A young man in a red shirt yelled fiercely, ‘NO PICTURE!’ when I stepped onto a building site in Port-au-Prince’s notorious Cité Soleil.

He was working with a chain of other young men who lined a ladder down into a big hole with a foot and a half of pale, tan water at the bottom. Two barefoot men with pants rolled up and 5-gallon pails were standing in the soup, dipping it up and passing it out. They all stopped work and stared at me.

I slung my camera back onto my shoulder and nodded assent, and then they all burst out laughing. They threw comments back and forth like there was some huge joke. I felt  they were saying I looked pretty funny with my serious white face. 

And then Mimi2, as we call her—because she is the second powerful woman by that name we have found in Haiti on this trip—came striding across the tiny jobsite to the edge of the hole. They men all fell silent and faced her and she said a few things in Creole with that too-quiet voice some women use to make boys and men behave all over the world. The fellows got real still. I looked at her and she nodded at me with a little drop of the chin. “It’s OK,” she said. “You can take pictures.”

Then they shrugged and laughed again and talked among themselves, shooting me looks of amusement; but they got back to the hard work of passing the big buckets full of slurry up the ladder to be dumped on the ground, and the passing the empties back for another round..........read more