Hti: How shall the poor live in Haiti?

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Seventy-year-old Adrienne Saint-Charles and her four children lost their home.

"We used to eat next door," she said, pointing to an empty concrete floor where there once stood a restaurant called Merci Jesus. "Now we have no restaurant to go to."

Saint-Charles, rail-thin with a weathered but animated face, still seemed astonished by the events more than a month later. "They said nothing," she said. "They just wrote ‘à démolir’[to be demolished] on the side of the house on Dec 21."

Saint-Charles is one of thousands of Haiti’s squatters. For her and her neighbors, many of whom have lived on the street for up to 15 years, this is the way of life for much of the Haitian poor, a natural and undeniable reality for whom adequate, legal housing is simply unattainable. But to the initiator of the demolition, squatting is breaking the law, and eliminating the practice is in keeping with sound principles of the first world.

The "they" to which Saint-Charles referred is the office of Delmas Mayor, Jean Maxon Guerrier. All those on the road knew it had been the mayor who had sent out the bulldozer, but that’s not where they all put the blame.
"You know who did this? It was the bourgeois," said one resident.