Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti (review)

Everyone knows that Haiti is an economic, ecological and political disaster. At least, that is how every newspaper article and television spot about Haiti seems to start. We may suspect that the truth is more complex, but few of us visit, and even fewer have worked there. The list of geographers with long experience in Haiti is short: Georges Anglade, Jean Marie Théodat, Rafael Yunén, Paul Moral, Guy Laserre, and not many more. Few American geographers have mastered the logistics or the languages. (French is fine for government offices, but Kreyòl is the language of field work).

The absence of basic information is nowhere more evident than in Port-au-Prince, a city that is growing so fast and so haphazardly that many neighborhoods (Kosovo, Brooklyn, Boston) are hard to find on any map. Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince is an important new addition to the scant literature about the Haitian capital. Its author, J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat, is an anthropologist, and his focus is on the lives of the city's street children, but he provides a rare picture of the urban landscape.

What will immediately capture most readers are the stories of the children: brief portraits (2-5 pages) of six of the children with whom Kovats-Bernat worked closely, inserted between the chapters of formal academic argument. They are written in direct, simple prose (and, not incidentally, a simpler type face) that brings to life the children and their surroundings. Here is the beginning of one piece:

Blak Lovli doesn't have a birthday. He thinks he is around sixteen, but he is unsure of his exact age because he doesn't know the month let alone the year of his birth. He's a very likable boy—polite, attentive, and eager to tell every detail of his hard life on the street. That life has clearly taken a physical toll on his body. A large curving scar extends along his scalp and ends halfway down his forehead, the result of a razor fight in which he was involved. Several mottled burn scars cover the tops of his feet and a number of his teeth have been lost to decay.

Black-and-white photographs of the children are scattered throughout the book. Many photos are taken from above; as the children gaze up into the camera we see just how small they are. They have no shoes and often no shirts, but they flash dazzling smiles.

Sleeping Rough could be read just for these stories and the photos, which deserve a full-fledged documentary. However, Kovats-Bernat sets the lives of the children in full context. An introduction presents his fundamental thesis. Street children may be the victims of economic and political forces beyond their control, but they are not helpless; they confront and sometimes overcome the limits imposed by their circumstances. The first five chapters help us understand what these circumstances are. Kovats-Bernat explains how children end up on the street and how they manage to exist: where they sleep, what they eat, the odd jobs they do, the illnesses they suffer and, above all, how they survive the violence that seems to come from all sides, including armed gangs, the police and other street kids. Kovats-Bernat does not hide their worst traits: glue sniffing, thievery, and the lagè domi , or "sleeping wars," that they carry on with each other, mostly at night, to resolve long-running conflicts. However, his sympathies are clearly with these timoun lari (street kids). He finds most of them likable, hard working and surprisingly protective of each other. He describes a touching relationship between Ti Amos, a small boy, and his street "sister," a teenager named Bèl Marie. Ti Amos asserts that he sleeps beside B...