Making treasures

This week the environmental education team hosted a program in "trash formation" with a group called the Asosyasyon pou Konbat Fatra Plastik (the Association Against Plastic Trash, or the AKFP). We invited nine extra-interested kids from our Environmental Agents program to participate in the 5-day training.

The goal was to learn how to make these:
- which are fashioned from snack wrappers and strips of cardboard (cut from USAID vegetable oil shipping boxes, naturally). Not only is this a creative way to transform unsightly used packaging into something useful and pleasing, it gives these kids the tools to start a small business if they choose.

They divided into teams, each person cutting, folding, and stitching together the long strips.

After a day or so, they warmed up to each other and passed the time having fun hanging out.
See? It's not a sweatshop!

(Remember the Agent on the far right? That's Silmique, who rocked the mountaintop tree planting day a few weeks ago. He confirmed overachieverness today when he mentioned that he's already started making these bags at home in the evenings. No, he says, his hands aren't sore from all this detailed finger-work.)

A few of the finished products:

So this is a dream development project, right? It offers a creative solution to Haiti's ubiquitous trash problem and provides a way for kids to make money and protect the environment.

Win-win...almost. I do think it's a great project, given a few caveats:

1. "All Haitians have is trash, and they make such great things with it!" True, there is a lot of trash here, but there is a danger in thinking that empty plastic wrappers are the only resource this country has. Making these items can be seen as a true act of creativity, since Haitians aren't obligated to work with these materials any more than Americans are.

2. Finding plastic trash is easy, but finding carboard is surprisingly difficult. It can be had, but having it might present too much of a challenge to starting a business.

3. Where is the market for these bags? At $15-20 US each, they're out of the price range of the average Dezam area resident - and as Frantzo pointed out, you can buy a goat for that kind of money, which will reproduce and create a return on your investment.

(If I could step on a tiny soapbox for a minute: price is actually a really interesting question. $20 is next to nothing for a week's worth of work, but all too often tourists and travelers are on the hunt for bargain-basement souvenirs and treasures: "I got this great handmade X for $2!" We in the developed world need to change the way we financially value the labor of others, regardless of where they live.)

4. Reusing does nothing to reduce consumption, of course still the primary way to reduce trash production.

I am encouraged by the fact that these issues are being addressed by AKFP and my Haitian coworkers. This morning they discussed the idea of having multiple price points to allow more working- and middle-class Haitians to afford the bags. They discussed the value in using these bags with pride, showcasing local handiwork. They recognized that this is a stopgap measure while we all work on reducing consumption.

And that discussion, my friends, is something of a development dream come true.

Still a city gal at heart

I'm still learning to look for nuance in the countryside, to recognize a dirt track as a legitimate thoroughfare, to spot a school in a slightly-larger-than-usual enclosure. (I have similar problems in the U.S. countryside. It's so hard to find things out there!)

In the meantime, one of our favorite things about Haiti is tap-tap decoration. (For those of you who need a refresher, tap-taps are trucks that provide public transportation throughout Haiti. They're often heavily loaded with people and goods--once we saw a woman riding with her refrigerator!--and have fixed routes and generally fixed prices.) For the most part, the tap-taps in the Artibonite Valley look like pickup trucks with extra seating in the back, but many of the ones in Port-au-Prince are one-truck parades.

On our most recent trip to the city, we spotted these beauts:

I'm still trying to figure out what that animal is on the side.

Che seems to be a popular figure: he makes not-infrequent appearances throughout the city.

More popular than Che.

Do those dollar signs count as second mudflaps?

Just amazing.

How can you not love these?

The art of the question

When I was preparing to come to Haiti, I had a lot of questions about Haiti's art scene. Given that the arts are often the first to lose funding in the U.S., I wondered what keeps the creative drive alive in a culture that faces so many material challenges. Over the last few days, we've had the opportunity to explore several different genres: metalworking, music, painting, beadworking, sculpture, dance, and woodworking.

The first artisans we visited were primarily commercial, and I wondered if the answer to my question of what vitalizes the arts here is simply the fact that it can be lucrative. (I'm not sure if it's still true, but at one point Haitians were producing handcrafts that were sold throughout the Caribbean.) Is money truly what keeps creativity alive, when it comes down to the essence of survival?

However--and quite fortunately--it turns out that Haiti is not a land of easy answers. The joy of creation has been more than evident in the work of several of the artists we've met here, and it seems that art is alive and well beyond the marketplace.

This is a rather simplistic outline of the question, but I've again run out of computer time...and I again welcome your thoughts on the matter.