In the smoke and dust along Rue La Saline, at the edge of a rubble-strewn dump, a little man with missing front teeth hammered away at a shattered pillar of concrete.
Jean Robert Lemer, 45, had been laboring for hours to extract a piece of the iron reinforcement bar that ran through it. But he wasn’t making much progress.
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If he had a hacksaw, he could cut off the exposed metal. But he only had a little household hammer. “I’m going to try to sell a little bit,” he said, “and then buy a sledgehammer and get a big piece.”
In the slums of Port-au-Prince, residents have long been forced to scrape and hustle to survive. And as the economic consequences of last week’s earthquake sink in, they will be hit the hardest, as they have in times of past political violence, floods and hurricanes.
But for now, they have rubble to scavenge.
Lemer’s brother, Samuel, 49, crouched nearby, cutting foam from a cheap mattress into a square. He figured he could sell the foam to an upholsterer, if one ever opened again.
Samuel’s backpack was already filled with sticks he planned to sell as fuel.
“I’m not wasting my time with the hammer,” he declared. “It’s too hard.”