Word: petitiveness
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...villages like Ganthier and Petit Trou de Nippes, half the young men live in the brush. They return to town in the morning, after the army patrols have stopped, to collect food and money from their parents. In Ganthier, the local priest says the men fled after soldiers discovered that they had formed a group to discuss politics. "They just want to kill somebody," he says. "The people are living in hell." Even the mayor of Port-au-Prince, Evans Paul, lives in hiding. Ever since paramilitary thugs shot up city hall last September, he has not returned...
...peasant supporters of exiled President Aristide. Those who have escaped the region claim the army has conducted a scorched-earth policy in an attempt to deprive Aristide's allies of their food and livelihood. "They took everything we possessed," says Wilna Nelta Joseph, whose home in the town of Petit-Bourg was looted in April. "They left me with two empty hands." One farmer describes the destruction wrought by the army in the village of Petite-Riviere on April 25: "They burned down houses with everything in them. They cut down the banana trees, fruit trees, coconut trees. They shot...
...with an electric cattle prod. "The police kept yelling that we had fled to show support for Aristide," Esterlin recalls, "and that we should all be killed." Terrified, he broke and ran. Police were unable to catch up, so they went instead to Esterlin's mother's home in Petit-Trou. Still unable to find him, they fired several rounds into the house, wounding Esterlin's younger sister in the foot. "Now," says Esterlin, who spends most of his time these days working on a charcoal boat, "I am without a home and no longer go near the village...
...little chance of recovering what they lost. Instead they are forced to live off the goodwill of their impoverished neighbors, further hastening the downward spiral of a village already on its last legs. "Those who left and were granted asylum were the town's best people," says Gerard Phillippe, Petit-Trou's justice of the peace and the only one of the returnees who has carved out some measure of success. "They were the ones who organized the peasants and who would have one day run the town. Without them the town is dying. It stumbles from...
Last year Petit-Trou's only storyteller died, leaving no one to protect its memories, such as they have become. Already bereft of a future, the town now finds itself without its past as well. Yet astonishingly, plans are already in the works for still another boat, whose keel is secretly being laid a few hundred yards from where the Dieu Veut was launched. Rumor has it that about 1,000 similar boats are under construction by neighboring communities up and down the coast. If the embargo continues and Aristide fails to return, the call for "leaving day" will...