Re: Haina (long)
Haina is beautiful if you consider that a great deal of all inbound and outbound ocean commerce for the Dominican Republic goes through this port. (actually 2 ports, east and west). The road coming into the port areas are filled with trucks carrying containers filled with goods, to the point of traffic jams for much of the day. In between the trucks on the streets are hundreds of motorscooters carrying workers, or shipping documents, that are necessary for all of this freight movement.
There are also Free Zones in Haina with thousands of workers (and many others very near) that produce hundreds of millions of pesos worth of goods and wages here.There are hundreds of warehouses and other businesses with buildings here.There is a large power plant that runs on coal, and has a good-sized backup inventory of coal next to it. There are other diesel electric plants to produce electricity along the river also.
It looks like a beautiful paradise to a capitalist, and if it were gone, the DR (and most of those foreign readers who live here in the DR ) would probably be too, because no one would have most of the foreign things that they cannot get otherwise here in the DR, and want and need in their lives.
Because Haina is one of the oldest areas of commerce, and has easy ocean access, the workers who are needed to do this necessary work have ended up living in, around, and on top of most of this area, and the results are a massive, crowded, polluted, dirty, harbor slum filled with makeshift "casitas" made from concrete, wood, waste lumber, parts of trees, corrugated zinc, plywood, scrap metal, etc.
The river and surrounding area is polluted from fuel, topsoil, unknown chemicals, human wastes, garbage, and jammed with all kinds of ships, boats and unidentified objects. The air is full of diesel fumes, chemical smells, dust, and the smells that eminate from having a few hundred thousand people, and millions of rats and cockroaches living in a relatively small area ( a few square kilometers) who eat, work, sleep, cook, wash, deficate, drink, and raise families. (not necessarily in that order).
Sorry that I cannot offer any photos, only hope that this description will conjure up a photo in your mind. Once you have seen it, you will realize that you could probably be around any major port in any part of the world, and unless someone told you, you wouldn't realize where you were.
