— In the smoke and dust along Rue La Saline, at the edge of a
rubble-strewn dump, a little man with missing front teeth hammered away
at a shattered pillar of concrete.
If he had a hacksaw, he could cut off the exposed metal. But he had only a little household hammer.
The sun was taking a toll, searing through a pall of white cement dust and the black smoke of smoldering trash.
Lemer started pounding at the portion of wire
sticking out of the concrete, thick as a pencil, hoping he could at
least break that off.
“I’m going to try to sell a little bit,” he said, “and then buy a sledgehammer and get a big piece.” In the slums of
residents have long been forced to scrape and hustle in the most
desperate ways to survive. And as the economic consequences of last
week’s earthquake sink in, they will be hit the hardest, as they have
in times of past political violence, floods and hurricanes.
But for now, they have rubble to scavenge.
Lemer’s brother, Samuel, 49, crouched nearby,
cutting foam from a cheap mattress into a square. The earthquake
destroyed the upholstery shop where he worked. So he set about
salvaging with his brother. He figured he could sell the foam to an
upholsterer, if one ever opened again.
Samuel’s backpack was already filled with sticks of wood he planned to sell as fuel.
“I’m not wasting my time with the hammer,” he declared. “It’s too hard.”
Piles of white concrete chock-full of rebar lined
the road for hundreds of yards. The man-made plateau of the dump rose
behind — long sifted down to shredded plastic and dirt, and surrounded
by vast slums themselves made of the city’s detritus.
The scavenging here is so thorough that in the slum
of Cite Soleil, men stand over pots of boiling aluminum, melted down
from whatever bits of wire and soda-pop tabs people bring them. They
pour the molten metal into molds, and shape it into pots and utensils.
The earthquake’s boon to scavenging is steel. For
days, residents have loaded knots of the rebar onto wooden carts sinewy
men use to haul impossibly heavy loads across town.
As a mason,
He pointed furiously at his stomach. “I am hungry,” he said.
He was thin enough that in America he would be considered emaciated.
The price of food has tripled, he said.
“We were already hungry,” he said. “Now it’s just worse.”
A couple miles away, even a business that one would
expect to do well during such a deadly disaster was itself struggling
to survive.
his wood from the provinces, but transportation has been upended by a
shortage of gasoline. Now his workers were scouring the city for planks
of wood from fallen buildings. Most of the ruins, however, are
concrete. The city’s teetering old wood homes, called gingerbread
houses for their fanciful fretwork, mostly survived.
The wood Charles’ men had gathered was mostly rough
and splintered and with no straight edges. He had no power tools except
an air compressor for spraying paint.
Yet he had found a way. Under a rusty tin roof next
to the city’s main cemetery, one of his men sawed lengthwise down an
8-foot board with a handsaw. Another used a trowel to coat a coffin
with car body filler to cover the cracks.
The workers were running low on the lining for the
faux satin interior, but they had enough for now. Shredded paper from
office buildings constituted the padding for the occupants’ eternal
sleep.
By the time a painter sprayed them silver, the
coffins looked professionally made, with different shapes and sizes and
levels of quality. The workers were making two or three a day.
“Whatever I find I use,” Charles said. “I have no choice.”
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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