50 Gourdes

No, I'm not talking about the hard-shelled vegetable looking thing. A gourde is a unit of currency in the country of Haiti. One of the blogs I follow just mentioned that a man (sick with cholera) told the writer that he was too poor to get a moto-taxi to go to the hospital. The writer mentioned that the taxi only cost 50 gourdes or $1.25 US. There's danger in that statement. Anytime we value someone's currency based on our own, it gets tricky. When our family first arrived in Haiti, the Haitian gourde was legally tied to the US dollar, so much so that we used to calculate everything in Haitian dollars, a currency that honestly never really existed. But it wasn't just the ex-pats that referred to the currency that way, the grocery and hardware store owners, the bankers, as well as the average Haitian on the street did too. At that time, $1.00 US was equal to 5 gourdes - not 50! So even though the 50 gourdes is only worth $1.25 US, to that sick man it is still 50 gourdes - not one, not two but fifty! Those of us who get paid in US dollars and exchange our valuable currency for the very weak Haitian gourde can quickly accumulate a lot of gourdes. However, the Haitian who works sweeping the street or doing yard work or working in one of the few factories in Haiti is not paid in dollars but in gourdes, a currency that has plummeted in value over the years. Fifty gourdes is a lot of money to a poor Haitian.