Metal scavengers scrape a living from earthquake-damaged Haiti

Published 5:00 am Saturday, May 1, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The pounding starts at dawn, when the men with the calloused hands crawl by the hundreds, antlike, over and into the ruins of this broken city, from the toppled old market-houses on the Grand Rue to the humbled schoolhouses of the central city, from the shattered shacks along the waterfront to the crumpled mansions up the hill. You hear them before you see them. Heavy hammers tapping out a beat.

Concrete played the villain’s role in the Jan. 12 earthquake drama that savaged Haiti’s capital. The city’s dominant building material was weak when it should have been strong. The men with the hammers hit the stuff hard, as if exacting a kind of communal revenge. Embedded in all that concrete are countless tons of steel and iron, there for the taking. The metal is everywhere. So much of it that Port-au-Prince should be a wonderland for the metal scavengers, the Caribbean conduits for an international scrap-metal market.

Should be.

The metal doesn’t come easily, even with hands as strong as Fritz Mesca’s. Mesca, a 28-year-old with a worry-lined face that makes him look much older, leads a small band of scavengers. Each morning, they survey the cityscape for opportunity. Sometimes the prospecting takes hours, interrupted by false starts and demoralizing setbacks. Some days, police shoo him away, accusing him of looting. Sometimes rival scavengers claim entire buildings, even though there’s plenty for all.

One time, the youngest of Mesca’s three-man crew — a puckish 14-year-old named Pyrus Jean Rousier — tried to stand up to a territorial metal man. The sore spot on Rousier’s upper right arm is a reminder of that encounter. “He was a big, big guy,” Rousier says one afternoon. “It really hurts.”

Jackpot

On this day, though, Mesca, Rousier and their friend Wilio Petit-Home find an uncontested hunting ground. And what a spot! A collapsed hardware store holding a trove of metal, not only embedded in the concrete but wedged beneath it. The rumbling earth left the structure a mere skeleton — brick walls and arches intact — but the meat of the place collapsed into a lumpy heap of cracked concrete and contorted rebar.

Mesca crushes concrete slabs with heavy hammers and wrests the metal out, straining to rip it away. Petit-Home, 26, finds a weighty, basketball-size lump of nails fused together in their bins by the heat into a grotesque form resembling a metallic porcupine. A big score.

Out on the street, they assemble their loot: three heavy, waist-high bags of metal and a gangly pile of rusted rebar and scraps. It’s too unwieldy to carry, so they wait in the shade of a building with Doric columns, now only a shell, a relic of pre-earthquake Port-au-Prince, but one with an air of shabby dignity. Twenty minutes pass before a spindly man comes along pushing a wheelbarrow. He agrees to be their hauler.

Rousier trudges alongside the overstuffed wheelbarrow. He struggles with a half-dozen six-foot-long bands of rebar slung over his right shoulder, flopping dangerously on the crowded street. A woman bends at the waist, just avoiding being slashed by Rousier’s bars. She yells at him and he drops his load.

After Rousier drops his load two more times, the wheelbarrow guy comes to his rescue, heaping Rousier’s tangle of rebar on top of an already wobbly pile.

Payout

An hour of stops and starts later, they wearily pull off along the roadside, where 20-foot-high piles of metal stretch the length of a typical city block.

To weigh the metal, the owner of this enterprise, a sour 24-year-old woman named Christa Rene, has dangled the screen of an electric fan, now serving as a weighing tray, from a swing set. The swing set balances on cinder blocks to get extra height.

The weighing and negotiating do not go well for Mesca’s crew, who worked six hours in wilting heat to get to this point. Mesca is illiterate, and Rene’s calculations confuse him. She imposes rules he’s never heard of: less money for the first 60 kilos than the second, less money for the nails. Always less money. Bewildered, Mesca accepts her offer: 420 Haitian gourdes, the equivalent of $12.

And he won’t keep much of it. A missing saw, borrowed from a friend, is going to cost him $2. The wheelbarrow guy gets $2. That leaves about $4 for Mesca, and $2 each for Rousier, Petit-Home and a fourth member of their crew. As soon as the money is in his hands, Mesca spends the equivalent of 50 cents — one-eighth of his payday — on water, his first refreshment of the day.

Mesca walks another hour to the huge encampment he’s called home since the quake destroyed his house, killing his mother, a sister and an aunt. He knows the money he made today will be gone within minutes of his arrival. There’s a girlfriend and son to support, and relatives to feed. Even though he’s making a little, they’ll still need handouts from relief groups to survive.