How Women Trade Amid Tensions in Haiti

The boats are first visible a ways offshore, chugging along at half speed, approaching at dawn from the east. Sixty feet long and made of wood, their bright sides are painted with pious slogans, in Haitian French, that read like prayers the vessels won’t sink: Confiance en Dieu, Christ Capable, Samuel 7:12 (which ends, “Thus far the Lord has helped us”). The crafts are so loaded down with supplies and people that each wave looks like it may overtop them. But they’ve been carefully packed, and the great mounds of goods on which the passengers sit—big sacks full of beans and hot dogs and spaghetti, plastic-wrapped mattresses, jugs of cooking oil—remain dry. The boats are returning to a pebbly beach near Marigot, a village on the southern coast of Haiti, after a six-hour overnight journey from the town of Anse-à-Pitres, along the border with the Dominican Republic, some fifty miles away.