By Isabelle Pypaert Perrin

Step by step, I climb up the steep paths of Grande Ravine, the vast shantytown that clings to Le Morne in Port-au-Prince. Jacqueline invites me into her tiny house, where holes in the sheet metal roof let the sun in. The day before, I had met Jacqueline’s youngest child at the Babies Welcome program run by ATD Fourth World in Haiti. At one year old, her little girl had been very fragile. “She could have died,” Jacqueline said. Today, she is regaining strength. Jacqueline is about to go out to earn a living. In a corner is a green basket that she will soon fill with hair brushes, soaps, and home remedies, stacked high in a pyramid, to carry on her head. Jacqueline runs a small business: she walks in the streets with her wares and calls out to prospective buyers. There are thousands like Jacqueline in this area, where there are more sellers than buyers. In this place, everyone does something: there are merchants, porters, motorcycle-taxi drivers, used-phone vendors, repair people of all kinds, and people selling phone minutes. Even the children carry buckets of water on roads that are so uneven that I’m afraid of falling.

How many entrepreneurs in the world risk everything as they do? Street vendors without insurance face the risk of theft, bad weather, and illness. Small retailers have to pay for everything in cash from wholesalers who get all the profit. They go into debt when they have to take out small loans at very high interest rates. People living in poverty do not weigh on the economy of countries — they help develop it. In areas where they are relegated to second-class citizenship, they make life possible, despite everything, by developing trade, communications, water supply, transport, waste treatment, and recycling. With their intelligence, they are always inventing solutions; and yet, in the end, their children are still hungry. Even so, our world continues to look down on them, accusing them of polluting cities, of being idle, of being disorganized, and of living anywhere they can. In developed countries, they are accused of being a drain on public finances and being content to live on benefits, as if they wanted to be unemployed and excluded. But in fact they refuse to be left aside. They are eager to contribute to society, to the point that they are sometimes forced to take any job available and end up being exploited. Where in the world — in what summit conferences or economic forums — is the resourcefulness of people in extreme poverty taken into account? Where do we take steps to build a global economy that respects the dignity of all people?

Photo ATD Fourth World Thailand