STORY by TRACY CASSAGNOL
PHOTOS by KRISTIN NICHOLS
In a perfect world, "The Crops" would be a town like any other. Living in the pink, blue and green houses are an accountant, a mechanic and a carpenter. The woman down the path has two young daughters who head off to school in the morning with sleepy eyes and dragging feet. The guys in the house around the corner spend their afternoons waiting for work, their laughter and jokes carrying in the wind.
However, this little community is an island within an island, isolated from the rest of Andros. English is never heard here, and neighbors call out to each other in Haitian Creole.
“Ki jan ou ye? (How are you),” a man calls out.
“Ou konnen .. .map kenbe! (You know… I’m holding on),” the woman calls back.
More than 300 Haitian immigrants live in The Crops, accounting for only a small part of the estimated 60,000 Haitians living in the Bahamas. According to The Nassau Guardian, the islands’ largest newspaper, this number is a conservative estimate. But it makes Haitians almost 20 percent of the country’s total population.
As Bahamians struggle to define themselves and their nation, they continue to look at the Haitian population on Andros and in the rest of the Bahamas as a problem to be dealt with, a group to monitor, a community to keep unsettled.
The immigrants live in the shantytowns with various names like The Crops in Andros, The Mud and Pigeon Peas in Abaco. The “Haitian Problem” as Bahamian media refers to it comes to life in The Crops. Haitians, many of them illegal, come to work on the farms and orchards of Andros Island, the largest of the Bahamian Out Islands. Haitians call these islands “zile.”
A Life in the Dark
The older man everyone calls Dadzi has lost much to these islands.
The eyes that once looked across the water to the bright lights of Nassau have failed him, leaving him in the dark. His youngest daughter left years ago to live with a Mennonite family, visiting her parents for a couple of hours on Thursdays. He has not heard from his oldest daughter since she paid a man to take her to Florida three years ago.
His only companion during the day when his wife Mami is in her pepper fields is an old, black AM/FM radio. The 70-year-old can rattle off the names of the anchors he hears: Piman Bouk, Ti Jacques and Saint Surin. The stations he picks up are run by Haitians in Miami, Montreal, New York and Haiti.
He leans forward to hear the opening song.
“Lagem poum pale, Lagem poum pale.” Let me go so I can talk . Let me go so I can talk, the song says.
“Haitians cannot have a station here,” he said. “We can’t talk. We can only work. There was a priest on Nassau who started a show several years ago, but the government stopped that.”
Not much has changed in the Bahamas since Dadzi and Mami came more than 40 years ago. They came as a part of the first major wave of immigrants in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Before he left Haiti, Dadzi voted in the 1957 election for the man who eventually lost. Francois Duvalier, the dictator who took power, appointed a paramilitary force that made the lives of Duvalier’s former opponents difficult.
It made things dangerous for Dadzi. Like many Haitians in similar situations, he wanted to live beyond the reach of Duvalier’s government.
“We came to Nassau because Bahamian bosses were sending for us, looking for people to work,” he said. “It was easier to come here than go to the states.”
In 1959, Dadzi, who lived in Tortuga Island, an Haitian island in the north, heard that a Bahamian boss was offering passage to people willing to work.
The boat captain left the dehydrated and sun-stricken immigrants on a sandbar until he could smuggle them in at night.
“We stood in that shallow water for hours, scared of sharks and looking to God in the sky to bring us safely,” Dadzi said.
His first job was working with a construction company. It paid 10 shillings a week, which would be less than $1 in modern times. When the Progressive Liberal Party took over for the British government in 1964, Dadzi witnessed a step forward for Bahamian citizens.
With each gain, however, the government took more rights away from immigrants, Dadzi said. Haitians did not have the same rights in this foreign land, because Bahamians felt threatened by a growing immigrant population.
By the time Dadzi and Mami moved to Andros and started their family, the government did not allow Haitian children born outside the Bahamas in public schools. Faced with the prospect of sending their two young daughters to the fields, the couple was approached by representatives from the Mennonite Mission on Andros Island. They offered to take their daughters into the school if the girls agreed to be raised the Mennonite way.
The meeting started a relationship with the mission that remains today.
Every Sunday the Stauffers, a Mennonite family, come to pick up the couple and take them to the Mennonite church in Fresh Creek.
On this morning, Mami seems 30 years younger. She is excited, her normally tired eyes alight with happiness.
“Today you will meet my daughter,” she said to a visitor.
At the church, a thin woman with Mami's smile walks up and greets the couple with kisses on the cheek. She is wearing the long-sleeved blue dress worn by the Mennonite women, her curly black hair tucked under the same white bonnet as the blond missionaries.
She takes her place toward the front of the church. Mami sits near the back.
After the service, Mami and Dadzi are driven home by the Stauffers. Mami immediately changes out of the high-necked, long-sleeved dress and puts on a sleeveless cotton dress. Dadzi unbuttons his starched white shirt.
“These clothes are too hot,” she says. “I can’t work in them.”
When the couple’s youngest daughter Emmelienne was a teenager, she asked her parents if she could live with the Mennonites. She now lives with one of the families, helping out with chores and teaching Sunday school.
“The Mennonites do not believe in school,” Dadzi said. “They are good for teaching people how to clean and plant. That is probably why Rosemary suffered so much.”
Rosemary, their oldest daughter, left Andros and paid a man to take her to the States. She was afraid that the skills she learned from the Mennonite school would not be enough to get her a job and hoped to go to school in the United States. No one has heard from her in three years.
In some ways, the Mennonite Mission has been a blessing for the Haitian immigrants on Andros. Its presence can be seen throughout The Crops. The most modern features of The Crops- a red water pump, two modern-looking houses, and plastic tarps to cover seedlings- were all gifts from the Mennonites. Successful farmers, they have taught Crops residents novel ways to plant in the Androsian soil. Their farm down the road is a place where Haitians can buy farming tools and construction material, seeds and fertilizer.
When Dadzi’s eyesight began to deteriorate, the Mennonites paid to send him to Nassau. A Mennonite woman, her two young children in tow, comes every harvest season to bring Mami’s peppers to the packinghouse. And, with their help, Emmelienne is working out her residency situation.
“Mennonites are good people,” Mami said. “They will stand with you. They will work with you.”
However, for Haitians, whose culture values higher education and is centered on news, the Mennonite’s rejection of higher education and isolation from the media is difficult to accept.
“The way they live is not natural,” Louis, a resident of The Crops, said. “If you bring your child to them it is as if you have made them a gift. That child doesn’t recognize their parent.”
Life alone is difficult for Mami and Dadzi. Emmelienne visits once a week, making the trip to her parents’ small house on Thursday afternoons. Without the large extended family they would have had in Haiti, with children and grandchildren to care for them, the burden falls on Mami.
“I used to come home and find all of my peppers harvested,” Mami said. “The husband used to do it all for me. Now he is scared to fall.”
Without Mami’s help, Dadzi spends the day sitting in the same chair, either in the house or, on hot days, under the grapefruit tree in their backyard.
“Since I have been here, I have aged a lot. I have thought a lot. I have worked a lot,” Mami said.
The family she left behind in Haiti is gone, with the exception of nieces and nephews who barely know her. Both of Dadzi’s parents and all of his siblings have died.
“I don’t have any family [in Andros],” Mami said. “God alone is my family here.”
Several years ago, Dadzi received a letter from the Bahamian government, informing him that he had lived as a resident long enough to apply for residency. There was a time when he would have jumped at the offer, when the Bahamas and Andros Island still held the promise of a better life. He did not respond to the letter.
“I don’t want to be a citizen,” he said. “I’m not Bahamian.”
Working for life
The students from the nearby American school are in a wild mood tonight.
“Can you please put on some music, Joe?” they ask.
Joe the bartender, as he is known to the American students, obliges. The guys at the bar are buying well this evening.
“Two Kaliks for me, one liquor for the lady,” one student says, reaching over to drop five American dollars in the tip basket, his glassy eyes never leaving the young woman beside him.
In Haiti, Joe, 25, is known to his family and friends as a quiet person. He hasn’t had alcohol since he lost his best friend in a car accident in Port-au-Prince three years ago. His days have become centered around religion. He feels personally responsible for what happens after he serves the drinks.
“They go off to some place every weekend, and when they come back they don’t know the difference between the sky and the ground,” he said about the students. “I know they do drugs, and they are so young.”
Here, as in Haiti, drugs are common. Joe’s mother has had him tested several times; each time the tests come back negative.
“If my mother could see what I am doing now, she would die,” he said. “Sometimes when they come in, they fall asleep, and I have to stay until they wake up.”
He would gladly leave, but the tips the students leave Joe are his only income. Besides, the boisterous students are more respectful than the hostile Bahamians who frequent the bar, he said.
“Bahamians treat me very badly,” He said. “Once they see a Haitian, they want for that person to be doing machete work. They walk in here and get jealous and threaten to call immigration. When immigration officials come here, I show them my papers.”
Joe said the owner of the bar has not paid him this month. When he asks, she jokingly responds that she will call immigration. So he comes back each night to man the bar and collect the tips, waking up each morning to clean out the hotel’s rooms and bathrooms. On days when there is not enough seafood, he even works as a fisherman, catching saltwater fish for Sheila’s dinner guests.
“I’m waiting until I get together enough money to go home,” Joe said.
Home is the Haitian capital, Port au Prince, where Joe works as an English teacher.
Although, the position is vastly different from the one he holds at the hotel, the paychecks are still rare. During periods of unrest, the school he taught for closes for months at a time.
Still, Joe admits he is luckier than the young men in The Crops. He speaks fluent English and has a visa that allows him to visit his family in Haiti.
The majority of the young men who live in The Crops work in the fields. On sunny days they go off to work in construction at the new hotel or to plant onions, peppers, tomatoes or citrus. They come to the Bahamas illegally and speak little English.
You can find a group of them on rainy days, when farming is not possible, sitting outside on rusty bicycle seats and dusty plastic crates. They “bay blag” or tell jokes, continuing the strong Haitian oral tradition to pass the time. They come from different places in Haiti, Cap Haitien and Gonaives in the North, Les Cayes and Port-au-Prince in the South.
These young men are a part of the second wave of Haitian immigration to the Bahamas who fled the island for different reasons, both economic and political.
Before he came to the Bahamas, Hedlin worked as a diesel truck mechanic. A year ago, the situation in Haiti was volatile. Kidnappings were an everyday occurrence and the young men in his village were heading to Port-au-Prince to work or staying back to join the drug gangs that started . The opportunity to come to the Bahamas, work and send money to his mother and seven younger siblings seemed full of beautiful possibilities. But, he said, the real situation is far from what he imagined.
“If we found a truck they would let us work on, we would,” Hedlin said. “Bahamians think that we are stupid, and that we are only good for work with a machete.”
The Bahamian government issues work visas to Haitians with the stipulation that they only work in agriculture. Furthermore, Haitians must apply from within Haiti. Once they come to the Bahamas, their employer must be the one to renew their visa, which cost $650 per visa, per year. Workdays in the fields are long and the going rate for a day’s work is $30.
Some immigrants are unable to pay the $650 fee, so their employers pay. They must work off their debt, resulting in a form of indentured servitude. The U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report, released on June 5, 2006, listed the Bahamas as a special case.
“Some local sources have stated that labor exploitation of Haitians may be widespread, with employers coercing undocumented migrants to work long hours for no pay or significantly below the minimum wage by withholding documents and threatening workers with arrest and deportation,” the report said. “Such workers could be subjected to conditions of involuntary servitude, a severe form of trafficking in persons.”
Unable to present their cases at the Bahamian police stations, immigrants are subject to the whims of their employers. There are no strikes, no labor unions and no standard working conditions for stateless people.
“They know we work hard and will work night and day,” Hedlin said. “But there is no work for us sometimes, and then they don’t pay us.”
Hedlin said he can work several months without pay, getting up each morning and catching a ride with his employer to the field. The crops he grows himself are difficult to sell, he said.
“You have to depend on your boss to take your crops for you,” he said. “Many times they go and never give you your money. You can’t say anything. They will just deport you.”
The situation is the same, no matter how long you have lived in Andros, Louis said.
In Haiti, Louis was well-liked and used his popularity to get a government official elected. After the election, the opponents harassed him and threatened to kill him before the year’s end.
He has lived in Andros for more than 10 years and works as the construction supervisor for a new luxury resort. Before Louis agreed to do the job for $6 an hour, a Bahamian held the position and was paid $15 an hour.
Louis said the lack of representation for Haitians on Andros is the biggest problem.
“Because I have lived here and speak English, people come to me with their cases,” he said. “If they filed for papers and have not yet received them, I call the Haitian ambassador. He is never available and has not visited Andros to see how we are living.”
Last month, the Bahamian employees at the hotel lined up to receive their paychecks. When one Haitian worker asked the boss if he wanted them to line up, the boss laughed.
“To be deported,” he said.
The boss is a Jamaican and is notorious in The Crops. The people say he only speaks one language to them: curses.
“It is not a good situation,” Louis said. “He has had people deported before. He treats us like animals. Sometimes, we can’t even use the same facilities as the Bahamian workers.”
The fear of deportation is what brought many of The Crops residents to Andros. In Nassau, the raids are more frequent, and tensions are higher between Haitians and Bahamians living on the much smaller island. They move to Andros, despite the fact that life is expensive in the “zile,” where everything must be imported from Nassau.
Even on this sleepy Out Island, fear of deportation is constant. In July, the immigration authorities raided The Crops, handcuffing and detaining four men. Moise said they came in the middle of the night, when the guys were asleep inside of the tiny wooden hut the six of them share.
“In times like that, you just run and hide, even if you have papers,” Moise said. “You hide in the bush and crouch down until it is safe to come back.”
Crouching in the bush under the night sky is a far cry from what Mise thought life in the Bahamas would be. He left Haiti during the most recent violent coup, which ousted President Aristide. A carpenter by training, he was unable to find work in the overcrowded Haitian capital.
He runs because he has no papers, crouching beside his housemates who have legal documents.
During a major immigration raid in North Eleuthera in April of 2006, the majority of
immigrants picked up had legal status. Of the 187 people detained, 166 had to be released, according a May 8, 2006, article in The Nassau Guardian. The Grand Bahama Human Rights Association president, Fred Smith, told the newspaper that Haitians were being mistreated in the raids, citing instances of theft and physical abuse.
The people in The Crops prefer to simply avoid the situation. Everyone there flees when authorities enter the community. The women and children, men, young and old, flee to the bush, crouch and wait.
Community Ties
Every morning Julia wakes up to dress her daughters for school. Like her mother did for her in Haiti, she feeds them codfish and boiled plantains. Hair ribbons are tied, shoes are shined, and shirts are pressed. By the time 4-year-old Sarah and 9-year-old Olivia are sitting in the family’s Nissan Pathfinder, not a hair is out of place.
Olivia is quiet this morning; it was not an easy morning for her. Her mother discovered a smudge on the pressed shirt she chose to wear.
Sarah is her usual energetic self, kicking the back of her mother’s seat, her black shoes making a “thump, thump, thump” on the hard plastic.
On this particular morning, the Bahamian school bus that usually picks up the girls is not running, and Julia must take them to school. She tries the ignition, and there is no responding roar of the engine.
The girls will be late.
Before Julia can roll down the window, three of the neighborhood guys are already looking under the hood.
As they wait for their “uncles” to find the problem, the girls are teased by “Uncle Hedlin.”
“You think you are going to get to stay home today?” he said.
Sarah and Olivia are used to the teasing of their many “uncles.” Their “uncles” are not relatives, but in The Crops everyone is family. For right now they have to put up with 20 “uncles.” This number changes every time immigration comes around.
After ten minutes, one of the guys isolates the problem. Julia’s car is out of gas.
“Sister, nothing is wrong with the car,” Wesner said. “You have no gas. That is the problem.”
The uncles laugh and make jokes. Not willing to be outdone, she responds good-naturedly.
“I always put gas,” she said. “It is you guys speeding along when you borrow the car! Not me!”
After the men funnel gas into the tank, she starts one of the few working automobiles in The Crops.
On the way to school, a Bahamian gas station employee waves, shouting a greeting as she drives by.
Julia’s daughters were born in the Bahamas and have legal status as Haitian-Bahamians. The school they attend is a Bahamian public school.
At the school, she walks Sarah to her classroom, stopping to chat with her Bahamian teacher. Olivia races off to her classroom with hardly a wave.
The ride home is a journey of contrasts, taking the mother of two through the well-kept Bahamian neighborhoods near the girls’ school. The paved road becomes a dirt path into The Crops where the brightly colored homes are huts in comparison, and garbage litters the surrounding properties.
Earlier this year, a little girl several houses away got sick. Her mother used the entire family savings to pay a doctor to come see the girl but when the doctor arrived, she refused to enter The Crops, afraid of the unhealthy conditions.
One of the uncles carried the sick child in her bed sheets to the road where the doctor would see her.
“We did not live like this in Haiti,” Julia said. “Please don’t think that we don’t know how to live. We just can’t find another way to live.”
To rent a room in a better neighborhood, you must be able to show proof of a steady employer or have your boss sign for you, Julia said. In addition, the landlords need regular payment, something that is not possible because steady work and payment are rare for Haitian employees.
Julia is one of two women who live in this side of The Crops. Her home is a hub of activity, with one of the few working telephones in the region. During soccer games, the guys crowd her doorway to watch the games on her television.
“She doesn’t let us come in if we are dirty from the field,” Avrilus, a neighbor who often stops by during the day, said. “Julia likes to keep her house clean.”
The other woman, Mercegrace, stops by during the day to check up on her. Julia was diagnosed with diabetes by a foreign doctor at the clinic. The prescriptions he gave her for insulin and diabetes medication are safely tucked away in her room.With no insurance, the medications are too expensive.
She is not the only one in need of medical attention. The kids suffer from persistent ear infections. Every so often, their eyes cloud up from infections they contract from swarms of flies in the area. Skin conditions abound, probably from the garbage, she said.
The Bahamian nurses at the Fresh Creek clinic are not always receptive to Haitian immigrants.
“They think we all have AIDs and only help if the foreign doctors are around,” Julia said. “We get the prescriptions but can’t do anything with them.”
During the day, when the girls are at school, Julia and Mercegrace find ways to keep busy. They mend the men’s clothing, cook and clean the house. Options are limited for Haitian women. The visas they were granted to join their spouses explicitly state that they are not allowed to seek employment in the Bahamas.
Mercegrace applied for her visa legally from Haiti. Without any warning, the Bahamian government canceled it after four years and sent her a deportation notice.
“We need to have someone to make sure they process our papers and to keep them from cancelling them for no reason,” she said. “We need a person to speak for us.”
She is terrified of being deported. Julia is the only person she knows who has spent time in the Carmichael Road Detention Centre in Nassau.
Immigrants waiting to be repatriated are detained in the compound, surrounded by fences covered with barbed wire.
A 2002 report by Amnesty International stated that the organization was “ very concerned” about reports of physical and sexual abuse at the Centre after received allegations of the rape of two women detainees.
The organization also called the conditions, “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” and stated that the Bahamas was in serious breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In 2006, one Haitian detainee, 27-year-old Jason Lionels, was beaten. Visitors told The Nassau Guardian that an officer beat the man with a gun as he stood behind the fence talking to a female friend.
“They check to see if everyone is still there three times in the night,” Avrilus said. “They call your name and if you don’t respond or are still asleep, they beat you.”
Avrilus was an accountant before he came to the Bahamas. He said Bahamians resent Haitians because they do not speak English but purposefully keep Haitians in a state of ignorance.
“We are isolated from them so it is hard to learn to speak English,” he said. “We have no access to night schools and libraries.”
He had dreams of continuing his education by attending medical school.
“As a young guy, you wish you could work or study to make a life for yourself, but [Bahamians] don’t agree,” Avrilus said.
Julia’s tiny kitchen table is often the location of discussions like this one. When 3p.m. rolls around, everyone leaves, and she leaves to pick up her daughters.
The 10-minute ride to the girls’ school is a quiet one. Julia seems preoccupied when she waves in the direction of the gas station.
“You know, Sarah is the only one who speaks Creole,” she said. “Olivia used to speak Creole but she doesn’t anymore.”
At the school, the girls jump into the car, their white socks browned with dust and sweat marks forming on their shirts.
At home, the girls toss their bookbags in a corner and eat a dinner of rice, beans and chicken while watching a Shakira concert. Sarah dances to the right of the television.
“She is such a great dancer,” Sarah said. “I wish I could be like her.”
When the concert ends, Olivia starts her homework. She works slowly, making spelling errors without anyone to correct her.
There is not much for children to do in The Crops. There are few families and even fewer children. The girls at the school go to freshwater springs and the beach on weekends.
“My parents are too scared to go to the beach,” Olivia said.
Life Continues
The days of Haitian people on Andros are numbered. Four were taken in June. A hundred were deported last year. Two go tomorrow.
As they wait for their number to come up, the Haitian people in the Bahamian islands attempt to cultivate a life in this unwelcome soil. Work is a constant concern, home an ever-distant place, the future as uncertain as Androsian weather.
Church services under the tent are close to normal living.
Tuesday, everyone is preparing for the evening service. Olivia grabs two chairs, waddling under their weight. Sarah listlessly follows; she is too small to carry the white plastic chairs. Mercegrace braids Julia’s hair, her fingers shining with hair crème.
Brother Wesner and Brother Avrilus, as they are called during the Baptist service, are under the hood of the car, using the car’s battery to test the three Christmas bulbs that serve as the church’s lighting. Earlier they spent four hours carefully handstitching the tent after heavy rains tore it, using fishing wire and needles.
When 7 p.m. rolls around, the small congregation of the sagging tent beside Queen’s Highway are standing, waiting for Brother Wesner to begin the service.
Amid the prayerful silence are moments of enthusiastic song. A wooden bench collapses, leaving its occupants without a seat and their neighbors stifling chuckles. The church doesn’t have a name. This congregation is not afraid to experiment with new songs and procedures. This is a community creating traditions.
The reading today is from the Book of Luke.
Jesus comes to Jericho and meets a blind man by the road. The man calls him the son of God and asks to be granted sight. The miracle is performed, sped along by the power of the man’s faith.
Faith and perseverance are the message tonight. Direction is gained by perseverance. Sight is granted by faith.
The residents of The Crops nod and murmur agreement. This is indeed the right message. The service is going well, the patrons of the modest church are pleased and proud.
Then, the flashes appear followed by a car, orange slices of light reflecting off the tent canvas. Most every head whips toward the road and Brother Wesner falls silent mid-sermon. In a moment of pure terror, heartbeats skip and hands are clenched. The white BaTelCo truck with its flashing orange lights speeds past, the telephone company driver not sparing a glance to the church in the field. It is not an immigration vehicle. Today, life continues.
Simple living conditions are standard for immigrants living on Andros.