Jwaye Nwèl

Traditional Haitian Christmas decorations. These churches are each hand-made from cardboard and tissue paper, then illuminated with candles.


By the sea during Christmas week. This boy takes a break after a morning catching aransèl, salt-water fish.


Christmas Eve: picking through the fatra (trash/rubbish) on a street corner near my house. And I live in a nice neighbourhood.

Musicians on a mural inside Sainte Trinité, the Anglican Cathedral in Pòtoprens.

M. Thompson Ambroise has worked as a tourist guide in Pòtoprens since the 1950s, and has an enormous number of stories to tell about life in the city over the years. Unfortunately not many tourists come to Haiti these days, and times are hard.

Christmas babies, on my kitchen doorstep.

At the market

Taking photos of people in Pòtoprens is next to impossible. This morning I visited the rural market in Fondwa (or Fond d'Oie, in French), where it was slightly easier.



The standard means of transport for goods around Haiti is on the head. The woman in the foreground, like many, doesn't wear shoes.

Somewhere under this pile of people and goods is a truck, which is going to transport them all to Pòtoprens, si Bon Dye vle (if God wants it).



Under a heap of very affectionate children at the orphanage in Fondwa.

It's disturbing how dry parts of this country - which has good rainfall most of the year - can be. Agriculture is a tough business here.

Back on the road.

Saturday morning in Kafou, one of Pòtoprens's less celubrious suburbs. The Egalité Bank in the background is not a bank in the usual sense: it's a lottery outlet, one of many thousands all over Haiti which are helping to keep poor people poor.

Where do American school buses go when they die? They come to Haiti, where they are operated as public transport for as many years as they can still physically move. And then they are abandoned where they fall.

Pòtoprens

I have spent my first few months in Haiti living in the capital city, Port-au-Prince (in the French spelling) or Pòtoprens (in Creole).

A typical street scene, in front of the cathedral in the city centre.

The Champs de Mars. Considering how poor the electricity supply is in this city (and that a large proportion of the inhabitants do not have electricity at all), it is suprisingly difficult to take photographs without power lines getting in the way.

My corner shop. Ti machann (little merchants) like these are to be found all over the city. The organisation I work for, Fonkoze, makes loans to ti machann, enabling them to grow their businesses and to achieve some degree of economic security.

Pòtoprens is famous for its "gingerbread" architecture - 19th-century wooden houses, mostly now in picturesque stages of decay.



Another reminder of happier days: Pòtoprens had a tram network for several decades, which fell into disrepair in the 1930s.

The modern transport system is more concerned with colour (and with the volume of the onboard sound system) than comfort.

The morning blokis in my street.

Having an immaculate school uniform is a precondition for attendance at school. Along with the school fees themselves and the cost of textbooks, this results in a fairly serious barrier to entry to education. People say that many school authorities collaborate with clothing suppliers in changing their uniform every 2-3 years, forcing all the pupils to buy new sets.

Given the problems which many children have in attending school regularly, as well as difficult exams which must be passed each year in order to progress to the next grade, it is not unusual to find people in their mid-20s still trying to finish secondary school.

Why these lunatics were driving an armoured personnel carrier around a quiet suburb is beyond me. The UN force in Haiti, MINUSTAH, is almost universally reviled here.

From a distance, the city actually looks quite attractive. Under those trees it's chaos!

My best friend in Haiti. Like me, Caramel likes to observe life in the city, but appears to be continually baffled by it.