Mud cakes: food for many in Cite Soleil (Feature)

By Andrea Sosa Cabrios Jan 26, 2010, 17:44 GMT

Port-au-Prince, Haiti - Nadia Guerrier sits on a piece of canvas in Cite Soleil, a poor, violent neighbourhood in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. Her hands slowly stir a mix of soil, butter, salt and water with which she is set to make mud cakes.

She takes the dough with a spoon and shapes it with her hands. One by one, she puts together rows of circular biscuits on the canvas, in the sun.

'The sun dries them. Then they are clean,' says the woman's nephew, Fumi Ricardo, 26.

Eating mud cakes was a Haitian tradition long before the devastating earthquake that is believed to have claimed up to 200,000 lives and left 600,000 people homeless on January 12.

'Many pregnant women eat them, because it seems that they are very rich in nutrients,' Michael Kuehn, regional director of the German aid organization Welthungerhilfe, told the German Press Agency dpa.

'Now it is of course also an expression of poverty, but it would be an exaggeration to say that people have to eat this because there is hunger in Haiti,' he notes.

Kuehn himself has tried the cakes.

'I cannot recommend eating that, of course not. But it is not something that reflects poverty, there is a cultural factor,' he stresses.

For Guerrier, 36, the mother of six children, making these cakes is a way to earn a living. She wakes up at 4 am and works till 3 pm making them.

'I make 100-150 each day,' she says in Creole, while she stays focused on her task and barely lifts up her head.

Each biscuit sells for five gourdes (13 cents).

Neighbours walk past and stare at Guerrier as she works.

'I don't like them,' her nephew admits.

But Ricardo says the cakes are 'rich in nutrients.'

'When people have nothing to eat, they're good,' he adds.

Guerrier makes her cakes sitting before her small shack. Her children peer out of the door as she stirs the mix, while some neighbours walk on precisely the place where the mud cakes will soon rest.

Mud cakes are part of everyday life in Cite Soleil - just like rubbish, violence and overcrowding.

For Kuehn, improving nutritional standards in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, would require increasing the nation's production of foodstuffs, and distributing food more fairly.

'There has to be in the country a policy of giving people the chance to buy the available food, rather than importing,' he notes.

However, Kuehn is not that shocked about mud cakes.

'I remember that, when her hair fell off, my mum ate something that is called 'Kieselerde' (silica) in Germany, which has many minerals,' he says.