Haiti Anthropology Brief: Eighteen Characteristics of Life in Rural Haiti that Every Aid Worker Should Know

1. Haitian cultivators depend on an array of diversified cropping strategies adapted not so much to production for income but also production for survival and security (i.e. planting of hardy drought and hurricane resistant crops that tend to have maximum harvest durations, providing near continual harvest of crops throughout the year).
2. Haitian cultivators are best described not as subsistence producers, but subsistence oriented producers who sell more than 50 percent of their harvests in regional, open air markets.
3. The open-air markets found throughout the country are part of what is called in anthropological parlance, a regional rotating market system, one in which markets are held in different locals on different days of the week giving families access to at least 2 markets per week within walking distance of their homestead,
4. Robusticity of these markets is made possible by,
   • Micro-climates that allow for complementary harvest seasons (the micro-climates themselves are caused by
     • altitude differences– as between mountain and plain.
     • rain shadows, caused by the mountains
     • the fact that Haiti is located at the interface point between different continental climate systems
5. Rural Haitian women often make careers of medium and long-distance itinerant trade; they purchase local produce in one area and transport it to provincial markets or urban markets and, not least of all.
6. Because the markets do exist: rather than processing crops and storing them, cultivators can and overwhelmingly do sell their harvests in the regional rotating market or they sell them to specialists who sell in the markets and then store the surplus in cash, thus allowing the cultivator to avoid losing produce to rot, mites, and rats, all serious threats in humid, sub-tropical environments.
7. Dependence on money, scarcity of money, the lack of storage, and the fact that micro-climates make produce available almost year round means that most cultivators purchase seed for planting rather than storing it, something that often gives way to wide fluctuations in price between harvests when markets are glutted and planting time when seed is scarce and must be sought elsewhere.
8. The efficiency of the market and itinerant female traders makes prices highly uniform throughout Haiti.
9. Not only is there a vigorous and competitive market for produce, but labor too, such that prices for day laborers tend to be uniform throughout the country, with the only cline in cost being from extremely rural to peri-urban to metropolitan Port-au-Prince. For example, in 2011 the price for a rural day labourer was 100 HTG in the rural NW, the rural NE and the rural South. The income for skilled laborers such as masons was ~500 HTG throughout the country. The same is true from one skilled craft to another, all skilled craftsmen tending to make the same income.
10. Production and income strategies are organized around the household rather than the workplace. Put another way, regarding peasant production strategies, household tends to be the work place and the labor pool is primarily composed of household members.
11. It is the household and not the State that provides a safety net for individuals; a secondary safety net is social capital  in the form of reciprocal exchange with family, friend and neighbors, credit and emergency aid from shop-keepers, large land owners, pastors, shaman, orphanage owners, NGO directors, doctors, politicians, and lovers as well as assistance from friends and family living in the city, the Dominican Republic or overseas.
12. Basic and necessary household services–including the provision of water and fire food, the cooking of food, cleaning cloths and maintaining and hygienic sleeping and food-preparation space–are low cost but labor intensive tasks accomplished by unremunerated household members, mostly children.
13. Prevailing rights and duties relating to the mode of production derive from gender based division of labor and demands of prevailing household livelihood strategies.  More specifically, as a cultural rule, the rural household in Haiti is the domain of women. Women are even thought of as the owner of the house. Men plant gardens on behalf of women and in the name of the children they have together. Women are also regarded as the owners of the produce.  They do the harvesting, sell the harvest and manage the money. Household members participate in a wide range of productive income or food generating activities, such as agricultural production, livestock rearing, and fishing. And again this is true for all members of the household, even young children.
14. Child labor: Even very young members of the household may contribute to livelihood security by fetching fire wood and water, running errands, washing clothes, preparing meals, and selling goods. Aid workers–both Haitian and foreign–often fail to grasp the importance of child labor contributions to the lower income rural and even urban household.  The reason is quite simply that the architects of agendas for  UNICEF, World Vision, CARE, and donors such as USAID and the EU rather see children playing and studying vs working. Many parents would like to as well. But we must first respect the importance the children have to household food security and livelihood, i.e. survival. It’s absurd to think that parents will or are able to assume alone the household survival tasks while their children wile away the days in play and learning skills that will be of no benefit to them or their family for another decade or two.  We must keep programs realistic and perhaps even target some programs to help children deal with their labor tasks rather than unrealistically insisting they should not work or, worse, pretend that they do not. The point is so important it bears repeating. More important than anything else in understanding the household as the basis for livelihood strategies and the role that children play is that, for both urban and rural areas, children stay home and perform basic domestic tasks and care for younger siblings thereby freeing adult women (mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins) to pursue income generating activities outside the homestead (itinerant trade, and to migrate to villages, towns and urban centers where they work for months and sometimes years as domestics servants). [i]
15. Response to Crisis: The greatest threat to household livelihood security is internal threats: specifically, sickness or death of a family member, medical expenses, and loss of livestock and crops.
16. The greatest costs are medical, school tuition, and ceremonies, particularly funerals but also annual offerings to the family spirits, baptisms, and marriages.
17. Droughts and hurricanes (both called siklons by locals), while a significant threat to people in villages, towns, and cities, are less of a threat to rural Haitians. Hurricanes are typically not as great a threat as might be assumed–or as suggested by a few rare but catastrophic instances–because mountains protect most of Haiti, breaking up the winds and usually leaving only heavy rains as a threat. When high winds do prove devastating, they also down trees thereby providing a short-term windfall in the form of charcoal produced from the fallen trees and shipped to the city, a windfall that helps peasants overcome the impact of lost crops and animals.  Moreover,  flooding and heavy rains are not near as catastrophic to crops as outsiders typically assume. Manioc, sweet potatoes, and arrowroot survive and even benefit from the abundant rainfall. While they are not as great a photo op or as useful in dramatic NGO and UN fund raising drives, prolonged droughts are usually more devastating than hurricanes and floods.  Only the hardiest crops and livestock survive. When a drought strikes, demands on household labor increase precipitously. The principal feature that determines the success with which a household can cope with the drought is not how few mouths it has to feed but how many able bodies it can put to work.  Crop failure turns many households to charcoal production and, as a consequence, local wood supplies dwindle and household members must travel farther and farther to find wood for cooking fuel.  But most problematic is the water supply. Water sources dry up and people have to travel farther to fill their buckets.  For example, in Far-West Haiti, the temporal distance to and from the nearest secondary water source goes from 70 to 120 minutes.  Springs are packed with crowds of pushing, shoving and cursing women and children. People get up at midnight so they can arrive at a distant spring before it becomes too crowded and they spend hours waiting to fill a single water jug. Some people, particularly young children, return to the house teary eyed, trodden and bruised, having failed to procure any water at all. During a drought washing clothes becomes problematic as well. Women must travel great distances to find clean water and a vacant place to sit and scrub.  Animals have to be watered more frequently since the desiccated fodder dehydrates them. Fodder itself becomes scarce.  So cultivators are traveling farther and farther into remote areas to graze their animals or to cut grass for them, and then they must lead the animals more frequently in the other direction, into more peopled areas where adequate water sources are more common and tend not to dry up.   All of this additional effort translates into more labor and the need for more workers, because rain or no rain, people must eat and they must drink.  Food still must be cooked, water found, clothes washed, and at least some animals must be kept alive so that when the drought finally ends there will be something with which to start producing again.
18. High fertility and the demand for children:  An important consequence of the high labor demands and need to adapt to crisis seen above is that, despite what many development practitioners and healthcare workers believe, having many children is economically logical from cultivators in the region. Congruently, they tend to be radically pronatal; they want children, and at 6.0 to 7.1 births per woman fertility in the rural areas is perhaps the highest rate biologically possible given the prevalence of infectious diseases, low-calorie diets, high rates of female malnutrition, high female labor demands, and high rates of male absenteeism. Despite all these limiting factors, fertility in the rural areas is equivalent to the second-highest country birth rate in the world and almost as high as 19th and early 20th century Hutterites, who had the highest sustained fertility levels ever documented.

NOTES

[i] To drive the point about he importance of children home. The labor of children is so important in making households productive entities that without them the household does not exist.  In a 1,586 randomly selected sample of rural households in the North West. only 53 households did not have children, and these were overwhelming households in the yards of our households that did have children (Schwartz 2000).  When asked, rural respondents repeatedly drove the point home explaining why they want children with references to work and the chores they perform. Typical were comments such as, “If you don’t have children, dogs will eat you,”  “you need children,” “children are the wealth of the poor,” and,

If I did not have them, things would be worse for me. You need a little water, they go to the water. You need a little fire wood, they go get wood. The boys work in the garden for you. They look after the animals.[i] (thirty-three-year-old mother of eight)