The People Who Eat Mud

“There are people digging with their hands, searching for people
in the rubble. There was unimaginable destruction.”

— Bernice Robertson, an analyst with the International Crisis Group

January 13, 2010 New York Times

A massive earthquake hit Haiti – near the capital city of Port-au-Prince – on January 12^th, killing thousands, injuring a multiple of that, crushing buildings and squeezing the life out of a nation where the national pastime appears to be hopelessness. This is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and near the bottom of the entire earth, sharing an island home with the not-so-bad-off Dominican Republic. Haiti is also the country where people eat mud to stave off the belly-wrenching pangs of hunger.

On July 29, 2008, the Guardian (a UK newspaper) wrote about this scene in the capital: “In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun… The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti's most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food.

“Brittle and gritty - and as revolting as they sound - these are ‘mud cakes’. For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families…. It is not for the taste and nutrition - smidgins of salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt, and the Guardian can testify that the aftertaste lingers - but because they are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies… ‘It stops the hunger,’ said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. ‘You eat them when you have to.’”

Before the earthquake, Haiti and its population were starving. 80% of the nation’s food is imported (most of the local soil has been so depleted by over cultivation so as to be useless), vast segments of its population live in squalor, joblessness is the norm and political instability quite routine. The few successful farmers that eked out a living on their patches of land were devastated when the country lifted the tariffs on food in the 1980s, cheap imports follow, and the land simply atrophied. As forests were cut and used to make charcoal to heat homes and cook, erosion further decimated the quality of the farmland. Food prices in the international marketplace have since skyrocketed, placing new burdens on this lost corner of the earth.

Then, the earthquake hit. The January 13^th Los Angeles Times: “[A]long the city's roadsides, the true cost of Tuesday's magnitude 7 earthquake was readily visible: the bodies of victims neatly lined up, some covered in white sheets and some not… The corpses included that of a young girl -- perhaps a teenager -- in pink shorts; a couple lying next to one another; a man covered in a sheet up save for his horribly swollen feet poking out from beneath… There was virtually no sign of outside assistance other than a few United Nations vehicles passing by -- and there was no police presence, no water being handed out, no encampments except those set up by people apparently left homeless by the quake or those too afraid to go back into their ramshackle homes in case of aftershocks.

“Across the capital, some of the worst damage appeared to be in hillside neighborhoods such as Petionville… Elsewhere in the city, structures lay collapsed like giant sandwiches, with layer upon layer of concrete and remnants showing through: mattresses, shreds of clothing, chairs.” According to CNN, over 100,000 have died, most of Port-au-Prince is in rubble, electricity is off and government services have ground to a halt; thousands are missing, and big after-shocks (5.0+) have hit and more are expected.

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I’m Peter Dekom, and I am deeply saddened.