Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun: A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti

by Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné

  Franchesca told Fédrik to ask me to help him at SONAPI. He had never entered the grounds. The next morning, he arrived early to pick me up in Delmas 19 and we carried on to SONAPI.

  When we arrived, all kinds of merchants were lined up in front of the gates, as usual. It is so busy that you need to take care to not step in a pot of boiling rice or a pile of oranges or avocados. It is impossible to not step in the garbage, especially as the day proceeds and the piles grow.

  In front of the main gates, armed security guards asked to see our identification. Fédrik showed Franchesca’s badge. They took our national identity cards as ransom and gave us visitors’ badges for the time we were in the Park. Then we passed by the MINUSTAH soldiers who also maintained a presence in SONAPI.

  We passed by a number of factories before we found Franchesca’s. Again, in front of the factory was a security guard toting a shotgun. His eyes were hidden behind dark glasses. We asked him if he could help us find the administrative office. He took off his dark glasses and told us to turn left as soon as we entered the factory.

  We passed more armed security as we crossed the courtyard to the main door. As we entered, we saw all the employees in long rows inside a huge room working feverishly as supervisors walked slowly up and down, surveying their work. We turned left and saw the administrative office. There was simply a smoked glass window with a narrow slot in the middle. We stood there, not knowing what to do. We could see nothing behind the glass.

  After a few minutes, a very stern female voice, already tired of our presence, growled at us from the other side of the window, “Well! What do you want?”

  Fédrik couldn’t speak. I took up the explanation and slid Franchesca’s identity card into the narrow slot. “We are here on behalf of this employee.”

  “What’s wrong with her? Where is she?”

  We explained and said that we had come to collect her money that she needed for the treatment for malaria.

  “This worker has been absent for three days. She is about to be terminated.”

  “That’s what we’re here about. Here’s the document from the clinic that is treating her.” We passed a document with the letterhead of a respected clinic stating that Franchesca was suffering from malnutrition and malaria. “She has no money for her treatment, so she has sent us to pick up her pay for her.”

  The female voice replied, “She’ll have to come here to pick it up herself.”

  “Madam, maybe you don’t understand. Look at the document. She is deathly ill. She cannot walk. She cannot leave her bed. That’s why she has sent her husband and me to pick up her pay. Without it, she can’t afford the treatment.”

  “Okay. Move away from my window. All your talk about malaria, husbands, documents, and pay means nothing to me,” she snapped. “How do I know that you didn’t find this identity card in the street? You could have got anyone to forge that document. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Put yourself in her place,” I pleaded. “Imagine that you are in a critical state and that the only way to save your life was to have a relative come here to pick up your pay. Would you rather that they not give it to you?”

  “A thousand times!” she said. “I’m responsible for the payroll money, not somebody’s health.”

  This was a waste of time. This voice that snapped at us from the other side of the glass was treating Fédrik and me like thieves. Far worse, she was condemning Franchesca to death. It was unbearable. But there seemed to be nothing we could do.

  Fédrik could barely control his anger. He stamped harshly around the grounds of SONAPI, kicking up Haitian soil in every direction. As he passed me, I caught the gist of his argument.

  “That’s why I keep saying to Fran … working in this factory.… She says that it’s going to provide for her future … it will kill her.… She’ll see how much they respect her. How much they need her.”

  He carried on in fury all the way to the hospital. I said nothing to avoid adding to a fire already burning out of control.

  “How did it go?” Franchesca asked as we walked into her room. “Did you get my pay?”

  Fédrik fumed, “Give us your money?! They’re hoping you die so that they can keep your two weeks’ pay! They have no interest in you whatsoever.”

  Franchesca was groggy from the serum that she was taking for the malaria. But she called a nurse and asked to be sent home to take the rest of her prescription there. She could not afford to stay in the clinic. The nurse wrote a discharge note for Franchesca. Féd and I helped her back to pigsty camp.

  Early next morning, Franchesca was waiting before the door of the factory to resume her work.

  chapter twenty-seven

  ONE OF THE BENEFICIARIES of Haitian labour is Gildan Activewear, the largest manufacturer of sportswear in North America. It subcontracts its t-shirt production to Allain Villard, a member of a rich Haitian family. The bourgeois families work together to make sure that the working standards and salaries are equally terrible for all Haitian workers.

  Paul told me what was happening in Canada after the earthquake. The news that all but two of the buildings in the Palm Apparel plant in Carrefour collapsed during the quake, killing approximately one thousand workers, was bad for the company. Gildan shareholders had to be reassured quickly … not about the thousands of lives, but about their investments. Would the company be able to continue production? How weak would it be as a result of this devastating blow? The company directors immediately made public the good news that its other contractors in Haiti had survived the earthquake with no serious injuries to personnel or damage to equipment. And they had resumed production.

  Meanwhile, Canadian news was full of the devastation of the capital. Paul related how images on television were showing just how poor we are here. So Gildan’s message had to be properly nuanced. It had to assuage investors’ fears at the same time that it seemed to care about Haitian workers. Paul told me that at a shareholders’ meeting in Montréal, the management said that it would financially compensate the families of its deceased workers and that it would provide food, medical, and psychological help to the survivors. We decided that I should go to the Gildan factories to see if any such promises were being honoured. It seemed odd, since the conditions don’t vary among the foreign assembly plants. If one foreign company began to change working conditions and salaries, then people would not work for the others and all hell would break loose. In fact, we seldom know the name of the company we’re working for or what country it’s from. They’re all just blan companies.

  In any case, Paul and I would write up the results of our research and describe the situation — whatever I should find out — on a website that he was setting up for me to describe what things were like in Haiti. I decided that it would be best to have some support. I didn’t want to do this alone. While I was mulling it over, a brother from church, named Mardi, appeared next to me. He was a teacher, but unemployed. He seemed a good candidate. I had already told Paul that I would need to have some money. Not only did I have nothing to buy food or to live, but sending photos on the Internet could be expensive from Haiti where I would need to have a connection — often slow and unreliable — at an Internet cafe. Plus, I would have to research and organize my part of the project. I asked my friends at SONAPI and they said that Gildan had a number of sweatshops around Port-au-Prince. It could take time to research. Paul was also struggling financially at the time. But he had fifty dollars, and his friend donated another fifty so that I could carry on. All I could promise Mardi was that I would pay for our taptap rides and our food while we were researching. He agreed. He said knowing that he would eat was already a service. We decided to start out early the next morning.

  He was afraid of carrying out our project. So was I. How would we continue? We could be targeted. In Haiti, anyone who tries to speak a truth that interferes with the rich can be easily eliminated. And both Mardi and I sensed that we were targeting one of those truths.

  When I s
aw Mardi’s concerns, I suggested that we should just present ourselves as we were, unemployed Haitians looking for work. No one would take us for a threat. We would arouse their contempt or, at best, their pity.

  Then I went to visit Annie at Mme Bolivar’s house. She was very worried. She couldn’t ask me not to do it. But she said, “Be careful!”

  Afterwards, I returned home to Delmas 19. I prepared for our research. I decided that I would take a camera that I had bought with a gift of money from Louise, a kind woman who always read the website that Paul and I had started and whom we knew when she had visited Haiti in 2006.

  The next morning, I went looking for Mardi. We took a taptap to Carrefour 3 Mains, to begin our research in SONAPI. We entered the grounds to see if we could locate a Gildan factory there. We asked the security guards in front of any factory that had no name affixed to it if they knew whether Gildan employed workers here. We were sent all over the place. Finally, we found a guard who knew that Gildan used to have a factory at SONAPI, but that they had moved a few months earlier. He advised me that Gildan operated in Carrefour Thor, the same address that Paul had given me. We decided to leave SONAPI in peace. We now would have to travel to Carrefour Thor.

  Leaving SONAPI, I suggested to Mardi that we had better eat before we got on a taptap. One of the street merchants who sells to the workers sold us each a plate. Because there were no chairs, we had to crouch down to eat in the bustle of the entrance, among the garbage and the fumes of charcoal burning and cars passing. There was such little room that we had to get up each time someone passed. Then we bought ourselves soft drinks and started out again. It was now ten o’clock and the sun was rising fast. It was going to be very hot. We found a merchant who sold us a couple of caps.

  We took a taptap to the main intersection to get a bus for Carrefour. In the bus, I asked people if they knew of a factory called Gildan. No one knew. So I asked them if they knew of a factory owned by the family Villard. That, they recognized. They told me that it was in the centre of Carrefour Thor. They told me that I would have to ask people where to find Kay Villard, rather than Gildan. Factories are known in Haiti by the name of the Haitian subcontracting family, not their corporate partners.

  When we descended from the bus, I began asking people. One explained that it would be too complicated to give or remember directions. There were too many twists and turns and ups and downs through narrow alleyways. He said that he could send us in the right direction, but that we would have to ask others until we arrived at Kay Villard. I went as far as his directions took me. From there, I asked a child to show me where Kay Villard was. “Is that the factory?” he asked. He gave me another set of directions that I followed to arrive at the factory complex. Smart kid!

  There, I saw a big gate. It was opened to let a car enter. I saw a big tractor working inside the complex. It had evidently already cleared piles of rubble away, as it was now preparing the land for reconstruction. There were many containers that I assumed were loaded either with fabrics for the workers to transform or clothes ready to be shipped to Canada. The door closed on me.

  I didn’t want to look suspicious, so Mardi and I kept moving and spoke to the security guard who manned the little kiosk in front of the gate. We addressed him as if we were a couple of unemployed workers looking for jobs. Since it was the first time that Mardi was involved in espionage, he just listened carefully. I figured that if you want to arrive at the truth, you may have to take a long and complicated path. I could certainly not simply pose my questions and expect answers. I would have to move a little distance at a time, asking at each new twist and turn in the conversation for the way forward.

  I greeted the security guard and said, “Hello sir. Could you please tell me if this company is hiring?”

  He replied, “Today, they won’t be taking anyone. But next week, they might be.” He pointed in front of him, on this side of the gates, and said that the company was going to expand there.

  I asked him, “But there is so much space inside where the tractors are working. Why don’t they use that to expand?”

  “That still belongs to the company. The factories inside were destroyed in the quake. Lots of people were killed. Now they’re rebuilding.”

  I said, “We’ve come from Delmas. We went to SONAPI. I asked people whether there was a company that paid better than the others. Some people told me that Gildan paid more. So, that’s why we’ve come here. Is that true?”

  “You should have stayed in Delmas and worked at any of the factories. There’s no difference. If you want to make more money, the only way is to try to make the quota. That’s almost impossible to keep up. It’s all the same.”

  He was much older than me, the father of a family. His dark glasses were just for show — to give him a tough look. Once he took them off, his eyes were kind and he was decent. He wore a uniform: green pants and a white shirt. The twelve-calibre shotgun in his left hand seemed at odds with his manner.

  I put myself in his place: “You should be the best paid here. You should be paid more than the boss. If there is trouble, they’ll kill you first, before they start looking for the boss.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “Normally, if I had another profession or something else to do, I would never choose to be standing here with a gun in my hand, trying to threaten people. Here, I hardly earn anything. The boss doesn’t have any respect for me. But I have my family to feed.”

  I asked a more searching question: “But at least if you have an accident or are sick, you will have some kind of medical insurance?”

  He smiled. “If you are sick, you are supposed to use the money you make to pay for whatever you need. The minute you can’t work anymore, you are of no importance to them. The rich understand the situation this country is in. They will never value workers. The minute you show signs of costing them money, they replace you with one of the unemployed poor that wander the streets. They have no need of you.”

  I, counting myself among the unemployed poor wandering the streets, continued, “Maybe in the big meetings, the bosses talk about how well they treat their employees. But maybe if someone really wants to know, they should ask people like you.”

  “Of course. We are already condemned to never know a better life. Look at you. You are young. You have your life ahead of you. Maybe if your parents had some means, you wouldn’t be looking to sell yourself to work for a place like this. That’s why so many choose easier ways to survive, like kidnapping and theft. At least they don’t have to feel like slaves.… Anyway, I’m not going to continue with this. It’s too dangerous. There’s no respect. There’s no future.”

  While we were talking, the street merchants were setting up for the lunch break in the factory. It was almost noon. They arrived balancing big pots on their heads. They set them down and prepared the plates. The juice merchants too prepared for the moment when the factory doors would open. Mardi and I excused ourselves from the guard and went to stand with the merchants. We bought plates for ourselves. We heard the merchants complaining among themselves about all of their clients who had died during the earthquake with debts on their heads that the vendors would never be able to recuperate.

  I asked one merchant, “Has the factory been open for a long time? When did it reopen after the earthquake?”

  “After the earthquake, I had to go to the country. I returned after a month to start up my business again. But it had been open for awhile at that point.”

  Mardi spoke up. “Did you have any family who worked in these factories?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Everyone around here had people in the factories. Some had broken arms and legs.”

  “Ah, well,” Mardi continued, “at least you can be sure that they would compensate you and help the injured. A big company like this must have lots of money to take care of the victims.”

  “Oh really?!” she stared at him, as if trying to figure out what planet he was from. “Everyone who died, died for the patrons. Those who
were injured simply added to the poverty of their parents. Because it was the families that had to do everything to help their injured. Not the company.” She dismissed Mardi as if he was an innocent.

  “But I thought there was a system of medical help for the employees. Maybe you didn’t seek the right help,” Mardi pushed.

  She replied, “The bosses never listened to the sick any more than the dead! They don’t have the time. Normally, if the workers were human beings, bosses should have brought the victims together to see what they could do. Even if it wasn’t a lot, it could have been helpful. There were meetings after the earthquake. The company did suggest that there would be help in the future. But that future never came. And the talk has all dried up.”

  While we were talking, the workers poured out of the building. Mardi and I split up to talk to different groups. We searched for the people, wherever they could be found, who wanted to talk.

  I went up to a man buying a plate from a merchant. “Excuse me, sir. Could you help us? My friend and I are here from Delmas. We were told that this factory pays better. Is that true?”

  “That depends on whether you make the quota or not. Sometimes I make it but, when it is high, I can’t. I normally make 150 gourdes a day ($3.73 US). Sometimes less. There are people who work overtime to make 200 gourdes a day ($4.97 US).”

  I pushed, “If you are sick, is there any medical help?”

  “No,” he said, “they send you home rather than to a doctor or a hospital.”

  I asked the obvious, “That money can’t take care of all the expenses of living. How do you cope with that salary?”

  He said, “Even if the company would feed us, rather than forcing us to dig into our little salary, it would be better for us. But no. The bosses see only the quantity of our output. They don’t care what we’re going through.”

  While we were talking, I saw another group of employees arguing next to a juice merchant. I walked up to buy some juice from her, to listen in on the discussion. I was able to pose as one of them without them knowing, since no one could know all the other employees. This time, a number of people were talking. But all were frustrated.