From Shanty Town to Bruceville: Vieux Fort’s Way of the Cross!

A hundred yards or so from the Winera boxing plant in Vieux Fort, not far from all-inclusive Club Med, is a garbage dump. It’s not quite the size of its more infamous Choc relative, nevertheless rivals Sulphur Springs as a must-see tourist magnet. Between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon, a concerned taxi operator assured me, vacationing amateur photographers from the UK, Canada and the United States trip over each other in their quest to capture from various angles the shocking activities at the dump. As incredible as was the taximan’s tale, I decided it warranted investigation!

I arrived at the dumpsite around 8 a.m. on Thursday this week, my camera cocked. I spied not a single tourist. Which is not to say the area was deserted. I counted more than a dozen raggedy young adults, male and female, busily scavenging, conceivably for scraps from the tables of the nearby luxury resort. I had taken two or three pictures before I was interrupted by a shirtless youth no older than 20. With support from four other scrawny young males and a pretty but unkempt female teenager, he insisted I put away my camera. There was no hostility in his tone, no threat in his manner. His demand had nothing to do with embarrassment or shame. For “a piece of change,” he promised, he and his friends would pretend I did not exist. We were haggling over the precise amount that would render me instantly invisible when I noticed three little girls furiously foraging inside the bin, none more than five years old, all nude, seemingly oblivious of the bee-sized flies that swarmed around them. Similarly preoccupied a few yards from the container was a pack of emaciated mongrels. A line by William Blake came to mind: “A dog starved at its master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state.”

Not far from where Club Med’s snow birds daily preen themselves in the gentle Caribbean sun, more than a few illegally topless, is a place called Shanty Town. (UN-Habitat defines a shanty town as an “illegal place or unauthorized settlement characterized by substandard housing made up of plastic sheets, corrugated metal or cardboard boxes, owned by impoverished people without tenure security.”)

I spoke with a gray-haired elderly female resident who was hanging out laundry to dry on a clothesline a few feet from a small shack. From inside the wood structure came the cacophonous sound of bawling babies. With glassy but prideful eyes, the old woman told me she had built the rickety shack with her own hands shortly after Hurricane Allen demolished her previous residence in The Manng (kwéyòl for swamp). She seemed to enjoy having her picture taken, judging by her toothless grins and cackles. At one point a young woman appeared in the open doorway. She had on pumpum shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt that at one time may have been white but now featured suspect stains in various shades of brown. At her shoulder she held a diapered baby, reminiscent of a rifleman on parade. In answer to my question, she said the week before my visit she had turned sixteen. She dropped out of school when she was made pregnant by a fellow student recently turned fourteen. Their baby was just a week short of ninety days.

“Don’t take my picture for no Voice, eh,” she said, in a tone more suggestive of an invitation   than discouragement. In any event, she wrongly presumed I was a reporter for the island’s oldest newspaper. “I gettin’ my own house soon wee,” she bragged, then disappeared with her sleeping baby in the midnight-dark interior of her abode.

The old lady wanted it noted that hers was the first shack to be constructed post-Hurricane Allen. With a sweep of her skinny right arm, she said: “All of them you see there, they just follow me.” Her disdain for her neighbors was palpable. When I queried how many people shared her quarters, she said: “Just me and my family. Eleven of us. That’s my grandchild you just see there with her baby.” I recalled an article in Psychology magazine about domesticated rats in a cage. Came a time when they had multiplied to three times their original fifteen. One morning their owner showed up to feed them and could hardly believe the horror that greeted his eyes. During the night the pet rats had apparently cannibalized one another. Less than twelve were still alive—by the author’s account, a deadly consequence of over-crowding!

At the back of the old woman’s shack, mud-covered pigs rooted for food in a slimy malodorous lake of floating detritus. To anyone with a nose, it was quite obvious the turbid pool also served as the community latrine. I finally said good-bye to the old woman, having promised for the fourth time to let everyone know she had built the first post-hurricane home in Shanty Town.

At a petrol station, I engaged the owner-attendant in some small talk. He seemed familiar but I knew not why. “I’ve just come from Shanty Town,” I informed him. “It’s pretty bad there.” He took his time reacting. “Those people? They’re worse than animals,” he sneered. “All they do is drink rum and fuck. Every other young girl has three kids and six men.”

“Well,” I said, “what else is there to do?”

The gas man said: “They love living like rats. For years, the government has been pleading with them to move. Every time they refuse. Or they leave and return a few days later. All they care about is white rum, drugs and mating like rats.” Only as I was pulling out of the petrol station did it hit me. The man at the pump had twice been a candidate at election time. On both occasions, he bit the dust. Lost his deposit!

The chairman of the town council did not mind talking with me, but only on condition I did not take his picture. The Vieux Fort council “doesn’t actually function . . . not really,” he said, shrugging. “People just stopped attending meetings. There’s no money for anything. Actually, we had a meeting yesterday evening . . . it came off okay, I must say.”

I queried the purpose of the get-together. “Well,” said the councilman, “we had already given them a deadline. Those people in The Manng, we told them to do something about their pigs and those sick stray dogs that follow them everywhere. They have until Monday.”

“What do you plan to do then?”

“What else?” asked the town councilman, “on Monday we start shooting!” He said the council had also decided it was time to make examples of some of the Shanty Town and Manng squatters who insisted on dumping their used diapers and other garbage indiscriminately. He paused before adding, “Their dogs, too!”

I inquired about trash collection in the area. He said the council operated a dump truck hired from “the group that took over after that funding scheme thing. It’s called ETS.”

“Is this the company operated by Daher and Ausbert d’Auvergne?” I asked. He seemed to panic. “No, no, no. Just the Daher fellers. Not d’Auvergne!” Did he know there were people eating out of the Shanty Town garbage container? He repeated himself: “I told you they are not people, they behave like animals. You have rejected bananas all over the place, still they prefer to eat the white people’s discarded scraps.”

The councilman laughed when I said: “Maybe they’ve had enough of green bananas. Maybe they need some smoked salmon to go along with, for a change!” We moved on. He said Eldridge Stephens, a former MP for Vieux Fort and the current chairman of the Development Committee, might be able to tell me the government’s plans for the folks at The Manng and at Shanty Town. “We met just last week, and Stephens said he would contact the people in a few days to tell them what’s what. Either they rent the land on which they’re squatting or they purchase it.”

I said the people of Vieux Fort appeared to have given up all hope, that the town was at once depressed and depressing. At first the councilman laughed, then abruptly changed his attitude.    Now he appeared as desperate as some of the young men I’d earlier photographed at the dumpsite. “Much of what you’ve seen here are the consequences of government policies,” he said. “The people feel abandoned. Left behind. Ignored. Look around, see those little bra and panty factories operated by a bunch of slave-driving Koreans? They mean nothing. What we need in Vieux Fort is proper drainage, decent housing, potable water, proper job opportunities and so on.”

I interrupted his flow. “What’s wrong with the factories?”

“Most of the workers are women from Laborie, Choiseul, Banse,” he said. “Not from Vieux Fort. Who in this time wants to work like a mule for fifty dollars a week?”

“It’s better than nothing,” said the provocateur in my soul. “Better than sitting around idle all day, waiting for scraps from Club Med’s tables.” It seemed he was lost for an appropriate response. Finally, he said: “It goes way back. Vieux Fortians have always been very laid back. They wait for opportunities to jump on them. They prefer to wait their turn for a job at the dock that pays $500 for two days’ work. The dock has always played a vital role in the lives of the Vieux Fort people. Sad to say, the Labour Code has no fixed minimum wage for factory workers.”

I was still haunted by what I’d seen at the dumpsite. “What do think is the impact on the visitors we attract to Saint Lucia with our pretty-pretty color brochures when they see what goes on in Shanty Town?” He sucked in a chestful of air, exhaled. “It’ll probably do them good to see the real thing up close. Maybe they’ll say something to their travel agents. Our government pays far more attention to them than they do to the common people of this country!” An off-duty policeman stopped by, offered still more food for thought: “Vieux Fort is the kind of place you want to visit just once.”

About 4 a.m. last Saturday, the desk officer at the town’s sole police station received a tip-off. Two bodies had washed up at a section of the beach close to Club Med. This week a young woman appeared in court on charges related to the grisly discovery. Allegedly, in the early hours of Saturday morning she had taken her two little girls to the beach and drowned them. Just before I set off on my return journey to Castries on Thursday, I stopped by the Sapphire Restaurant, not far from Shanty Town. I wanted a word with the owner.  

He said he had last seen the accused killer about 5 p.m. the day before someone stumbled on the lifeless children. He was as shocked at hearing what had transpired as were all who knew the murder suspect, also a cook’s assistant at his restaurant. He was aware she was a mother but had never met her children. It was common knowledge that two men had fathered them. He never suspected the woman was pregnant a third time, not until her arrest. At work, she had always appeared cheerful. She ate her three daily meals at the Sapphire. She was in fine spirits the last time he saw her. After work, she had gone dancing at a nearby establishment.

I visited the home of the 22-year-old filicide suspect. A dilapidated one-room shack surrounded by several other shacks in varying stages of decay. It was without electricity, without running water, no toilet, no bed. Someone showed me a 4×5 filthy piece of yellow sponge in the center of the room—the bed on which the suspect slept with her offspring, age two and three. I couldn’t help wondering if they were still asleep in the early hours of the morning when their mother took them in her arms for the last time to the beach, dumped them in the water, and walked away.   

Publisher’s Note: The preceding first appeared in the STAR in July 1987. Shortly after Kenny Anthony was in 1997 elected as MP for Vieux Fort, and prime minister of Saint Lucia, he had reinvented Shanty Town and renamed it Bruceville, in honor of his predecessor Bruce Williams, revered by his constituents who knew him only as “Daddy Bruce.”