In stricken Haiti, food is key not just to survival, but also to the morale of the aid workers and the displaced. Alex Renton reports.
Lunch was patés, which look a bit like Cornish pasties that someone has stamped on. But the children were very excited. Most of them had had nothing but bread or the United Nations high-energy biscuits to eat that day. The cook, 19-year-old Valencia Desiluz, was frying them in hot oil, for anyone with five Haitian gourdes (about 10p) to spend.
When my turn came I had a nervous bite: the crunchy pastry was good, but it opened up a Worcester sauce reek of dried fish and onion. This was a little bit further than my stomach was prepared to go on a first date with Haitian disaster camp food. So I gave the rest of the paté to two small boys — Stanley and Dieudonné — who thanked me politely and ate it before we’d finished exchanging names.
Their mother, Marianne, told me that the family had had little help, other than the biscuits, since their home crashed around them on 12 January. They were borrowing money to buy food, like most of the 50 families living under tarpaulins on the beachside road running out of Port-au-Prince. Oxfam was helping them to clean the rubble out of a well and put in a pump. Having a nearby source of clean water would be a big help.
But what were they to do when there was no more money? Fruit and vegetables for the children had become too expensive. What about when the rains came? These were not questions I could answer. I gestured towards the vast United States aircraft carrier lying at anchor in the bright blue: “There is lots of help here — the whole world wants to aid Haiti,” I said, uselessly, in my bad French.
The broken country is not currently a foodie destination, obviously enough. I’d been warned before travelling to Haiti with Oxfam to fill my suitcase with Pot Noodles and cereal bars; but things have improved. Now, two months into the response, the 200 or so Oxfam staff, 75 per cent of them Haitian, all get a good midday meal. One of the drivers, his family still living under tarpaulin, told me it was the only real meal he gets: “We reserve everything for the children.”
At lunchtime in the school that serves as Oxfam’s temporary operations centre, a queue snakes round the yard as everyone waits for their spicy goat stew, rice and beans. One day there was salt cod, flaked and fried with onion and served with boiled yam and beetroot — delicious. I asked for the recipe.
The aid army, like any other, marches on its stomach. Down at the United Nations logistics base by the airport, needs are served in a wooden structure perched on a couple of portable buildings: it reminds you of a ski resort café. But inside it’s like the bar scene in the first Star Wars movie, with customers of all shapes and nationalities: Japanese and Uruguayan soldiers, big Australian water engineers, leathery bush pilots, elegant New Yorkers strategising with the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, US military engineers in desert fatigues.
It’s one of those restaurants that for a moment seems to be the centre of the world. There’s a practical hubbub; clipboards, Blackberries and VHF radios lie beside the cutlery. Yet the food is basic American: burgers, hot dogs, with a lot of those children’s snacks with cartoon names: Cheez-Its, Craisins. It is odd to see a hulking American captain dipping rusks into a carton of liquid processed cheese. Still, you can get a good cappuccino — crucial for people who work 12-hour days, most of them without a break.
With the rainy season coming, there is a drive to support people in their homes: more people joining the 400,000 under tarpaulin would not be good. To see this I went into the the badly hit slum of Carrefour Feuilles with an Oxfam team leader, Alix Pecinthe, a young Haitian with degrees in anthropology and sociology. We climbed for 20 minutes up paths that were just scratches through and over the rubble of destroyed houses.
Pecinthe’s task is to set up deals with the community and local restaurateurs: Oxfam gives them funds to provide a daily hot meal to those people the community agrees are most in need. There are already 56 of these mini-canteens, each serving 80 meals a day. The cooks like the scheme (it gets them back in business) and the diners I spoke to liked the food.
So did I: there was a wonderful chicken sauce to go with the boiled maize, rich and red, the spices reflecting the many cultures that have blended in Haiti over the centuries; chilli, garlic, tamarind and cloves. Food, you realise, is key not just to survival, but also to the morale of the aid workers and the displaced. At the moment there is enough food. But Haiti’s troubles are not nearly over.
Originally posted in The Times.