But we were also taking a route that would go right through the shanty coastal town of La Saline and its massive open air marketplace, which was now rapidly approaching:
Here we are passing street vendors setting up shop, while below, a truck is delivering goods for sale in this poverty-stricken, grimy neighborhood:
We are on the fly, no time to stop, so I am shooting right through the window while trying to avoid blurring. There are a tremendous amount of cheap clothes for sale, many of them actually second-hand clothes imported from America and called "Pepe".
This is such a storied phenomenon that started decades ago during the presidency of John F. Kennedy in the early 60s, that an actual documentary has been made about it, and to top that off, here is an excerpt from an article about the documentary AND what came to be known as the "Kennedy" markets in Haiti:
From: Our Past is Haiti's Present: An Interview with "Secondhand (Pepe)" filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi
In the 1960s, as part of an international aid program, the US started shipping huge loads of secondhand goods to Haiti. Many older Haitians still refer to their secondhand clothes as "wearing kennedy," a nod to the president at the time. Another word commonly used to describe these goods is "pepe." Preachers were said to cry Paix! Paix! ("Peace! Peace!") to calm down the excited crowds awaiting new loads of items to sort through.Today, anyone in the Miami, NYC, and Boston areas -- cities with large Haitian immigrant populations -- is likely to run into someone at a flea market or thrift store collecting goods to take home to Port-au-Prince. Secondhand (Pepe) (clip) is a short documentary showing this remarkable trade in goods, as it explains the history of secondhand clothing in our country. Filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell, a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard, and Vanessa Bertozzi, a graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, who now works at Etsy, were curious about the tradition of secondhand clothing. From 2003 -- 2007 they visited ragyards in Miami, went through archives in London and Washington DC, and traveled to Haiti to see the pepe markets for themselves.
That is not all that is sold here though. There are also the traditional food staples:
Another truck delivering goods to market:
And now we have moved on past the marketplace and headed for a a nearby surprise stop:
This is the shanty neighborhood surrounding the ruins of infamous Fort Dimanche, , partially shown below, where the Duvalier dynasty sent its political opponents or those even suspected of crticizing them for torture and termination through untreated illness or execution:
This is the subject of my fourth article, with a number of photos, which you can visit HERE.
Leaving the Fort Dimanche compound in this poverty-stricken still struggling with earthquake debris a year later, we see a crate of junk metal that will eventually be sold for whatever the seller can get:
As we leave La Saline, still en route to Truttier, we begin to pass through stretches of countryside, which intrudes everywhere beyond the capital:
We are still close to the sea and the Bay of Port-au-Prince, as we pass by this fetid canal, just one more eyesore in a country with a horribly weak government and collapsed infrastructure:
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