A photographer visits Haiti, where ‘see no evil’ is shield

PORT-A U-PRINCE, Haiti — Haiti is not one story. It is many stories — overlapping, colliding, advancing relentlessly to violent and heartbreaking endings.

The rich and the desperately poor. The brutal and the brutalized. Uneasily and sometimes murderously, they share half an island that is a magnet for natural disasters.

Photographer Rodrigo Abd, working with reporter Alberto Arce, spent four weeks in Haiti and came away with a kaleidoscopic collection of images — fragments of slices of life in a tumultuous land.

From the beginning, they spent days riding a motorbike around garbagestrewn, dirt streets of the violent, coastal neighborhoods of Cite Soleil, La Saline, Bel Air, and Martissant.

One Saturday evening, after a shootout between police and a gang, Abd saw a corpse laying face-down in the street with passersby averting their gazes in a common form of selfdefense: See no evil to save yourself.

The pedestrians also covered their faces in the presence of a photographer. Abd quickly learned that most Haitians, but particularly the poor, didn’t want to be photographed — not by a white man and certainly not for free.

“No photo. No money. I want no pictures. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to talk to you.” These were the phrases Abd heard over and over.

On the other hand, Abd won rare access to the homes of the well-to-do who live in Petion-Ville, on the top of a mountain overlooking the bay of Port-au-Prince. In the past, they have been reluctant to show their faces and lifestyles to the media, but now they want to be seen. They feel they have something to say. Following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise last summer, many among the elite have given up hope and abandoned the island. Some are still here and still doing business.

“Once you have invested in a place and a hundred workers depend on you, how can you leave? There is no way back,” said one who remained behind.

The contrasts are poignant.

On one of his last days in Haiti, Abd traveled past the last shantytowns of Portau-Prince to a previously agreed meeting point north of the airport, where three gang members appeared from behind a cluster of trees.

Their faces were covered by rolled up T-shirts and their distrust was such that they asked Abd to lift his shirt: they were not checking for guns but for a hidden camera.

The gang members wanted to convey a message: There is no pride in being a gunman. There are no opportunities. If there were, they would not do what they do.

For these young people, the last in line, gangs are the only way to work in Haiti, a homeland swallowed by poverty.

RODRIGO ABD/AP Gang members use hand towels to conceal their identity Sept. 30 as they arrive to attend the funeral of a fellow gang member in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.