Rony Jean-Pierre features in One Day in Port-au-Prince, a multimedia documentary.
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) - If you took all the rubble created by Haiti’s earthquake, you'd have enough material to make three Great Pyramids of Egypt. That's 20 million cubic metres (35 million cubic feet) of debris, according to the United Nations.
Within all that rubble is a vast amount of scrap metal: twisted girders and buckled sheets of corrugated iron; broken-off car doors and crumpled drainpipes; bent alloy beams and rusty grillwork.
But mostly it’s knotted iron and steel bars sprouting from reinforced concrete.
These rebars, as they’re technically called, are everywhere. And everywhere you see Haitians grafting to extract them from concrete slabs. It’s slow, blistering work, done mostly by sledgehammer and hacksaw.
The risks of scavenging – including cuts that are easily infected and the perils of walking over unstable structures – are outweighed by the few gourdes earned selling scrap to one of the many dealers around Port-au-Prince.
Jean-Pierre Rony, 44, is a scrap buyer on the corner of Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Rue Joseph Janvier, in the heart of the downtown district.
He has a hulking set of scales and his own vehicle - a vividly painted “taxi bus” that could seat eight passengers if it weren’t crammed with metal. People come to him throughout the day lugging scrap they’ve salvaged. He weighs it, pays them and throws it in the van.
“I put what I buy in a warehouse, and I keep adding to it until I can rent a big truck,” he said. “After that I take it to the company GS.”
He was referring to GS Industries S.A., a Miami-based exporter that ships scrap metal and other recyclables to ports worldwide, including in China. It has a big depot on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. They pay him 8 gourdes (20 cents) per kilogramme.
“However many kilogrammes you make, they pay you that amount,” he said.
He estimated the contents of his taxi bus at 1,000 kg, which comes to a good $200 worth of scrap. That’s not net profit though, as the price he pays per kg is only marginally less than the one he receives from GS. Then there’s the cost of
vehicle hire and warehouse space.
“You buy it to make a couple of bucks, to live with your children,” he said.
And when all the rubble is gone?
“After this, when it’s done, we’re in God’s hands,” he said. “We’re in God’s hands, and we’ll have to figure out what to do afterwards.”
