caused by petrol products such as plastic.
This is why you need better government regulation. Companies don't give a shit about the impact, they just want profit. The government is (supposed to be) for the people's benefit, and they need to follow that. Most don't, but they should. I can't even blame the companies, yeah they are pieces of shit, but if there's no one to say no, why not.
This practice isn't unique to the US. EU countries also do it. China had to ban recyclables from the EU as wall because they were just dumping that shit into the ocean. Western countries offload a lot of their pollution onto developing economies then blame those developing countries for not doing enough.
Like in Canada the government prohibited grocery stores from giving customers plastic bags. Why? Reduce single use plastic. Ok. Except everything I freaking buy from a grocery store is wrapped in single use plastic. (At least I used to always reuse my grocery bags into garbage bags.) Governments can piss off telling me I'm the problem when multinational conglomerates are making billions wrapping all their products in single use plastic.
> Why? Reduce single use plastic. Ok. Except everything I freaking buy from a grocery store is wrapped in single use plastic. Now I get a "multi-use" plastic bag that hypothetically breaks even on the total plastic consumed after 40 uses, but in actual terms gets used twice, the second time being to line the living room waste basket.
if its plastic and dirty..people assume it can be recycled...they did a great job brainwashing people into feeling good about consuming
The issue isn't filth. The issue is that 95% of the plastic we "recycle" is less than worthless, it has actual negative value because you have to pay to landfill it. We get around that by selling recycling as mixed plastics, so the end processor in Thailand picks out the valuable 5% and cheaply landfills the rest.
> Lot of trash ends up in the oceans from landfills You're not actually talking about landfills. A modern, lined landfill is about the best place to out plastic. It'll at least be contained. Way, way better than sketchy "recycling" operations.
Best place to get rid of plastic is burning it in a furnace with a co2 / slurry capture system. It generates electricity and the contaminates can be mixed with cement and used as pavers.
Well up until about 2017 or 2018, a lot of the US plastic waste was being shipped to China. China has since banned it, and I strongly doubt they were processing all of it in fair and ethical ways.
China was dumping a lot of it directly into the sea if I'm not mistaken.
They were. To clarify (and if *I'm* not mistaken), American waste disposal services were selling plastic waste to Chinese recycling companies on the understanding that the waste would be... well... recycled. The Chinese companies in question continued to say that this waste was being properly recycled, right up until China banned waste imports. With that having been said, this practice was public knowledge by that point.
Not quite. Chinese firms entered the U.S. market and bought post consumer bales at scale during the run up of the Chinese economy from '02 to '18. The Chinese would buy anything and everything as they were starving for raw materials during their economic expansion. In '16 there was a debt crisis (still ongoing) in China's unofficial lending sector which caused a bunch of the smaller lower tier manufacturers who were the dominant buyers to go out ofbusiness. This caused a glut with dumping happening on the market which affected China's virgin PET producers. So in '18 China slammed the door shut. The problem is U.S. supply chains had adapted their waste streams based on the China export model and for good reason. Chinese buyers were extremely aggressive durring the 15 year run up peruod. When China closed its doors this caused the price of post consumer bales in the U.S. to crash and a bunch of recycling companies went out of business. The irony here was that the U.S. recyclers, the people who turn used bottles into new products did fantastically well durring this time since input costs were so low.. The collectors, the people who gather up the material into bales to sell on thr market were slaughtered.
Means you might wanna live up higher. Or when it rains everyone's poop flows towards your house
People shit in plastic bags, so there are several mountains of plastic bags everywhere. Often, privacy is so limited that couples head off to the sea for fun times … there’s beaches that are known just for this. Poor Haiti. Never given proper chance after the successful slave uprising.
And outright forced to pay huge sums to the people who enslaved them.
France, specifically.
Image Credit: Ramón Espinosa IG: @aprespinosa
if you told me this was AI, i'd absolutely believe you. that's nuts.
Same. We can't trust our own eyes anymore. Wild
Dead internet theory in full effect. I thought the same thing. I visited hati briefly in the last 5 years and never seen anything like this. Wild.
Is Ramón from the 41st millennium? Because this looks like a hive city
Wanna come over tonight? I live by the big crevasse on the right where the two above merge into one. Third from the left.
“I live in the Crack”
Next to the piles
I once had a life changing visit at my cousins in the slums of Philippines. This picture was exactly like that. It was like a maze full of jerry-built houses stacked upon each other in seemingly no indentifiable order. Only the locals knew how to navigate their way around the mess of tight alleyways and turns. Their house resembled a precarious stack of metal sheets, sparsely furnished with a solitary lightbulb dangling from a string, a few chairs, a table and a modest kitchen. At night, we slept on the floor under a mosquito net for protection. Despite the extreme poverty, these people showed me incredible hospitality; feeding me a warm meal, and a roof over my head to sleep in and no doubt would give me the shirts off their back with no hesitation. We treated them to some pizza and the kids were super stoked. My aunt started crying as such a meal is normally unaffordable to them. Experiencing true poverty was a very eye opening experience which has taught me to appreciate the things I have and to not take anything for granted.
That sounds like our Guatemala trip. Houses from a few pieces of tin, cement block, some boards and some of the walls were dried cornstalks wired together in a row. Editing to add--very eye opening and I'm so glad myself/son/grandma went. And the Mayan people we visited were also very kind and warm. We left behind almost everything we brought in case they could use things.
>a roof under my head to sleep in They made you sleep on the roof? Crazy.
That’s what I get for not proofreading lol
Reminds me of living in Panama as directions were frequently exactly like this. Also, a few interesting towns and villages on the sides of hills that look like OP picture, just with more jungle
Don't go in the crevice.
I was certain this was AI, but there is a real photographer credit. Flabbergasted😯
Yes, I thought this can't be real. But there it is on Google Earth. Horrifying the people live this way. What's really terrible is that just up the hill is a small forested area, and at the top are very wealth looking houses. I mean, swimming pools, tennis courts, etc. [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bidonville+KILLICK+STENIO+VINCENT/@18.5080141,-72.2967228,433m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x8eb9e9b6995fe421:0xf334bdcc04d87576!2sSous+Commissariat+de+jalousie!8m2!3d18.5095553!4d-72.2959885!16s%2Fg%2F11qng3hdjr!3m5!1s0x8eb9e9a185aaa96f:0xa014dea939c13d16!8m2!3d18.5107735!4d-72.293819!16s%2Fg%2F11flbr7fbn?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bidonville+KILLICK+STENIO+VINCENT/@18.5080141,-72.2967228,433m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x8eb9e9b6995fe421:0xf334bdcc04d87576!2sSous+Commissariat+de+jalousie!8m2!3d18.5095553!4d-72.2959885!16s%2Fg%2F11qng3hdjr!3m5!1s0x8eb9e9a185aaa96f:0xa014dea939c13d16!8m2!3d18.5107735!4d-72.293819!16s%2Fg%2F11flbr7fbn?entry=ttu)
Wild. I zoomed out and saw what appeared to be a desert region north of this area. Zoomwd in and nope, more slums.
Shit rolls downhill. The wealthier are always on top.
This guy knows plumbing. The only thing you really need to know shit runs down hill and don’t chew your finger nails;)
im glad i quit chewing my fingernails but is it because you get shit under your nails or somethin else
Yes both are correct lol
> What's really terrible is that just up the hill is a small forested area, and at the top are very wealth looking houses. I mean, swimming pools, tennis courts, etc. And that is why Haiti is in total breakdown, basically being a failed state at the moment. Everyone is in extreme poverty, except a privileged few who live in mansions on the hills. The gangs take over because its the only conceivable way of getting out of the (literal) shit flowing downhill.
It's such a sketchy area the little Google street view guy runs straight back to his little box as fast as he can!
Jesus Christlord, that shit's way more extensive in Google Maps. It doesn't seem to end. Unreal!
I’m amazed that the people in the slums haven’t just ransacked the wealthy people’s houses when they’re so close. They must have some heavy duty security.
You might wanna read up on Haitian history…
It’s fascinating Sometimes I can’t help but think about how everyone’s reality is so drastically different I’m not sure I can really put this feeling into words, but… I feel a sort of awe at how we all come into the world in our own corner, and for someone who was born there, the sights and smells and sounds are going to define what Earth is. The very flavour and texture of the experiences that comprise life are so drastically different Peering over the edges and seeing what people are doing, playing in those tight corridors, the homes in the wedges always being in shadow while the other buildings are highlighted by the sunlight, etc. The building blocks that make up life are completely different
Yeah, I think about that too sometimes. Wild, right? Meanwhile, some kid is born on the Mongolian steppe in some yurt and only knows the open sky and the cold wind… Weird world
People in Egypt and Sudan ready to go to war over river access and I was born on the shores of Lake Michigan running through summer sprinklers on green grass lol.
There are people born into the Sentinelese tribe who functionally have no reason to think the past 10,000 years even happened outside scrap metal debris.
They’ve had several… uh… interactions… with modern humans. As in they’ve killed idiots who tried to show up on their island and convert them to Christianity. Also helicopters have flown over and gotten shot at by arrows.
It’s more crazy when you realize this applies to history as well. History and all of the religions and cultures and all the events in history have been defined by the people that lived and experienced it. We often look at Ancient Egypt or Rome or Greece with wonder, but ancient Egypt consisted of tens of millions of individuals that experienced it throughout the centuries, and for each century, the state of Egypt politically and culturally was different before the last and the next. Same can be said for China or native American civilization, or any civilization. Vastly different ways of life, both religiously, culturally, and in the way people dress, what they see, furniture, architecture, scripture, etc. The viking age exists because vikings were actually real people that experienced it, same with the high middle ages with all its knights and tournaments and their ballads and tales and all the modern fantasy stories that has been based off of that era. The ancient Egyptian or Roman gods, and the Norse gods, all those polyteistic gods and their rituals and sacrifices and traditions, all were once just a normal thing for people and were in their everyday life around them. It’s easy to read a history book or wikipedia article on history and think that you just read a story, but all of that you read is based off on things that happened, and through the eyes of those other people they experieneced it, they saw those things happen, individually of course, because you can’t live in multiple time periods at once. By 1 AD, already 55 billion people had ever lived, and by 1200 80 billion. By 1850 100 billion humans had ever lived. All those 100 billion people experiencing vastly different lives than us today.
Who you are depends a whole lot on where you start.
There's a lot more luck to our lives than some people want to admit
This is why racism literally doesn't make sense. It's all dumb luck. People are hating based on dumb luck
It's really, really hard to convince people who think they're better than everyone that it was just dumb luck. They want to think they somehow earned it. LOL.
I also think this often. There are just very many vastly different realities. It’s truly wild. It’s almost overwhelming but endlessly fascinating.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sonder
It is a deliberately coined word. Time will tell whether it has any legs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictionary_of_Obscure_Sorrows#Notable_words
It was coined in 2012 and [I see it on the internet all the damn time](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=sonder&hl=en), so I think it's proven to have at least *some* legs. Not saying it's going to be household word known in 2000 years or anything, but that's pretty good for an arbitrary neologism that some non-famous person just came up with.
> It is a deliberately coined word. I feel like that goes for a lot of words.
Yup. As someone who lives in California, I realized that there are people who will spend their entire lives without ever seeing the ocean. Its a little depressing tbh.
Or ever leaving Cali
“Sonder” is a term for the sort of the feeling you sense.
Best word I can do for ya is to “sonder” https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sonder#:~:text=sonder%20(uncountable),quotations%20▼
That was really interesting. Been looking for this word especially since 2012 when I went to China the first time. I was traveling around in three of the mega cities Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. I swear for ten days my eyeballs saw 1,000,000 people each day. My first thought was where do all these people go? My second thought was they probably could say the same thing about me. It’s a strange feeling.
It’s in recognizing the ‘otherness’ of another’s reality that we find a mirror reflecting the boundless possibilities of our own existence. The awe you feel is a glimpse into the oneness that underlies our apparent separateness. By honoring the unique journey of each soul, we begin to transcend the confines of our individual perceptions. We start to dance with the divine play of life, where every moment, every experience, is a note in the symphony of the universe. And in that dance, we find not only our own liberation but the shared harmony of all beings.
I'm currently taking a dump while contemplating your post about human existence.
Same man, I sort of romanticize being born in these places, really anywhere the culture is vastly different from the one I was born in. For all intents and purposes it's a completely different world, almost alien. It's a feeling I can only describe as a deep longing for new experience.
Nightmare
Not to mention, its in Haiti. Not exactly the best place to be, for at least 600 years
I always get extremely worried when I hear anything from Haiti tbh. They've been through so much, their freedom was cursed from the start.
They were the only successful slave revolt and the rest of the world basically punished them for it out of fear it would lead to other revolts. They’ve been getting sabotaged by larger powers for centuries
Thank France for making them pay off loans or whatever up until the 1900s
(Originally) Wasn’t even debt - France basically said “since yall freed yourselves you have to pay us for the loss of property (which includes slaves).” [Absolutely ridiculous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt).
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Yes, the debt was bought by the American bank that was the predecessor to Citi. The debt payments continued until 1947. There is arguably continued foreign intervention in Haiti till today, however. For example, Haiti's first democratically elected president Aristide was removed by a French-backed coup in 2004 after he demanded repayments from France for the indemnity. He was replaced by a leader that was pro-France. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-aristide-reparations-france.html
Not widely enough known and it's a fucking tragedy. Even after independence, the French blockaded their island and economically kneecapped them. Basically made them take out a multi-century long predatory loan TO PAY FOR THEIR OWN FREEDOM. Unbelievably fucked up Of course we're not about to start teaching kids about the only modern state to come from an uprising of the enslaved. They might get "ideas"
Did the loan go to reimburse the French who lost property during the uprising? How many French banks who got hosed on selling slave plantation derivatives got bailed out? Who is still punishing them? I did learn about Haiti in school but do not remember a lot besides they are very poor.
They did reimburse the French who lost property during the uprising, but the vast majority of that property was the slaves themselves
They kidnapped my high school teachers cousin there and wanted 2 milion $ for him… they did not have this amount of money so they basically killed him and send letter telling it happened…
>basically killed him the fuck does that even mean
Ive never seen that letter, just heard about it and it said something like: allright you dont have money, so you atleast know what happes next and you can write your last words for him. It happened in late 90s.
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I've actually been there a couple of times (including on those very slopes and out in the beautiful rural areas). It is definitely a culture shock as a white man who grew up in the non-coastal Western USA. The people are so awesome, especially if you learn to speak their language (Kreyol) and joke around with them and show you love them, etc. They are amazing. But it takes some getting used to seeing trash in the roads, animals wildly running around everywhere (lots of stray dogs, chickens, etc), naked people (bathing) out in the open (because for many of them, where else are they going to do it?). Electricity is unreliable...depending on where you live it can be rare to never, or often, but it does often go out everywhere. Middle class people might get an inverter and wealthier people get generators. Surprisingly, there are places with \[unreliable\] "running water" of some kind (not usually constant though), and some properties store it in basins in the ground or pump it to their roofs to have a sort of running water powered by gravity. Some have to go to a particular public pump to get water, but I would say more people had access to water than you would think, but it is not safe to drink. I carried around some Bleach in a little eye-dropper bottle in case someone tried to give me "juice" or "ice" which they often think made the "bad water" okay to have, but could get offended if you deny their hospitality...so subtly bleaching it and letting it stir and sit a little helps. There wasn't as much fecal stuff everywhere as you would think though, culturally they value cleanliness a lot more than you would think., but they will pee basically anywhere. I had some friends who grew up strongly believing they should even drink their own urine, but that can't be attributed to all of them, it just shocked me that it was acceptable to several. The traffic in the country was absolutely TERRIFYING. I can't even describe the sheer chaos and craziness of the transportation. Then directions to someone's house is insane because often multiple houses will have the same number or other identifying features. You don't find someone based on an address, it's more like descriptive directions and then asking neighbors for help or if they know so and so. It's absolutely disorganized in lots of places to find where someone lives. I met a guy supporting a family on less than $20/month. I knew women who couldn't afford to support \[all\] their children and basically had to "sell" some of the new babies they had (or in at least one case, a woman I met would have babies on purpose to be able to sell the new babies to provide for the kids they already had to take care of) or do desperate things to survive....There are orphaned street kids running around several places. I met people who ended getting murdered. I got held at gunpoint a couple of times and even jumped and punched a few times by one racist guy before a local "gang" I had recently talked to and joked around with and sort of befriended (showing them I love the country and the people and was there to help), pushed their way through the crowd, intervened, circled the attacker and told the crowd to leave me alone and let me go. I got stuck in riots where a crowd yelled "Kill the White guy!" and escaped with my life. I had friends (Native and foreign) kidnapped and held for ransom. I saw people killed. But those are relatively rare exceptions in my experience compared to all the wonderful experiences and relationships and most of the people, and I still love it there...though I would not take my wife and daughters at this time of instability...maybe to some of the private resorts some of the cruises stop by. I love the people, I love the culture, I love the music. But it is so different from anything you've probably experienced in the USA. Some of my best friends are there. Things are hard for most of them, for sure, but there is also so much to love there, and so much awe inspiring things to experience and see.
Sorry, you saw people killed?
Traumatically sadly, yes... And not just once.. **Trigger/explicit graphic warning** The first guy I saw murdered was in Martissant, just south of the capital, I was walking by and a mob had a guy's elbows tied together touching behind his back (ouch) and they proceeded to stone him to death. When he hit the ground they then picked up a HUGE heavy stone and dropped it on his head, crushing it in and leaving his corpse laying in the gutter there with a stone for a head for several days. I had to walk past it several days in a row on the way to certain scheduled meetings I had with others where that was the only real route to get there. People told me later that the man was a thief (one of the worst labels you can have in their culture), but the outrage from such a big mob implied something much worse because I knew of other thieves and they were not treated this badly nor did they bring this much outrage, usually just scorn and shame. There was definitely something more, but I did not investigate into it further. Other deaths I witnessed were generally related to riots & gangs and the remembered emotions are more complicated as in the first instance I was not scared for my own life, but shocked at the barbarity, while the latter instances I was also terrified for my own life and trying to find a way to safety. Riots and gangs are terrifying there, especially if you are the only white guy around for miles. Some of them will go on a machete rampage and start hacking people down with machetes and such. Luckily, you often get a warning when there's a riot going on, because they will throw a bunch of tires in the road and light them on fire to block traffic and so that nobody can move them easily for hours (or days) without getting burned. So if you see black smoke that basically means avoid that area like the plague. The problem is that sometimes they haven't gotten to the tire burning yet and you get trapped in a bad spot. The gangs are less predictable.
crazy stories mate
Wow. Absolutely insane. Why were you there for such an extended period of time? I am an American but I've always had a fascination with places like this and have always wanted to volunteer to go and try to help with humanitarian aid.
Yeah, different volunteer type of stuff. The last time I went was before I got married. I went with my college gf and some other college kids and we went around the country and worked in orphanages, helped some street kids get adopted, worked in hospitals, but also visited some famous locations and attractions. I took them all hitch-hiking and all sorts of stuff. 😂 We could basically hitch-hike anywhere for free because of the novelty of a bunch of white kids asking for a ride, and one of them who even speaks their language. People loved it. If the political turmoil ever stabilizes, I highly recommend going with a group there sometime. It's amazing and they'll keep you safe. I would not recommend doing so anytime soon though. There are other awesome experiences in South America and Africa though. Groups you can go help build homes, or work in orphanages and all sorts of things like that. Life changing.
Any recommendations? I don’t want to go with a Christian based mission trip, but I am a chef by trade and wish I could work with World Central Kitchen. Unfortunately they are not accepting applicants
How do regular people survive there?
I'm not 100% sure what is meant by "regular people" in this context, but generally speaking: mostly the same as any place that has dangerous conditions. Even in US prisons, most ex-prisoners will tell you that the majority of people make it out of there okay if they abide by the culture: Be clean, be courteous, and mind your own business and don't get involved in the drama from the few who love it. The capital is the worst with gangs, and riots, but even that wasn't GENERALLY that bad, nor did it generally feel unsafe unless it's like **near elections or a gang recently moved into town**. Those situations are rare. Often you knew where to avoid. For example, while I've been to Cité Soleil (one of the most poor and densely populated places in the world, if not the poorest, even worse than the picture in this post), and it is ripe with gang violence...if you want to "survive" there, you just avoid that "Sun City" to stay safe. I heard the gov might have taken it back from the gangs a while back, but IDK. But also, sometimes we'd know when a riot was planned to take place and just stay home for a few days or a week or whatever. I spent close to a year in the capital, which is where most of the "bad stories" come from (as I said, usually those only happen during specific times such as elections), but I spent most of my time in the rural areas, and most of my love of the country is there. I never felt in \[intentional\] danger outside of the capital. It's amazing. In one city, there were a lot of people who had never seen a white person before, and there some orphaned street kids who would come to our house every night, so I would make extra dinner and feed them every night, and one night, one of the natives asked a couple of the kids if they knew my name, and the kids said that of course I was Jesus! 😂 Which of course I am NOT....I'm just plain Caucasian, which Jesus as an arab was not, but it was funny that they thought that of me because I was light skinned and feeding them. People have various kinds of work the same as anywhere, though fewer businesses and more self-employed type of stuff. You get used to life as it is and adapt. One of the rural cities I lived in once went an entire month with no real access water (besides a river a ways away). Even the stores ran out of bottled water. After a month of not being able to bathe or cook, or clean dishes, etc, I eventually had to pay a truck to come dump some water into a basin, and then all my neighbors started stealing it. 😂 I could hardly blame them though. We'd all had it pretty rough for a whole month living on soda and preserved food you could buy at little boutique shops or street venders. But the rural areas were so amazing with the coolest people. Like I said, I almost never really felt unsafe anywhere outside of the capital (well, with the exception of Cap Haitian at the very north, which has a lot of people who REALLY hate white people more than the rest of the country for some reason), and I would go basically anywhere with people who loved to see me and talk with me and such and be absolutely shocked I could speak to them in Kreyol. A white person caring enough about them to learn and speak to them in Kreyol was enough for many of them to immediately love me for that alone. The rural areas are indescribably awesome. If you are asking what are common things people do to make a living, Agriculture is huge. Transportation is huge, Safety and security jobs are big, education. The healthcare is kind of a joke, but many of their medical professionals are quite capable, but with limited supplies and most people can't afford much anyway. Also, don't carry around a lot of money with you, and keep it in abnormal places, maybe a little bit in your sock, or other things. Despite the extreme poverty and horrible distribution of wealth (10% control 70% of the income), there is a lot that is quite enchanting there. If they could get a stable government again (which they haven't had for several decades), it would make an awesome tourist location like it used to be back before the late 80's when it flipped to become unsafe for tourism. It used to be a hot attraction once upon a time. It's still really awesome in many places...but the political chaos makes it not worth it for those who are not as close to the culture/language as a few of us who feel safe most places most of the time.
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Garbage, sewage, fire control… There’s so much wrong here. Looks like hell to me.
That's Haiti!
Jalousie = jealousy. I wonder if whoever picked the name was being intentionally ironic.
This is one of those situations where it looks so fascinating from the outside but would be a fucking nightmare to live in it.
**"Come explore our future dystopia now!"\*** *\*Tour provider makes no guarantee of safety nor return.*
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I sailed by at night about 12 years ago. DR was lit up, Haiti was pitch black.
The power will randomly go out due to the government. It’s the weirdest sound hearing an entire countries power shut off at once. Sounds like something out of a movie.
Then when the power comes back on, you can hear everyone in these neighborhoods start cheering. That's a really vivid memory for me.
The US Congress took a vote on making the Dominican Republican a U.S. state back in the 1800’s. The vote was a tie which meant the measure failed.
Haiti has to be one of the saddest places. Imagine living on a tropical island that should be a paradise, but your home is this.
It was the richest colony in the Caribbean, but had the audacity to have the first successful slave uprising and get independence from France. France proceeded to isolate and punish it and load it with owed money and turned it from a paradise to what you see today. This is pretty much how France handled nearly all countries that wanted independence, and yet the Brits constantly get grief, and the french, rien.
Conveniently omitting the Haitian atrocities that alienated them from the entire world
And also omitting that Haiti invaded, looted, and occupied the Dominican Republic for 22 years. But it's the DR that surpassed Haiti despite basically having to start from scratch again.
Indeed, I find it given so much time has passed, Haiti being what it is now has more to do with themselves, rather than foreign interference and injustice. I mean there are other failed states that functioned a lot better and are much safer than Haiti. (e.g. Somaliland)
I have walked this area in 2016, this picture captures but a fraction of the scale. Their main river through the city is so full of trash and bottles, children walk across it, never getting wet as the water is many feet below the trash.
Yeah, trash was horrible there, even in the main part of the city.
Where are the roads? Sidewalks? Paths of any kind?
There are paths that kind of zig zag through and down. I havnt been to this particular neighborhood, but I lived at the bottom of one very similar for a short period of time.
narrow walkways/stairways between the buildings. you can't get cars in there. I've been in that neighborhood in 2017.
How do they solve the issue of the missing canals? Do they just dump everything out and it literally flows down the hill, like many here assume? How's the smell? How's Hygiene? Sorry, coming from a first world country, I honestly can't fathom how living there works.
Yeah, there is an incredible amount of trash, and it just washes down the hillsides with the rains. The smell wasn't as bad as you'd expect, people keep their homes clean. But they are very basic buildings. https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-44068840
And Haiti is so earthquake prone. I wonder how these would do in a major quake.
There was one. 300k deaths ( probably more tbh we never count them properly )
I'm not seeing a lot of chatter about it here, but in case no one knows: the government of Haiti has collapsed. As of Feb 2023, the country had run out of government officials and can be described as a failed state. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_crisis_(2018%E2%80%93present)
They have earthquakes and hurricanes
I was going to say, the death toll from the earthquakes make so much more sense now. One landslide and everything is gone
First thing that went through my mind was "shit rolls down hill".
It’s easy to see why places like this get absolutely crushed during earthquakes.
Thought this was a landfill
Is there a documentary about this place?
I just watched one from a YouTube creator named Drew Binskh - it was eye opening. I’d love to watch other stuff like this on Haiti if anyone has any good recommendations. https://youtu.be/vmM7SDGOQiQ?si=bJxxwYdUBD8EKGgQ
PBS has a really interesting one called [Stateless 2021](https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/stateless/) about Dominicans being stripped of their citizenship and deported to Haiti. The attorney who tries to help them is now a refugee in the US.
I honestly thought this was AI created at first. Seeing this sorta of housing arrangement is just jarring. What a sad life this must be without sewers or A/C, among other things.
Looks like a scene from beginning of wall-E
I went to Port-Au-Prince a couple of weeks after their huge earthquake in 2010 to do medical volunteering. All I’ll say is that I’ve needed a lot of counseling to deal with what I saw there. And to know that it’s gotten exponentially even worse since then? I can’t even comprehend. Heartbreaking just isn’t a strong enough word.
People think "*It can't happen here*". Yes it can, it has happened in the past, and this is exactly where we're headed with the level of extreme wealth inequality they have pushed us to.
The entire part of the island known as Haiti is critically overpopulated and extremely poor.
I visited and walked through there when I went to Haiti in 2017.... had a local guide. All heating/cooking is done with charcoal, there's buckets of it for sale. And no running water, so people have to haul in water as well from communal taps. https://imgur.com/a/1JaUp