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Love it or Haiti it….

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So why, you may ask, have I chosen to put this picture of clay above? The answer may shock you but what you are seeing right here is a bucket of baked clay; clay to fill the stomachs of those very girls in the picture before. Like a placebo effect, their stomachs are tricked into feeling full from the clay as a means of replacing the food of which they can’t afford.     

Bunnies, swans, pigeons, guinea pigs and even a small cat, in my ignorance I thought I had stumbled upon a touching, albeit fairly disturbing, roadside pet store. “How lovely” I thought, until I realized these animals weren’t to be taken home to be loved, they were to be taken home to be fried for dinner.

With all the malnutrition and mysterious concoctions being passed around, in addition to legitimate illnesses and extreme pain (both physical and emotional) combined with a system that provides little to no health care, and forget about even trying to find a counselor or therapist, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that it is common place to find pharmacists drug dealers your average joe selling bulk quantities of mysterious pills on street corners as nonchalantly as if they were selling bananas.

It is difficult to say whether these pills are what they claim they to be (although if I were a betting man I think I’d surely put down my money in confidence that these pills were either completely synthetic, containing 20% of the actual medicine they claim to be, or strictly generic at best, and I too believe that is a stretch). In a private discussion with a Haitian woman involved with Wings Over Haiti, I heard directly from the horses mouth so to speak that these pills will do one of two things; make you more ill than you were to begin with, or do absolutely nothing as they are often made of chalk and other non-effective materials that can be casted into the shape of a pill.

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