Common Language Project: Multimedia that Matters

Rubble in Haiti

By Grant Fuller March 11, 2010

The government of Haiti has begun a massive cleanup effort, removing the thousands of piles of rubble left by from the January earthquake. A large dump site has been set up on the outskirts of town, and trucks full of debris arrive throughout the day. Reporter Grant Fuller tells the story of a man in Haiti who salvages metal from this rubble.

Story Transcript:

GRANT FULLER: A dump truck rumbles into a rocky clearing on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Men and boys climb onto it and peer inside. They're looking for any sign of metal, because metal means money.

An avalanche of crushed concrete, rocks and dirt falls to the ground. Oriles Jean looks disheartened.

ORILES: This is just concrete debris, he says. There's no steel, so there's nothing in there for us.

Ever since the earthquake, Jean has been here, salvaging and then selling steel reinforcing bars – rebar for short – that he finds in the rubble.

ORILES: Maybe the next truck will come with steel in it, he says. I guess we're just gonna have to wait for that one.

Jean works here with his five brothers. They all live together, along with his wife and five kids, in a nearby shack he built out of found debris. Their old home is too damaged to live in. Jean doesn't want to be here; he just wants his old life back.

ORILES: We were way, way more comfortable before. Here we don't sleep well at all. The floor of our house is, well, dirt, and we don't have beds. Everybody's squished together. And, there's an odor of dead bodies from the debris because sometimes they drop them here by accident.

Jean is an electrician. And he used to sell rat traps with his brothers. But with little electricity and less opportunity after the quake, the Jean family turned to rubble salvage. These days, two pickup truck loads of rebar fetch less than ten dollars.

ORILES: We can't even make a fourth of what we used to be able make. Think about it: Once the debris stops, we stop. And then we don't have anything.

Jean wears pink Crocs on his feet while he works, and always manages to smile in spite of it all. When the flow of rubble dries up, he says he'll be happy to look for other work.

ORILES: I don't feel good at all about doing this. I don't feel good about having to make a living off of people who have lost so much.

When the rubble salvagers of Port-au-Prince gather a big enough heap of metal, they haul it here, to a company called Haiti Recycling. This is where the scraps are sold. Workers climb over stacks of junk, sorting everything in a big shed. Stanley Sajous and his family run this place. They've been getting a steady stream of steel from the rubble sites.

SAJOUS: Most of the people that bring 'em in are, you know, the people of off the street, you know, they're poor people. They're making the best of the situation. I mean you gotta rebuild, so you gotta clean up first anyway. And I could say nobody wants to profit from such a disaster, but after a while, you know, everybody has to continue life and continue moving on and making something out of nothing.

Back at the dump, things have finally started to pick up for Oriles Jean and his brothers. They've laid claim to a giant, tangled ball of rebar, and they're trying to separate the pieces by sawing through the ropes of steel. Half a dozen men surround the rusty jumble, puzzling over it like a Rubik's cube they can't quite solve.

On the other side of the dump, one of the Jean brothers uses a mallet to pound a concrete column that's full of good rebar. He says it might take him two hours to separate the steel. Oriles Jean will then add it to the growing pile of scrap rebar in front of the family shack.

ORILES: Every time we look at that steel, it reminds me that my house is like that, too. I can't go in there anymore, just like this person can't go in theirs. We're just doing this work for now, until we see what God has planned for us.

 

For the World Vision Report, I'm Grant Fuller in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.