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Rénold Germain, 26, is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. These street sellers act as pharmacists but also confessors. “People have no secrets for us. They tell us about their infections, their digestive problems and sexual matters. For each problem we have a pill.” Port-au-Prince, Haiti. January 2016.
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Pélège Aristil, 35, is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. He is married to Julène Clergé and they raise their five children at Aviation, a neighborhood next to the slum of Cité Soleil. Pélège is in the last year of his theological studies that will give him his diploma of evangelical pastor. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. January 2016.
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Claudine Jourdain, 33, from Jérémie, in the south of Haiti. She is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. The “health totems” these ambulant sellers carry are always well stocked with antibiotics, painkillers, tablets to purify water, sexual stimulants but also a pair of scissors, as clients almost never can afford an entire blister of pills but will buy in single units. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. January 2016.
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Berthony Mélord, 24, is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. He is from the city of Saint- Louis in the south of Haiti is married and father of four. Pharmaceutical street sellers do not only use these “health totems” to hawk their goods but occasionally have stands in the local markets and, with the pills in suitcases, ride the public buses looking for clients. Port-au- Prince, Haiti. January 2016
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Ady Dumé, 38, father of two, is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. Even if it is formally forbidden to sell pharmaceutical products without a license, each morning the street sellers stock up with pills from the authorized importers. The sellers and the importers get very seldom controlled. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. January 2016.
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Julène Clerger, 37, has five children and is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. She is thinking of abandoning the business of street selling medicines since it demands endless and exhausting walks trough the dusty streets of the capital. She would like to reconvert to selling bananas and boiled eggs. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. January 2016.
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Aristil Bonord, 36, is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. Besides imported medicines, often of dubious origin, street sellers also sell locally produced drugs. There are three pharmaceutical companies in Haiti. In 1995, the one named Pharval distributed a cough syrup for children where one of the components, imported from China, was toxic. At least 88 children died as a consequence of taking this syrup. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. January 2016.
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Rébert Février, 39, is a street seller of pharmaceutical products. Most Haitian families, especially in the countryside where pharmacies are very rare, use tradition plant based remedies to cure their ailments, but in the cities they might do a mix. “But the young do not trust the leaves anymore” Rébert affirms, “they prefer our ointments and tablets.” Port-au- Prince, Haiti. January 2016
// The Side Effect
For Haitians, untrained vendors are the main source of medicine. For the sellers, it’s a way to survive.
“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.
In a little apartment in the Pacot neighborhood of the Haitian capital, merchants like Bonord are lined up to have their portraits taken by Gabriele Galimberti and Paolo Woods. 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.”
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.”
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.
“I chose this profession because times are hard here,” says Bonord. “I want my children to go to school. And everyone needs medicine.”
This story appears in the June 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Photographs by Gabriele Galimberti and Paolo Woods
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