A few days ago we came across a group of Haitians setting up a new tent city in an automobile junkyard.
In a 5 x 4 foot tent made of bedsheets and tall enough only to lie down in, we met Kerline, a woman in her early twenties who is taking care of her sisters three kids. Her sister and husband were killed in the earthquake leaving the children homeless. At first Kerline was nervous to have us around. The case with the American missionaries who went to jail for “kidnapping” Haitian children and taking them to the Dominican Republic has spooked a lot of parents in the tent cities. They are nervous when “blancs”, or white people they don’t know come around their children. But we are all friends now and the kids have taken to showing us every corner of their new community.
The families tent sits next to the shell of a yellow school bus with the letters of the American town from which it came painted over in black. Amanda tells us the youngest boy Marvin, was a momma’s boy before the earthquake, who was used to fresh fruit and cereal waiting for him each morning when he woke up. Now he is lucky if he gets a bit of rice and a piece of bread each day. To pass the time the kids play among the remains of the cars and trucks in the junkyard and spend hours building intricate kites out of the the twigs from coconut leaves and discarded plastic bags.
Every once in awhile a dispute over diminishing land space on the hillside will erupt among the families, but it never escalates very far, and hurt feelings don’t last long. The families here rarely see aid workers, and today a riot almost broke out when some locals brought a truck full of Healthy Choice pudding to pass out to the the kids. One of the boys brought over a package of the pudding he managed to grab when it was thrown into the crowd from the truck. Kerline looked at it and seemed to almost laugh. You could see it in her eyes, “are we really going to kill each other over pudding”. If more help doesn’t come before the rains, it could get much worse.
