déchets. stigmatisations, commerces, politiques ... - Viva Rio en Haiti

40 | GARBAGE
or abandoned (including street corners, gullies, canals,
dumps, and so on), the purchase/sales points,
especially those trading plastics and metals, the
workshops that use these objects as raw material or
fuel, and the domestic and commercial latrines. The
study also identifi ed the circuits involved in garbage
disposal, its transformation into merchandise
and commercialization. Open and semi-structured
interviews were used to learn about people’s habits
and perceptions vis-à-vis garbage and hygiene.
We talked to buyers and sellers at various points
in the networks through which the objects circulate
(in the streets, weighing points, trading depots,
workshops and the commercialization and exportation
companies), as well as conversing with the
owners and employees of commercial latrines and
with ‘notable fi gures’ from the zone. We mapped the
networks of bayakous (latrine cleaning professionals)
that work or have ‘bases’ in the area, identifying
the modalities used to organize the teams. We
reconstructed the trajectories of these people and
the mechanisms for shaping their relations with
the clients requesting their services.
Our interest in the management of fecal matter
stemmed from a suggestion from VR, which
was then discussing a project for the installation
of public latrines. In the fi eld, the relationship between
waste and latrines became apparent early
on in the ethnographic research as we talked to
residents from the area, who showed us unusable
latrines or waste disposal sites when the conversation
turned to garbage. This relationship was also
made evident through the existence of various
private companies providing both garbage collection
and latrine cleaning services, thereby combining
activities in a sphere that some viewpoints
separate into ‘solid waste’ and ‘liquid waste.’
The observations and interviews were conducted
both during the day and at night in order
to learn about the different habits, attitudes and
activities that occur at different times – for example,
as we saw, night is when the bayakous work,
early morning is when the kokorat (pickers) begin
to collect garbage from the dumps and canals.
We also had meetings with government agencies
responsible in one form or other for questions
relating to waste (the Ministry of Public Works,
Transport and Communications, and the Port-au-
Prince council), as well as talking to international
cooperation institutions (AFD, UNDP and IADB),
non-governmental organizations (GRET, Atletic
d’Ayiti and VR), and companies offering street and
latrine cleaning services (Boucard, Sanitec, Clean
Rite, JEDCO) or purchasing garbage for recycling
and exportation (GS). We conducted a survey of
the actions of these institutions and their distinct
views concerning the ‘garbage problem’ by interviewing
directors and employees, making observations
on the company premises, taking part in sector-based
meetings and visiting projects already
under way.
2. GARBAGE AND SOCIAL STIGMATIZATION
The description of the region under study as
one of the dirtiest in Port-au-Prince has attained
a broad consensus among the state institutions,
international agencies, NGOs, the population of
other parts of the city and even residents from
the zone itself. This consensus must be read for
its nuances, though, since the meaning of dirt and
the values attributed to it vary according the persons
and institutions involved, the region where
they live, and the diverse interactive situations in
which these topics emerge or are raised.
For many institutions the region is branded
with a series of ‘problems’ which the presence
of garbage exemplifi es and reinforces, feeding
the stigmatization that oppresses its population:
environmental, sanitary and social degradation,
linked to violence, unemployment and the absence
of the State. Thus the stigmatizing dynamic
of the external agents combines the description of
the zone’s ‘dirty’ characteristics with a judgment
on the ‘dirty’ habits of the residents. The ‘lack of
education’ and ‘absence of hygiene’ attributed to
the population is blurred with the characteristics
conferred to the location, reinforcing a diffuse and
doubly stigmatizing idea of dirt, a hybrid of sanitary
diagnosis and moral condemnation. 8
The local perceptions of dirt and garbage dialogue
implicitly or explicitly with these stigmatizations
from ‘outsiders.’ 9 Indeed it is not rare to
hear residents complain of the bad habits or lack
of education of the population to which they themselves
belong. Alongside these claims, though, local
people pose other kinds of questions that in
fact change the direction of this logic and effectively
overturn it: hence rather than a ‘lack of education,’
the real problem is a lack of opportuni-