For Haitian Artisans, Recycling Is Survival
The Caribbean nation of Haiti is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, suffering 60 to 80 percent unemployment, a longstanding AIDS epidemic and environmental devastation. But one of the country’s many challenges, garbage, has become a tool for sustainable development.
“Because people are poor and hungry, they cut trees and the environment is destroyed,” says second-generation Haitian metal craftsman Jean-Wilbert Bruno. Only two percent of Haiti’s once-lush mountain forests remain; much of the rest is used for fuel. The deforestation ag-gravates flooding and soil erosion, leaving little arable land for subsistence farming and adding to the mountains of garbage cluttering the landscape.
“It’s hard to find a street that isn’t completely littered,” says Hugh Locke, executive director of Yelé Haiti, a foundation established in 2005 by Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean. Locke says Haiti lacks regular municipal sanitation services and garbage is still relatively low on the embattled federal government’s priority list.
But refuse has become a key way for Haitians to tackle poverty. In Croix des Bouquets, scavenged 55-gallon oil drums are the raw material for rough-hewn yet delicately detailed metal sculptures called fer de coupe. Craftspeople cut the drums apart, hammer them flat, draw a design with chalk, then hand-chisel them into the desired shapes. In Jacmel, papier-mã{99}
é artists fashion old cement bags into carnival masks. In Port-au-Prince, street kids collect white plastic jugs, snippets of which they shape into graceful floral pins and AIDs fundraiser ribbons.
“Haitian craft is defined by recycling, an important strategy in a country with little in the way of resources [and] money to import,” says Alden Smith, Haiti program officer with the nonprofit Aid to Artisans. And the color and texture of the materials makes for a unique and quirky aesthetic. Moreover, he says, creating “junk” art “creates buyers and sellers of garbage, and eases the trash problem a little.”
ATA’s and Yelé Haiti’s efforts are part of a steady trend of small collaborative projects and training programs. The goal: jump-starting a former $30 million craft industry that crashed after the 1994 UN trade embargo but remains the number two source of employment.
The strategy seems to be working, with Haitian objets d”art appearing everywhere from the shelves of Neiman-Marcus to the Ten Thousand Villages website. Garden stores snap up the oil-drum sculptures. Artisans can make a decent, if not always steady, living. Pierre-Richard Desrosiers runs his own shop and helps support a family of eight children through his signature line of painted, seaweed-shaped bowls made from scrap metal he finds near airports and factories.
Craftwork, Locke observes, is “an irrepressible part of Haitian culture, with a great deal of potential that hasn’t been fully tapped.”