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

and at a distance from their bodies. We noted that,
as occurs in other large metropolises, here too most
of the garbage is not produced by the inhabitants
of these extremely poor areas. They insist – with
good reason – that the waste comes from outside,
up above and the markets. 38
This situation also explains why the actions
VR was implementing in the zone were so visible
at the time: suddenly waste bins appeared in
the streets and avenues, new dumpsters were being
placed on some street corners, brigades were
cleaning public roads and the Pont Rouge channel
continued to be dredged even after rains when it
was inundated again by the waste coming from the
distant and wealthy city districts.
The phrases “The sea never retains the fi lth,
running water is always clean” were not used by
people throwing away garbage: they concerned
and tried to rationalize the customs of those “others
who throw away garbage.” As well as describing
supposed hygiene habits, they express a moral
judgment on customs taken to be wrong, thereby
exposing the dynamic of social stigmatization
that surrounds garbage.
This logic of stigmatization shows, in turn,
that the ‘waste issue’ forms part of a wider social
confi guration involving urban issues (waste management
in the city), political subjects (ways of
dealing with waste, albeit through the spasmodic
nature of public policies, the lack of any defi nition
of responsibilities among public bodies and
the absence of specifi c funding), and questions relating
to international cooperation (which impact
on the ways of seeing and responding to the prob-
37 Some of the objects most frequently thrown in the
streets are undoubtedly the empty plastic bags discarded
after drinking. As we highlighted in a previous
work, the sachè dlo are the main source of drinking
water in the zone (Neiburg & Nicaise 2009). Various
people called attention to the singular characteristics
of this waste and its importance to the area’s sanitation
and to waste management in Port-au-Prince in
general. They also mentioned the need to implement
forms of recycling the plastic bags an/or of creating
legal regulations (like those found in other countries)
that force companies to pay part of the environmental
cost of these objects.
38 Aside from the fact that most of the waste produced
by the extremely poor is organic rather than non-organic,
in contrast to the rich areas of large metropolises.
lem, introducing new management models and resources).
But we also saw that people do not just throw
waste away: they recycle and sell it. The marketing
of objects discarded by others as garbage is an important
part of the small-profi ts economy, injecting
money into the survival mechanisms of people
and families living in the region. Along with
the dynamic of producing social inequalities and
the policy dynamic (of government and intervention
agencies), the universe of garbage also reveals
the market’s importance in structuring contemporary
Haitian social life.
GARBAGE | 57