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In the village of Tuffet, a 45-minute rocky drive from the closest city along Haiti's southern coast, several men get down to work in Monique Yusizanna Ouz's rural home. They're wiring up her two-room, dirt floor house with a breaker box, an outlet and a light fixture.

She's 66 years old and for the first time in her life, she's going to have electricity.

Ouz, who has five grandchildren, wants a refrigerator. She wants cold drinks — for herself but also to sell. And she wants ice cream, too.

"I'll figure out a way to pay for the electricity because it's better when you pay for something," she says. "It doesn't go away then."

Haiti has long been dubbed the Republic of NGOs because of its heavy reliance on foreign donors and international charities. But Ouz says charities come to the village and end up leaving when they run out of volunteers or money.

That's why 38-year-old Duquense Fednard is bringing a for-profit electricity company to Tuffet. He says Haiti can't survive on philanthropy alone: "You need an economy that is thriving, where businesses flourish and create jobs and that's how you grow a country.

Fednard has three businesses now: the rural electric company, a data processing one and another that sells a more efficient version of the charcoal stoves found in nearly every Haitian home (his model has a special ceramic liner so it uses less charcoal). He was born in Haiti but left as a teen. In the U.S. he got a master's degree from Columbia University, worked on Wall Street and was a small business consultant.

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The generators for electricity run on corn cobs purchased from area farmers. Carrie Kahn/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Carrie Kahn/NPR

The generators for electricity run on corn cobs purchased from area farmers.

Carrie Kahn/NPR

"A job in the U.S. to me doesn't have the same impact as a job in Haiti," he says. "Because a job in Haiti means that you are helping 10 people for every job."

Through a college buddy, Fednard got Benjamin Shell, a former microfinance loan manager, to come to Haiti and get the electric company going. "I'd never been to Haiti, I got a really low grade in physics in college, I didn't have any electrical background," Shell says with a laugh. "But I felt confident that I could teach myself.

Like Fednard, Shell subscribes to the same philosophy when it comes to economic aid: A hand out is not going to help.

Which brings us back to Tuffet and the rural electric company — and the cold drinks.

As school lets out, children stream onto the main dirt road, walking past newly installed wooden utility poles. About 300 families live here. Most are bean and corn farmers. Shell says Electricit d'Hati, or EDH, Haiti's electricity monopoly has been promising Tuffet electricity for the last 50 years.

"That's how you get elected in any part of Haiti, especially rural Haiti," he says. "You promise to either bring EDH, electricity or improve the service because it's a chief complaint of anybody anywhere."

If Shell and Fednard's plan works the town will get that service six days a week, ten hours a day.

Shell opens the door to their electric company's new offices, just off Tuffet's main road.

It's a huge warehouse.

Inside, the duo will put a generator that's going to be the company's linchpin. It will produce the electricity — not on expensive and dirty diesel but with corn cobs. It's a biomass gassifier, a new technology that's had success in other developing countries but has never been used in Haiti. The rest of the warehouse is for drying the corn cobs the company will buy from farmers.

"People are almost as excited about getting to sell their corn cobs as they are about getting electricity," says Shell.

Already, 65 people have signed up and have spent 1,500 gourdes, about $35, to get their homes wired. Expectations are high for the day the lights go on.

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Carol Macaus wants a freezer so she can sell cold drinks and ice cream. Carrie Kahn/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Carrie Kahn/NPR

Carol Macaus wants a freezer so she can sell cold drinks and ice cream.

Carrie Kahn/NPR

Washing clothes at the town's main water well, Carol Macaus says she can't wait. I immediately thought the first thing she and the other half-dozen women here would want is a washing machine. I was wrong.

Like Ouz, she also wants a freezer so she can sell cold drinks and ice cream. At current estimates, a freezer would cost a family about $25 a month to run.

People here have long wanted to have their own businesses but they need electricity to do that, says town leader Cherie Paul Andres. "If you have a freezer you can create your own business," he says. "So when it comes to pay the electricity bill it doesn't have to come out of my pocket."

That's exactly what Fednard and Shell are hoping for. Not only will the electricity boost living standards and help satisfy the thirst for cold drinks, it'll also spark Tuffet's stagnant economy.

But the day I was with Shell, driving down Tuffet's rocky dirt roads, that dream seemed to be slipping away. He got a call from the group that promised to develop pay-as-you-go electric meters, key to making the company profitable. They told him they definitively couldn't do it.

After two years of struggling, Shell says maybe it's time to accept that bringing electricity to this part of Haiti just can't be done — at least not by him.

"There will be somebody that does it that makes it work in the future and the work that we've done definitely won't be wasted," he says. "It won't be for nothing."

I left Tuffet a few months ago, not knowing what happened.

So I call Shell to find out. Turns out, he's still there.

I could hear a whirling sound coming from the background. "That's the generator, the gassifier," Shell tells me. "We are using corn cobs to make electricity."

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Shell found a new company to make the meters and 30 families are hooked up to the company's grid and getting electricity. More meters are coming, Shell has hired five more employees, and Tuffet has one refrigerator and two freezers running. Cold drinks are now being sold in the village.

"We are in business," Shell says.

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entrepreneur

innovation

Haiti

Dear March,

We got your news that employers added just 126,000 jobs on your watch. Hate to say it, but you have disappointed everyone. No doubt you'll say you were under the weather — literally. Sure, it was cold, but still ... Let's hope April does better.

Sincerely,

America

On Friday, the Labor Department's report on weak jobs growth left economists scrambling to explain what went wrong in March.

Most had forecast about 245,000 new jobs for the month, but they were way off base. The Labor Department said employers added only 126,000 workers. The unemployment rate, which is determined by a separate survey of households, held steady at 5.5 percent.

The disappointing March report confirms a wintertime slowdown. The average monthly gain in the first three months of this year was just 197,000 new jobs, down sharply from an average of 324,000 in the final three months of last year.

The Two-Way

Economy Adds A Disappointing 126,000 Jobs In March

So while the positive hiring trend did continue into the new year, it clearly has lost momentum. A lot of people looked at the construction industry — which cut 1,000 jobs last month — and blamed the exceptionally cold temperatures for freezing up so much economic activity.

"One cannot be stunned if wave after wave of severe snow storms and [arctic] temperatures curbed hiring, slashed construction activity, and kept consumers from stores," economist Bernard Baumohl, with The Economic Outlook Group, wrote in his assessment.

This winter brought other problems, such as a drop in the oil-rig count and the West Coast port disruptions, which caused supply-chain reactions. Wells Fargo economists noted that currency changes also hurt, making U.S. exports more expensive this winter: "Manufacturing payrolls edged down by 1,000, with the workweek ticking down, suggesting some modest impact from the stronger dollar."

So fingers can be pointed at some extraordinary factors that weighed down job creation.

But maybe the slowdown's explanation is simpler than that. Maybe it just reflects a cooling of the economy after nearly six years of expansion. The unemployment rate has plunged in recent years, and in the prior 12 months, job growth was averaging a robust 269,000 a month.

So at some point, the labor market was bound to take a breather.

"In retrospect, a correction such as this was very likely," wrote Doug Handler, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who spoke with NPR, also noted that March's numbers have to be put into a longer perspective. Consider, he said, that private businesses have added 12.1 million jobs over 61 straight months of job growth, the longest streak on record.

In March 2014, the unemployment rate was 6.6 percent. Perez said that if someone had told him then that the rate would plunge to 5.5 percent in one year, "I would have thought it was an April Fools' joke."

The overall job market's performance in the past year has been strong, he said. "I look at trend data," and the trend has been the worker's friend.

So the big question hanging over the economy is: Did job growth just take a rest during the harsh winter, or is it shifting to a much slower pace?

Handler remains fundamentally optimistic. "This result is more of an aberration than a trend," he said. "The April report will be more in line with stronger reports issued earlier in the year, allowing the March data to be discounted."

And PNC economist Gus Faucher saw some hopeful signs in the wage data, which pointed upward. Workers' wages rose by 2.1 percent over the past year — which beats the consumer inflation rate. "The tighter labor market is leading businesses to raise pay to attract and retain workers," he said.

Still, the report showed enough weakness to suggest the Federal Reserve will be in no rush this summer to raise interest rates.

"Today's sluggish job numbers, job revisions and mild wage growth are signs the Federal Reserve should keep interest rates low for the foreseeable future," AFL-CIO economist Bill Spriggs said. "Today is confirmation the economic recovery is incomplete and we have a long way left to go."

job growth

unemployment rate

Federal Reserve

Labor Department

Shortly after Ledezma took the oath of office in 2008, pro-government mobs took over the colonial City Hall building in central Caracas and refused to let the new mayor go to work. Helen Fernndez, a Ledezma aide who now serves as acting mayor, recalls the scene.

"They threw rocks and chased after us with clubs," she says. "There were gunshots and tear gas. The violence got so bad that we had to leave."

Ledezma and his team relocated in the 23rd floor of a bank tower in downtown Caracas.

Many people who work in the high-rise have no idea City Hall is located there — perhaps because it doesn't do very much. Back in 2009, ruling party legislators passed a law stripping Caracas City Hall of nearly all of its budget and responsibilities.

Opposition supporters in Caracas protest against the Venezuelan government and in support of jailed opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez and Antonio Ledezma on Feb. 28. Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters/Landov

One of the few programs Ledezma's office still runs is the distribution of water tanks to poor families. With her boss behind bars, Fernndez, the acting mayor, oversees these duties in a Caracas slum.

Nearly all other city functions are handled by an unelected city manager named Ernesto Villegas, who was not available for comment. President Maduro appointed Villegas to the job just two days after he lost to Ledezma in the 2013 mayoral race.

"That is something I have never heard of in any other country in the world," says Milos Alcalay, who handles international relations for City Hall. "'OK, you lost the election? Don't worry, my friend. You are still the mayor of Caracas.'"

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Alcalay says that as the president's popularity sinks, the Maduro government is resorting to drastic measures to prevent the opposition from picking up steam.

Nationwide, three mayors as well as opposition leader Leopoldo Lpez have been imprisoned on what the human rights groups say are trumped-up charges.

However, the opposition can also play rough. At a state-run grocery store, where people were standing in line to buy subsidized food, I met Nelson Barrio, who was wearing a red Socialist Party T-shirt.

Barrio briefly worked for Ledezma in the 1990s when he served as mayor of a district of Caracas. Barrio says that he and 800 other workers were fired because they didn't belong to Ledezma's political party.

"Venezuelan politics have always been hard-core," he says.

But back at the mayor's damaged private office, Mitzi Ledezma says that the arrest of her husband marks a new low.

"The government will have to build a lot more prisons," she says, "because the opposition is getting bigger by the day."

Venezuela

Supermarkets devote aisle-end displays to Spam and its familiar blue and yellow tin. A local Hormel licensee, CJ CheilJedang Corp., manufactures the product here, printing the logo on one side with characters from the Korean alphabet, known as Hangul.

It's relatively cheap, too: A 200-gram can costs about $3.

At that price, many Koreans view it as a tasty side dish, especially as processed foods go. "It's seen as a high-end luncheon meat," says Cho Hye-Jin, who works in Seoul. "Out of the variety of luncheon meats available in Korea, Spam is probably the best quality."

Cho and Park Jin-Hong, both construction consultants, say they most often see their peers consume Spam along with soju — a clear alcoholic beverage made with rice, potatoes or other starches. Park says Spam isn't a staple of his diet — "it's too salty" — but he does enjoy it.

He said he prefers a low-sodium version, one of two varieties (along with the original) sold in Korea. Customers here can also buy prepackaged Spam products, such as fried rice, in frozen-food aisles.

South Koreans aren't the only Asians who use Spam in traditional meals. In the Philippines, for example, it's sometimes served in rellenong manok, a stuffed chicken dish. They're also not the first to adopt specialties introduced by the U.S. military.

Perhaps the most iconic Spam dish in South Korea is a spicy soup known as budae jjigae, or army stew. After the war, Koreans used U.S. Army rations — sometimes smuggled off military bases or donated by soldiers — to make the deep-red dish.

This concoction comes in many varieties. Restaurants use a mix of hot spices, noodles, Spam, sausage, beans, corn, green vegetables — even cheese. It has been called "pig stew," "soldier stew" and "Johnson's stew," the latter after our 36th president.

Chris Amoroso, an American, discovered budae jjigae a few years ago while teaching English here. He liked it so much that he created a video on YouTube explaining the dish's colorful history. "It's delicious," he tells viewers, sitting before a boiling pot.

"It is not a soup that one can eat often. It's so rich and probably not very healthy," he tells The Salt. "Americans should know that if they ever get a chance to go [to Korea], they should definitely try it."

While the soup is an ingrained part of the food culture here, seasonal gift boxes are still a big reason why Spam sales are so strong in South Korea. The gifts typically come in Spam-branded boxes, with as many as nine cans inside, along with other items, like cooking oil. Families exchange them during the traditional harvest holiday season, known as chuseok, in early fall, and the Lunar New Year. Bosses hand them out to employees.

These boxes represent more than half of Hormel's annual Spam sales on the peninsula, the company says — perhaps one reason for the slick advertisements promoting them in South Korea.

Later in the short video advertisement described above, the camera switches between enticing rice and noodle dishes, an elegant sandwich and multiple cans of Spam. One by one, the cans fill the gift box. The young woman returns and smiles into the camera. She later shyly tucks her hair behind an ear while looking down, as if pondering something special.

The music continues. "We have prepared the gift set with all our hearts," says the narrator. "Spam gift set — everyone knows what it's worth."

Gray, who lives in Seoul, believes he knows the product's value here, too.

"I always joke with guests who come to Korea, 'See, you could have packed a whole suitcase of Spam. You would have made a lot of friends."

Hae Ryun Kang contributed to this report.

Matt Stiles, who recently tried Spam in ramen noodles, is a former data editor at NPR and currently a Seoul-based freelance journalist. You can share your Spam stories with @stiles or @NPRFood.

hormel

budae jjigae

americans

Korean food

foodways

Korea

spam

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