woman with pills in red basket on her head
Claudine Jourdain, a 33-year-old from southern Haiti, sells medicine on the busy streets of Port-au-Prince.
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Where Street Vendors Run Pharmacies Out of Buckets

For Haitians, untrained vendors are the main source of medicine. For the sellers, it's a way to survive.

ByArnaud Robert
Photographs byPaolo Woods
andGabriele Galimberti
5 min read
This story appears in the June 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.

“You see, I put the ampicillin next to the Tylenol—a packet of pink pills, a packet of blue pills. The colors have to look good together. If my display doesn’t catch the eye, no one will buy anything.”

Aristil Bonord adjusts the blue plastic bucket on his right shoulder as he speaks. Inside it, a steeple of multicolored pills in blister packs rises like a totem. A pair of scissors, used to divvy up the medicine, pokes out at the top. The whole thing is held together with rubber bands.

For more than 20 years Bonord has roamed the streets of Port-au-Prince with this tower of treatments, this chemical Babel. But he is not a pharmacist. He is a vendor.

man in blue shirt with long stack of pills
Vendors act as pharmacists and confessors. “People have no secrets from us,” says Rénold Germain, 26. “They tell us about their infections, digestion, and sexual matters. For each problem we have a pill.”

In a little apartment in the Pacot neighborhood of the Haitian capital, merchants like Bonord are lined up to have their portraits taken by Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti. The two photographers—working on a project about medical access in over two dozen countries—have long been fascinated by the city’s wandering druggists.

Street dispensaries, they say, are the main source of medicine for many Haitians. “Pharmacists are an endangered species,” explains Lionel Étienne, a local drug importer. “Medicine is considered an ordinary consumer good.”

woman with yellow bucket of pills

Julène Clerger, 37, has five children at home. She’s thinking about quitting the pharmaceutical business and selling bananas and boiled eggs instead.

man with blue bucket of pills

Clerger’s husband, Pélège Aristil, 35, may eventually leave the trade as well. Later this year, when he finishes his theological studies, he’ll be an accredited evangelical pastor.

The portable pharmacies may look like contemporary art installations or candy store displays, but they can be as dangerous as Russian roulette. The government’s lack of oversight allows untrained merchants like Bonord to obtain and sell pharmaceutical products: generic medicines from China, expired pills, counterfeit drugs imported from the Dominican Republic.

The activity is technically illegal, but the laws are rarely enforced by the Ministry of Public Health and Population. So the vendors sell anything they can get their hands on, from abortion pills to Viagra knockoffs. Sometimes they give bad advice to their clients. One seller told a teenager to take powerful antibiotics for his acne.

“Every time I see a street vendor, it is like a slap in the face,” mutters the ministry’s pharmacy director, Flaurine Joseph. “They are like time bombs, and we have almost no way to stop them.”

man with purple and yellow shirt with bucket of pills

Ady Dumé, 38, sells his pharmaceutical products on the street. Some vendors have stands or kiosks in local markets. Others pack their pills into suitcases and ride the public buses of Port-au-Prince, in search of additional sales.

man in plaid shirt with bucket of pills

Aristil Bonord, 36, peddles pharmaceuticals on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

To make these portraits, Woods and Galimberti used an 8 x 10 large-format view camera with film and a medium-format digital camera. A white wall served as the backdrop.

As the vendors waited to be photographed, they eyed their neighbors’ goods, rarely speaking. It was their only respite from a long day in the brutal sun. They were glad for the break but worried that they were losing clients.

Woods and Galimberti say they want to make people aware that access to medicine, taken for granted in developed countries, is a challenge in many places. In Haiti vendors and customers alike have to make do with what they can.

“I chose this profession because times are hard here,” says Bonord. “I want my children to go to school. And everyone needs medicine.”

man in blue shirt carrying bucket of pills

Berthony Mélord, 24, roams Port-au-Prince with a portable kiosk of medicine.

man in red and white shirt with bucket of pills

Rébert Février, 39, is an urban pharmaceutical vendor. Many Haitians—especially in the countryside, where pharmacies are very rare—rely on plant-based remedies. In cities they might mix those with pharmaceuticals. But that may be changing. “The young do not trust the leaves anymore,” says Février. “They prefer our ointments and tablets.”

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