Yoyo Piman

>>**Yoyo Piman**<<
  
Yoyo Piman is dead. He was shot on Tuesday by UN forces attempting to arrest 
him. The guys I know in Belekou shared the news on Thursday.
  
When I got up to Kaglo Saturday afternoon, I heard the same news from Breny, 
Mèt Anténor’s eleven-year-old nephew. Yoyo Piman was well known 
in Haiti. Though perhaps “notorious” would be a better word. He was 
the second-in-command of the gang that ruled Belekou until the UN overran all 
of Cité Soleil in February of this year.
  
He went into hiding, but didn’t go far. He stayed in Belekou, in a small, 
one-room shack in the midst of one of the neighborhood’s many narrow, 
unpaved corridors. On Tuesday, someone told the UN forces where they would find 
him, and they moved in Tuesday night. He tried to flee, and was shot. The guys 
I know were especially struck by how he died: running barefoot, half-naked, in 
the middle of the night, through the putrid Cité Soleil mud after four 
months of hiding in the cramped darkness. A miserable way to end.
  
I want to be very careful how I write about Yoyo. The most certain fact is that 
he died accused, but not convicted. When Breny spoke to me about it, he 
expressed excitement at the death of a terrible criminal. He also enjoyed 
making fun of Yoyo’s name, which was really a nickname. 
“//Piman//” means “pepper”. I don’t know how he 
came to be called Yoyo Piman. His real name was Junior. 
  
But Breny is a child, and one who lives far away from the reality of Cité 
Soleil. The guys from Belekou lived their whole lives around Yoyo Piman, and 
never spoke or speak of him in anything but positive terms. He was someone they 
knew they could count on: for advice, protection, and a few dollars now and 
then when they were in need. I’m told that during December he would walk 
the streets in his neighborhood loaded down with cash. No one in the area would 
go without a gift to celebrate the coming New Year.
  
  
  
I met him in December, I think. I don’t remember exactly when. I had just 
rented my room in his neighborhood, and he came for a visit. We had a long and 
interesting chat. Before even I had begun working in Cité Soleil, the 
young men who wanted me to come had spoken with Yoyo and Amaral, the real boss. 
They asked the two to give their blessing to my visits. The guys wanted to do 
what they could to ensure I could come and go safely. Amaral said I was 
welcome. But when the collaboration with the guys started to deepen, we wanted 
to talk with them directly to make sure they were really on board. 
  
The guys chose to ask Yoyo to come by to speak with me. They were never 
comfortable with Amaral. They neither said nor say anything bad about him. They 
never really speak of him at all. As much as I can tell, it’s partly in 
the old “If you can’t say something nice . . .” sense. Except 
that there’s a difference: Amaral wielded enormous power in the 
neighborhood. It might have been dangerous to speak ill of him.
  
So one day, Yoyo came by, and we talked for almost an hour: about the English 
class Héguel and I were teaching, about the progress of the group, about 
my impressions of Cité Soleil. He was glad I was working with young people 
he grew up with. At the time, some of his men were attending the class, and he 
was glad of that too, though as the battle began to heat up in January, they 
gradually dropped out. He seemed to feel a leader’s responsibility for 
them. He assured me I’d have no trouble with him or his people. He had 
discussed the matter with Amaral, and could speak for them both.
  
He also spoke of the struggle that he and his gang were embroiled in. Amaral 
and he felt trapped in an armed struggle with the UN. Amaral’s 
brother-in-law, Evans, who was the head of the gang in Boston, the neighborhood 
bordering Belekou on its northern edge, believed, Yoyo said, “in a 
military solution.” The Belekou did not feel as though it was in a 
position to separate itself off from the other gangs in Cité Soleil. When 
the UN finally moved in with all the force at its disposal, blood flowed in 
Boston, where Evans insisted that his people fight it out. Amaral and Yoyo, on 
the other hand, had their people lay down their arms. It’s not known how 
many died in Boston, but in Belekou the UN moved in without opposition and, 
therefore, without violence.
  
And Yoyo talked about his life. He had been wanted by the police for several 
years, so though he could circulate freely within Cité Soleil – the 
Haitian police still do not enter the neighborhood – he was unable to 
leave. 
  
Except once. One evening after dark, a longing to see Champs de Mars, the 
renovated public park in the middle of Port au Prince, overcame him. He hopped 
on his little motor scooter and gave himself a downtown tour. He said he 
enjoyed the outing, but could not feel safe outside of his home turf, so he 
never repeated the experiment.
  
I try not to kid myself about him. The money he freely gave to neighbors 
– to all who asked for it and to some who didn’t – did not 
grow on a tree and it didn’t fall from the skies. I don’t know what 
business he was in; I doubt he was selling popsicles. But I have to say I liked 
him and was grateful for his openness to letting me work with the guys. My 
neighbors in Belekou, who knew him all much better than I, evidently liked him 
too. 
  
His death provides an obvious moment for looking at how things stand in the 
Cité. After several months of what can only be called warfare between the 
gangs and the UN, with guns going off almost constantly, the neighborhood has 
now been quiet since February. There is a new sense of security, even if 
it’s rooted in the presence of the tanks that pass by my gate almost 
hourly throughout the day and night. The tanks and the heavily armed men they 
carry. 
  
But I recently read a journalist’s interview with a man who lives in the 
area. The man said that he was pleased with the new security situation. 
“But,” he added, “You can’t eat security.” 
Security is not enough. Without the economic opportunities that allow someone 
to eat and to feed their family, the peace that tanks currently enforce 
can’t last. 
  
I think that the man’s view of Cité Soleil can be generalized to 
apply to all of Haiti. A lot of progress is being made these days. 
There’s a lot of complaining, too. There’s so much work to be done, 
that the accomplishments to date can be hard to notice. But the local currency 
is stable, after years of losing value against the dollar. It’s even 
gained some of its old value. Some roads have been built or repaired. The 
capital is cleaner because of squads that have been hired to sweep and clear 
the streets of trash. 
  
And finally there’s the security situation. Streets in Port au Prince 
that were utterly empty after dark just a year or so ago are now bustling well 
into the evening: with pedestrians, cars, and street vendors. Adding a couple 
of hours of street life every day in a country where the vast majority of all 
economic activity is in the informal sector has to help.
  
But the progress seems fragile. Prices are starting to rise again as the price 
of gas goes up all over the world. And there’s still very little work 
here. As long as the economy fails to provide opportunities for most Haitians 
to earn their livelihoods, as long as most Haitians live in poverty, political 
instability is only the next disaster away. 
  
And economic development will not be easy. To paraphrase something 
Fonkoze’s leadership likes to say in another context: You can’t 
simply furnish someone with resources and expect them to move forward. You have 
to accompany them. People need to learn how to plan, how to organize 
themselves, how to keep track of their own work. Creating economic activity in 
Haiti will take money, but also lots of labor-intensive, attention-intensive 
effort. 
  
The complexity of the challenge is before me all the time. I recently watched as
a major non-for-profit took the first steps in their plan to create a business
for 20 residents of Belekou. Before they had even selected participants, their
coordinator in the field had run off with money he collected by changing
charging hundreds of people a substantial fee for submitting their
résumés. As far as I can tell, the plan has been postponed. Meanwhile,
a woman I know was unable to send her boy to take the national sixth-grade
graduation exam because she didn’t have the money to pay the owner of the
boy’s school what she owes him. She owes less than half of what she paid
the not-for-profit’s coordinator.
  
My own work with the guys in Belekou has been increasingly focused on our 
attempt to establish an income-generating activity. A first plan, to build and 
sell cheap solar chargers for telephones, seems to have run aground. The 
guys’ new plan is to open a very small bakery. It seems like a good idea. 
We’ve found someone willing to lend them the capital they need to get 
started. The local demand is evident. The very-small scale that they want to 
start with should be manageable.
  
“Should be” and “seems like” are not, however, the same 
as done. It will be a challenge for the guys to organize themselves, to share 
both the work and the rewards in ways that seem equitable to all. It will be 
hard for them to keep the earnings in the business, working for them, in a 
world that’s full of things they want to buy. They are hungry, both for 
consumer goods and, some of them at least sometimes, for food. Surely there are 
other challenges that I don’t foresee. And if violence returns, it could 
easily swallow up whatever progress they have made.
  
But we have to be optimistic, even if even we can tend to fear what lies ahead. 
There’s simply no other option. Some of the guys have parents that 
support them, but not all of them do. And even those who have parents are 
unlikely to get all the help that a young person needs. Many of them had to 
drop of school before finishing primary school. A few got somewhat farther, and 
a few still attend. None have any reasonable prospects of getting a good job. 
Self-employment is probably their only reasonable hope. For people as poor as 
they are, there is no real alternative to success.