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Where They Eat Cookies Made of Mud to Quench Hunger
January 30, 2008 at 4:53 PM
General Health News
Every week, up to 7,000 camcorder-toting tourists, the vast majority of them Americans, visit Labadee, a port located on the northern coast, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship for a day of sun, sailing, volleyball tournaments, and sliding on the "world's largest" inflatable water slide. It is indeed a private resort leased by Royal Caribbean International.
But then Haiti is also desperately poor. Children eat mud cookies. For the poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice and have to resort to desperate measures to fill their bellies.
Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said. (Colic means severe spasmodic pain in the belly.)
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