Haitian Market

The streets of Port au Prince are crowded with street vendors selling what they can. Imagine every square foot of the your city’s sidewalks filled with people squatting beside blankets on which they have neatly arranged items to sell- shoes, clothing, food, cooking utensils, mattresses- I literally saw kitchen sinks for sale on a sidewalk. Lucky vendors who stake out prime sidewalk space get to hang their items on a fence or the wall of a building. Of course there are no official standards, no permits, but there probably are mutually understood rules. I have no idea how anyone carves out a living selling the exact same mangoes and bananas that the person right next to them is selling, but somehow it works.

One day our whole group drove Madam Antoine, our amazing cook, to the market in her old neighborhood so she could pick up a few days of food to prepare for us. Madam Antoine brought along 3 children to help her at the market, since she essentially bought the equivalent of a big Costco run and needed help lugging her purchases from place to place.

This is what the market looked like:
There were pyramids of papayas, mangoes, oranges, coconuts, pineapples, melons.
Tables were heavy with piles of pigs feet and chicken feet.
There were wheelbarrows of charcoal for making fires, and other wheelbarrows of 3-4 foot rods of sugar cane (Haiti used to be the sugar cane capital of the world).
Most interesting to me was that men and women stuffed scrawny live chickens head first into black plastic bags, and walked around with them tucked under their arms.
Platters of smoked herring glistened in the heat and Madam Antoine picked up the biggest sweet potato I had ever seen: (this isn't Haitian Madam Anoine, by the way. This is Anne, of Virginia. But that is the sweet potato)

Later on in the day when we returned for Madam Antoine and the children, we had 15 people, all the market purchases, and two propane tanks crammed into a van with a passenger capacity of 12. We were so packed that the sliding door of the van threatened to come off. At one point in the van I yelled “Stop! The window just fell out!” and we drove slowly along in traffic as a random guy on the street trotted alongside us and gave us back our window.