It’s 8 o’clock on a Tuesday night, and the wooden benches in the Champs de Mars park are packed with college students. For many of them, like Pierre Madoché, a 23-year-old African-studies major at the State University of Haiti, this is the closest they get to a library.
The university closes at dusk, when chronic power shortages plunge most of the city into darkness. So the students have no choice but to head to public parks, the only places that are illuminated late into the night.
The conditions in this park — a sprawling expanse of concrete with patches of grass and spindly trees — are far from ideal. Flickering streetlights offer barely enough light for reading. And there are not enough benches for the several hundred students who come here on a typical evening, forcing many of them to stand under the lampposts.
Still, it beats reading by candlelight in a tin-roofed shack.
“Sometimes you want to study, but you can’t because there’s no electricity and too many people around,” says Mr. Madoché, who comes from a grim, working-class suburb called Tabarre. His three-room house has power only on alternate nights, he says, and then, finding a quiet corner in the space he shares with six other family members is nearly impossible.
So on weeknights, he sleeps on the floor of a cousin’s house here in the capital. The arrangement allows him to spend his evenings in the park rather than take the two-hour bus ride home.
Finding a lighted place to work is not the only challenge that he and the other students face.
“Eating is a big problem when you go to the university,” Mr. Madoché says, adding that the only food he had that day was a meat patty he bought for 10 cents on the street. “There is a cafeteria, but it’s too expensive, and sometimes there’s not enough food,” he says. “So many times, I just don’t eat.”
It is a familiar complaint among the university’s more than 10,000 students, many of whom come from poor families. But most feel lucky to be getting a college education at all, in a country where half of the population is illiterate.
Mr. Madoché tells how his widowed father struggles to put his seven children through school with the money he makes as a security guard. Four of them went on to college, against their father’s wishes. “He would like us all to work, but I want to study,” Mr. Madoché says with a shrug. He dreams of earning a Ph.D. in France.
For now, however, he has more immediate concerns. “If you will excuse me,” he says, with typical Haitian formality, “I will go see if my relatives have any food.”
