Haiti's Dirt Cookies: Hunger and Poverty in Cité Soleil

They look a lot like pancakes or cookies.

The recipe passed down from generations here in Haiti.

Women spend entire days making them,

grandmothers, daughters, and younger

girls. Infants are nursed while mothers work the mix.

Kids seem to enjoy

them, at least when our camera was around.

But these patties, known as bonbon teres by the Haitians who

eat them,

are a grim reminder of just

how poor this Caribbean nation is.

They aren't sweet,

they're hard to swallow, and add almost

nothing in terms of nutrition, because the cookies are actually

made of dirt.

It fills your stomach. When we haven't eaten anything,

this dirt cookie fills your

stomach.

Traded, sold, and even

hoarded by women here in the

poorest

section of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Cité

Soleil in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Small amounts of vegetable shortening, salt, and occasionally sugar

are mixed in with the dirt and water as well.

Made in places like this, an

old fort where torture was once

common by corrupt dictators here.

Fort Dimanche is now a center of

commerce built around the dirt cookies,

a basketball

court, soccer field, and school for hundreds of kids,

and home to many.

To get to the basketball court, which acts as a preparation area for the

dirt cookies, you have to cross this open sewer,

which is littered with animal

parts and trash and other nasty things, to get to an area where the cookies

are laid out to dry out in the sun. You can see that these

are still very wet, not quite ready to be served, but this

is literally dirt being prepared for humans to eat

on top of other dirt and filth.

Celine Denis' life revolves around the cookies.

For days, we watched as the grandmother sat mixing

the dirt cookie batter.

Selling the cookies is Denis' sole source of income

and often her

only food.

It's a necessary evil. I'm in a bad situation,

and that's why I make

them. It hurts my heart, but I have no choice.

We're forced to eat it.

It makes us sick, but not the way it would to

anybody who's not used to

eating it. Our system is kind of used to it.

The dirt is trucked into this

huge slum and sold at an enormous

markup to the women, who pay about five dollars a sack.

They say it comes from an area in the mountains and are convinced the

dirt is rich in minerals and vitamins.

And if they don't have the money, they're

happy, indeed eager, to buy the

dirt on credit. If it rains or the sun is blocked,

the cookies can't dry out, and women actually end up

owing money on the dirt they've purchased.

Not a drop of batter is wasted. And

throughout Haiti, the cookies are

seen in urban markets and small mountain villages.

We rarely saw adults eating the

cookies, as many seemed ashamed.

Kids, however,

asked repeatedly why we were so interested

before freely eating them. The UN's humanitarian

coordinator in Haiti says the need for dirt cookies is an

indictment of government failure and waste.

The five cent cookies, a necessity in

Haiti, imported food too

expensive for families living on about a dollar a day.

Some three point three

million Haitians are food

insecure today.

Around twenty-five percent of the children are chronically malnourished.

These are the same indicators as in, as in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Pregnant women have long eaten the

cookies for their supposed source of

calcium and antacid benefits. But doctors

dispute this and warn of tooth decay, constipation,

and worse. The United States Ambassador to Haiti has

taken a personal interest in lessening dependence on the cookies.

I've actually taken members of Congress down to Cité Soleil, and they've seen it,

too.

What do they say when they see people eating dirt?

Well, it's, it's worrisome. It's very worrisome, and we

don't like to see it.

Since the UN arrived in

Haiti in 2006 as peacekeepers,

nutrition has improved in pockets,

but the dirt cookies

are still being eaten. The widespread hunger means hundreds of

kids starting another school day in Cité

Soleil, as the Haitian

flag is raised, will be reduced to eating dirt.

This despite international efforts.

There is hope, by the way. There is hope.

Because despite this bleak picture,

it is doable to lift Haiti out of poverty.

But even the most optimistic observers

agree the future is bleak for these kids

without two elements long missing in Haiti, money

and a stable government.

Reporting in Cité Soleil, Haiti, this is Ben Schmidt for World Focus.