Haiti: Its dawn of progress after years in a night of revolutionKuser, John Dryden
History
Haiti: Its dawn of progress after years in a night of revolution
Kuser, John Dryden
Haiti -- Description and travel
The streets in Port-au-Prince are wide asphalt pavements and
would be adapted for speeding but for the presence in the center
and sides promiscuously of unruly "burros," naked babies playing
in the dirt, odd Haitian pigs looking like some new species of
animal, and pedestrians of strange sorts. This is true, also, for
some distance out on the Hasco road, over which we went. But after
a few miles we came out upon one of the new roads which has been
put down throughout the island by the Haitian Government under the
supervision of the Gendarmerie and of an engineering force loaned
to them by the United States. In all, about 500 miles of excellent
roadways have been put down since the American intervention.
In this work the budget system is now used and as every payment is
actually handed out by one of the American engineers himself, the
graft which was formerly rampant has been eliminated. In the days of
pre-American intervention a sum of, let us assume, $50,000 was voted
to build a road. $5,000 of this regularly went to the President
and $500 to each Senator who would vote for the appropriation.
This left, generally, about $10,000, or one-fifth, for actual road
building work.
The Haitians have proven to be good engineers and except for the
pay roll, large pieces of work are often carried on by them without
assistance from the Americans.
The first part of the road which we struck was excellent but after
branching off the main road to Pont Beudet we came to the new part.
Roads of this type, which is the one generally used, are macadam
with good foundation of different sized stones and 20 feet in width.
The top dressing is a good binding gravel which can be found within
short distances along almost all of the roads which they are now
building. A temporary track is run from each gravel pit along the
side of the road until a mile or so on another pit is dug and the
rails taken up and laid down from the new pit on. The gravel is thus
carried to where it is needed by a small engine and a few cars.
There is in this way no long-distance hauling.
Finally we turned off the new road to a clearing through a cactus
desert at the edge of Lake Troucaiman. Above either shore two
mountain ranges run parallel for miles, far above the lake. The lake
itself is open water in the central portion but by far the greater
part is filled with a mass of lily, mangrove and reed growth. Often
it is so dense as to be entirely impenetrable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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