In small villages and shantytowns throughout Haiti, children can scrawl their names in shaky script.

Teenagers more accustomed to speaking Creole impress visitors with greetings in English and Spanish.

Adults find light industrial work in an arid landscape that has traditionally offered little else but subsistence farming.

This Caribbean nation of 8 million is more commonly known as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere than as the world’s first black independent republic.

Yet throughout the island a sense of community thrives, cultural expression flourishes and the resilience of the Haitian people can be seen in efforts large and small to change things for the better.

Fewer than three out of 10 working-age Haitians are formally employed. Yet women and men—and many children—work as manual laborers, microproducers and market vendors in the informal sector.

Still, most in this predominantly agrarian society continue to work as farmers, tilling their land or that of large landowners for beans, vegetables or fruit. Others find work fishing the Caribbean waters or weaving straw baskets and other wares by hand.

They sell their products at sidewalk and roadside markets in both congested urban areas and harder-to-reach country villages.

Throughout Haiti, extended families pool their resources, and neighbors help one another when they can. The strong sense of community is rooted in history, in feelings of pride about being Haitian and in a deep desire for selfsufficiency despite economic hardship.

Haitians’ proud identity explodes in cultural expression, which abounds throughout the island, from the colorful, pulsating energy of Carnival to complex mythical canvasses painted by local artists.

Through art, music and dance, Haitians tell their family stories, share the plight of their countrymen and recount their nation’s turbulent history.

Carnival is the island’s most anticipated cultural event. It begins each year on the Saturday before the start of Lent and continues for four joyously manic days.

The drum beat of zouk, a mixture of African and French Creole music, fills the air while the streets teem with floats and dancing revelers bedecked in bright masks and audacious costumes.

Haiti’s color, music and pageantry belie its hard economic and social realities.

• For every 1,000 babies born, 80 will not live to see their first birthdays.
• About a third of all deaths in the country occur among children under 5.
• For every 100,000 pregnant women, 530 die from complications.
• Some 30,000 Haitians died of AIDS in 2001, and a quarter-million are believed to be living with HIV.

Families endure these hardships with resignation. But many find reason to hope and to act. In small villages along the western edge of the island, residents work alongside missionaries digging wells to provide a source of clean water for bathing, washing clothes, cooking and drinking—an alternative to streams and rivers that carry disease-causing pathogens.

In the Artibonite River Valley in central Haiti, the staff from the local hospital teaches families about birth control, parenting, sexually transmitted diseases and the importance of vaccinations.

Public health workers and volunteers from the Albert Schweitzer Hospital fan out over the rugged countryside, tracking every child and adult, immunizing them, weighing them and monitoring them for signs of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases.

Such efforts have helped reduce neonatal tetanus—a leading killer in Haiti—in parts of the Artibonite River Valley, and have helped lower the area’s infant and maternal mortality rates.

From efforts to educate parents has grown a renewed emphasis on educating the country’s children. Throughout Haiti, school enrollment is steadily increasing.

Each day, classrooms fill with wide-eyed youngsters dressed in tidy uniforms, eager to learn the alphabet, read a favorite children’s story and perhaps be the first in their families to learn how to write their names.

Alex Morel is a New York–based photographer who lived in Haiti during 2001–02. He took these photos on assignment for the Pan American Health Organization’s country office in Port-au-Prince.
 
Marisol Bello is a special projects reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in Pennsylvania, USA. She won the U.S. award in the Pan American Health Organization’s centennial journalism contest for her special report “Haiti, Mission of Hope.”