Selling Limes

July 23: I woke this morning in a small, hot cement room above a plaza 200 miles from my house. Already at 5am hundreds of men were busy buying and selling the previous day’s harvest of plantains, bananas, sweet potatoes, yucca, cucumbers, and other crops. We arrived late last night to park our truck full of limes in a prime selling spot, unfortunately located next to 11 other trucks full of limes. It was still relatively cool out when I pried the slated windows open to see the market so full of people, trucks, cars, carts, bikes and mules that it appeared difficult to move through. As always there was music playing but the shops lining the plaza had not opened yet when I walked down the narrow stairs to the street. I was not surprised to suddenly be the center of attention on the sidewalk but I was distracted from the hissing watching the aesthetically pleasing commercial activity. In addition to the trucks of produce there were women with giant bowls of homemade and processed snacks on their heads and men selling socks, cell phone chargers and tiny bags of water to workers carrying more than their weight back and forth between vendors. If you would have asked me before this morning if one man could carry three giant boxes of cabbage on his shoulder, teetering higher than 5 feet in the air, I would have said probably not. There were dark Haitian men, their bodies entirely muscle, leading carts moved by mules that appeared to be starving. Though they were extremely strong I guessed that the Haitians had only been eating as much as the mules. Finding our truck in the crowded, dirty street I climbed atop the mountain of limes to watch my companions sell. For hours, as the sun climbed in the sky they scooped five gallon buckets of limes, passing them over the rail of our truck into old plastic rice sacks, the unit of measurement used in this market. It was an unusually fast day of selling, though we had been at the market for a total of 12 hours, and we walked away with about $450, before subtracting costs. My companions and I then drove the 200 miles back home to get another truck full of limes for them to repeat the process in the same day.