Haitian slum calm, but racked by hunger

People received food supplies from UN peacekeepers in the Cité Soleil section of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in May. (Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press/File)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The guns have fallen silent for now and an uneasy calm has settled over Cité Soleil, Haiti's most notorious slum.

But the signs of past violence are everywhere in this sprawling, desperately poor neighborhood of 300,000, where disease and starvation claim countless lives.

Tiny craters left by flying bullets pock the walls of many of the ramshackle buildings. The police station is so covered it resembles a building with measles.

Residents say they don't know whether the quiet is due to a crackdown in recent years on the criminal gangs that once ruled Cité Soleil with impunity or simply to exhaustion brought on by hunger.

"The streets were so dangerous that nobody could go out," said Daniel Jean, 52, a fisherman mending his nets on a ragged strip of sand by the sea. "The security is better today, but the high prices for food are a calamity. I haven't fished in three days because the sea is rough, and when I go home at night there is no food."

Jean's lament is widespread in Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest country, where an estimated 80 percent of the 9 million residents struggle to survive on less than $2 per day.

The food crisis making headlines around the globe has hit Haiti hard, nowhere worse than Cité Soleil, long a symbol of the Caribbean nation's suffering.

Children dressed in rags beg strangers for food, and then wander away among pungent trash piles, sidestepping pigs rooting in streams of raw sewage. Adults bathe outdoors using dippers and plastic bowls, standing in the mud beside teetering shacks thrown together with rusty sheet metal, cardboard, and other refuse.

But shops are open and some merchants are making sales.

There are few shoppers, though, and thousands of people seem to wander among the endless lines of shacks. Young men sit aimlessly at storefronts, some openly glaring at strangers and scowling as police patrols pass on foot or in vehicles.

But many residents thank the Haitian police and the blue-helmeted peacekeepers from the United Nations for Cité Soleil's current calm. Over the past several years, the combined forces have arrested or killed several key gang leaders, breaking up the groups that once held sway.

Cité Soleil's mayor, Wilson Louis, says the neighborhood has turned something of a corner. With a functioning government established and secure streets, the troubled slum is chipping away at such problems as sanitation and infrastructure, he said.

"But our biggest problem is that there are no jobs," he said. "Easily 75 percent of our young men have no opportunity."

The US government has announced a $20 million aid project to bring jobs to Cité Soleil, and dozens of charities work in the slum, building houses and running food kitchens, schools, and small employment programs.

Willy Jean Baptiste, who runs a small charity school in the neighborhood, said the current calm is fragile. During the times of violence, some of the school's teachers were robbed by thugs, and parents were too afraid to let their children walk to school.

"Cité Soleil may look 100 percent safe, but I think it's only 50 percent," Baptiste said. "The gangs and the guns are still here, only in hiding. I have some of these young gang members stop here begging for food. Some of them say if they had a job, they wouldn't be in the gang."