From his office off the floor of Interamerican Wovens SA, a garment factory in earthquake- stricken Port-au-Prince, Hector Soto watches 540 workers stitching pink and turquoise medical scrubs for the U.S. market.
On an output chart hanging in his office, Soto, 41, draws a red line slashing downward. It’s dated Jan. 12, the day a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing about 230,000 people. Then, with a green marker, he adds a rising line that starts Jan. 25.
Four weeks after the temblor collapsed the economy of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, Haiti is slowly stirring to life. Factories that produced garments, which accounted for about 8 percent of the economy, are running again, while new entrepreneurs seek opportunity amid the ruins by selling mobile- phone calls or recycling building materials from the rubble.
“Haitians are very resilient,” said Eduardo Almeida, the Inter-American Development Bank’s representative in Haiti. “They are used to suffering all types of shocks, political and environmental. They get right up and find ways to keep on going.”
The earthquake injured 300,000 people, according to a government estimate reported by the United Nations, and left 1 million of the county’s 9 million people homeless. It was the deadliest in the Western Hemisphere according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Informal Jobs
Before the quake, about two thirds of the population lacked a formal job and 9 percent worked in manufacturing, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Haiti had a per capita income of about $1,300 a year, the Hemisphere’s lowest, and a gross domestic product of $7.36 billion in 2008.
Pre-quake exports totaled about $500 million annually, $450 million of which were textiles, according to the IADB. Garments made from local components accounted for $150 million of exports. The rest were assembled from foreign materials.
Interamerican, owned by Haiti’s Apaid family, occupies one of 49 identical concrete block buildings arrayed in an industrial park off the road to downtown Port-au-Prince from the city’s Toussaint L’Ouverture airport.
About 90 percent of its production goes to the U.S., Soto said, and clothing used to be shipped by sea from Port-au- Prince. The city’s port collapsed in the quake and the U.S. Army said it won’t reopen for months.
New Seaports
Now, seaports in the Dominican Republic handle half its shipments and the other half leaves from Les Cayes, a Haitian port 140 miles (225 kilometers) southwest of Port-au-Prince.
Clients, including San Francisco-based The Gap Inc., New York-based Polo Ralph Lauren Corp., and Landau Uniforms Inc., an Olive Branch, Mississippi-based scrubs seller, have stuck with the factory, Soto said.
“We are way below zero,” Soto said. The two-week shutdown set the factory’s output back a month, he added. “I had a target to step up production to 45,000 pieces a week by March from 35,000. Now, maybe I can achieve that goal in May or June.”
After the “twelfth,” as many Haitians refer to the earthquake, roads were impassable to supply trucks and the generators had no fuel. In addition, most of the plant’s employees didn’t show up.
‘Lost Friends’
“Some of them were dead, we later learned,” said the Dominican-born Soto, who moved to Port-au-Prince in December 2008. “But most were dealing with the fact they were homeless and had lost friends and family.”
Worried they would drop out of work en masse, Soto said he hired a psychotherapist for the plant.
Haiti is a risky place so Haitians know how to manage risk, said the IADB’s Almeida.
“You will see small entrepreneurs starting a business or selling a service from one day to the next,” he said. “The economy is very informal, so it fosters that kind of entrepreneurial spirit.”
At a dusty Texaco service station on the Route de Tabarre, a major north-south road through the capital, Simon Esperance, 25, clutches a large beige cell phone, approaching drivers lined up for gas and people waiting for a bus amid street vendors pedaling food and toiletries.
He bought the phone after his cashier’s job disappeared with his employer’s food market. He sells calls on the instrument, which resembles a table top phone without a cord, for 5 gourdes (13 cents) a minute.
Cockfights
“A lot of people lost everything, so they can’t afford to replace their cell phones yet,” Esperance said. “So I bought this so I can make money too.”
Thirty kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, in Cabaret, a town known for its cockfights on Route Nationale 1, Haiti’s main highway, Michel Saint, 34, is dumping debris from his Toyota pickup truck onto his front yard.
Unlike the tens of thousands of Haitians paid as much as $5 a day by the UN to clear the capital, Saint has opened a business of his own turning debris into building materials. His brother-in-law, Joseph Duperroy, 31, helps him unload chunks of broken buildings, concrete and scrap metal.From his office off the floor of Interamerican Wovens SA, a garment factory in earthquake- stricken Port-au-Prince, Hector Soto watches 540 workers stitching pink and turquoise medical scrubs for the U.S. market.
On an output chart hanging in his office, Soto, 41, draws a red line slashing downward. It’s dated Jan. 12, the day a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing about 230,000 people. Then, with a green marker, he adds a rising line that starts Jan. 25.
Four weeks after the temblor collapsed the economy of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, Haiti is slowly stirring to life. Factories that produced garments, which accounted for about 8 percent of the economy, are running again, while new entrepreneurs seek opportunity amid the ruins by selling mobile- phone calls or recycling building materials from the rubble.
“Haitians are very resilient,” said Eduardo Almeida, the Inter-American Development Bank’s representative in Haiti. “They are used to suffering all types of shocks, political and environmental. They get right up and find ways to keep on going.”
The earthquake injured 300,000 people, according to a government estimate reported by the United Nations, and left 1 million of the county’s 9 million people homeless. It was the deadliest in the Western Hemisphere according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Informal Jobs
Before the quake, about two thirds of the population lacked a formal job and 9 percent worked in manufacturing, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Haiti had a per capita income of about $1,300 a year, the Hemisphere’s lowest, and a gross domestic product of $7.36 billion in 2008.
Pre-quake exports totaled about $500 million annually, $450 million of which were textiles, according to the IADB. Garments made from local components accounted for $150 million of exports. The rest were assembled from foreign materials.
Interamerican, owned by Haiti’s Apaid family, occupies one of 49 identical concrete block buildings arrayed in an industrial park off the road to downtown Port-au-Prince from the city’s Toussaint L’Ouverture airport.
About 90 percent of its production goes to the U.S., Soto said, and clothing used to be shipped by sea from Port-au- Prince. The city’s port collapsed in the quake and the U.S. Army said it won’t reopen for months.
New Seaports
Now, seaports in the Dominican Republic handle half its shipments and the other half leaves from Les Cayes, a Haitian port 140 miles (225 kilometers) southwest of Port-au-Prince.
Clients, including San Francisco-based The Gap Inc., New York-based Polo Ralph Lauren Corp., and Landau Uniforms Inc., an Olive Branch, Mississippi-based scrubs seller, have stuck with the factory, Soto said.
“We are way below zero,” Soto said. The two-week shutdown set the factory’s output back a month, he added. “I had a target to step up production to 45,000 pieces a week by March from 35,000. Now, maybe I can achieve that goal in May or June.”
After the “twelfth,” as many Haitians refer to the earthquake, roads were impassable to supply trucks and the generators had no fuel. In addition, most of the plant’s employees didn’t show up.
‘Lost Friends’
“Some of them were dead, we later learned,” said the Dominican-born Soto, who moved to Port-au-Prince in December 2008. “But most were dealing with the fact they were homeless and had lost friends and family.”
Worried they would drop out of work en masse, Soto said he hired a psychotherapist for the plant.
Haiti is a risky place so Haitians know how to manage risk, said the IADB’s Almeida.
“You will see small entrepreneurs starting a business or selling a service from one day to the next,” he said. “The economy is very informal, so it fosters that kind of entrepreneurial spirit.”
At a dusty Texaco service station on the Route de Tabarre, a major north-south road through the capital, Simon Esperance, 25, clutches a large beige cell phone, approaching drivers lined up for gas and people waiting for a bus amid street vendors pedaling food and toiletries.
He bought the phone after his cashier’s job disappeared with his employer’s food market. He sells calls on the instrument, which resembles a table top phone without a cord, for 5 gourdes (13 cents) a minute.
Cockfights
“A lot of people lost everything, so they can’t afford to replace their cell phones yet,” Esperance said. “So I bought this so I can make money too.”
Thirty kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, in Cabaret, a town known for its cockfights on Route Nationale 1, Haiti’s main highway, Michel Saint, 34, is dumping debris from his Toyota pickup truck onto his front yard.
Unlike the tens of thousands of Haitians paid as much as $5 a day by the UN to clear the capital, Saint has opened a business of his own turning debris into building materials. His brother-in-law, Joseph Duperroy, 31, helps him unload chunks of broken buildings, concrete and scrap metal.
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