(Hard) Manual Labor; It's Mango Season!

In the U.S. when we talk about manual labor, it usually has something to do with a machine:  The sewing machine operator, the dish washer, the person mowing the lawn.  It does involve sweat and muscles, but with a mechanical assist.  In Haiti there is a lot of manual labor that is totally manual.

Take these demolition workers in front of the school.   It's Saturday morning and they are out working at 6AM.  Bons Samaritains has grown a lot in the last few years, and there is no longer enough space for the students to play during recess.  So the Foundation has bought some adjacent property, two empty homes on the Boulevard.  These men demolished the homes with sledgehammers, and now they are loading the debris, one shovelful at a time, into a high dump truck.  I cannot imagine the conditioning it takes to do this all day.

In one of my early posts I wrote about a woman who was smaller than I am, who was carrying a bag of charcoal on her head.  It had to weigh at least 40 pounds.  I was on a long, uphill walk, looking for an address of some people I wanted to meet.  I kept running across this woman and her young daughter, who was also carrying a bag on her head, a sack about half as large as her mother's.  It was a hot, sunny, exhausting walk over rough terrain, lots of mud and potholes- and did I mention a lot of it uphill?  She was selling door-to-door, and the bags looked just as full when I saw them after an hour of trying to sell.  Olympic level stamina.  There is not money, training space or time for sports training here- and especially not for women- but I think Haiti would surprise the world if someone came here and started some training clubs!

On a more pleasant note, the end of April and beginning of May signal the beginning of mango season.  You may be able to pick out patches of yellow in the marketplace in the video.  There are probably tens of thousands of mangoes for sale in the market.  Even in a land of perpetual summer, it seems that there are some fruits that people crave when they first ripen.  For us in the north, think of those first local tomatoes or strawberries.  Here in St.-Marc, think mangoes.

P.S.: Here is the work site at 5PM, the same day.  They have about half of it cleared off. Amazing.