Labor Shortage

In Haiti, children are regularly loaned to other households, and the unluckiest are treated like slaves. The quake won't change that.

By Katie Paul | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Feb 1, 2010 | Updated: 8:51 a.m. ET Feb 1, 2010

The days after the earthquake brought joyous reunions for some families. Others faced the grim realization that they'd been suddenly robbed of parents, children, or siblings. For 9-year-old Manuchka, there was neither. Manuchka is a restavek, a child servant who has done domestic chores for two sisters and their families since she was 6. Since she was 4, her life has consisted of fetching water, going to market, and scrubbing laundry. Sometimes, she was beaten by her caretakers. After the earthquake, she was denied food. So when she and her host families arrived at a campground for Haitians displaced by the disaster, she asked an aid worker to let her stay with him. With plans to leave Port-au-Prince and little use for a restavek anymore, the sisters said he could have her.
Slavery—which ended with independence in 1804—is illegal in Haiti. And technically restavek children are not slaves. But the irony seems lost on restavek's perpetrators; some 225,000 children are living as indentured servants in the first black republic born out of slavery's broken shackles. And, even after the earthquake, restavek is likely to live on.

Restavek's roots aren't all bad. Caribbean culture has always accommodated some form of child lending between families (usually relatives), to pitch in with extra work or care for the elderly or sick. This practice has evolved, and now many impoverished parents living in the countryside send their children to live with wealthier families in the city. In exchange for domestic help, those children are supposed to receive lodging, food, clothing, medicine, and—most importantly—education. In as many as half of the cases, they do (though classifying treatment in private homes is notoriously difficult). The unlucky ones, called restaveks—from the French rester avec, or "to stay with"—are essentially children loaned through normal channels but are denied schooling and subjected to horrific abuse and social degradation. Before the earthquake, they resided in up to 22 percent of Haitian homes, according to a study funded by USAID and published by the Pan American Development Foundation in December. Keeping restaveks is technically illegal but child loans are fine, and given the extent of Haiti's governmental dysfunction, it has become harder and harder to tell where one bleeds into the other. Conditions for children in the worst households have worsened over time, as poor urban families are decreasingly likely to provide educational opportunities. In the slum of Cité Soleil, restavek children can now be found in 44 percent of homes.

Now that the earthquake has thrown family networks into disarray, the already sparse social ties supporting restaveks are likely to break down, too. "For families struggling in the wake of a catastrophe, restavek kids are the first to go," said Glenn Smucker, an anthropologist who specializes in development work in Haiti. Thousands of Haitians were killed in hurricanes and floods in 2004 and 2008, and each time, he said, the restaveks were most at risk to be turned out on the streets or trafficked—a modern-day echo of slavery. "Whenever these things happen, restavek children always fare worse. Their parents are not there to watch out for them, so they're far more vulnerable than the rest of the population." The same stood for orphans, who often wind up in restavek situations. Girls, seen as more submissive than boys, were most at risk, making up more than two thirds of the restavek population.

But while the supply of children at risk has risen with each catastrophe, the demand for restavek children may abate after the quake. An exodus of thousands of urban residents from Port-au-Prince is reversing decades of migratory trends. If the shift sticks, it means there will be less need for restavek services in the city. "Since many children have returned to the countryside, there's the possibility that parents will keep their children rather than giving them away. That's what I am hoping will happen," said Jean Cadet, the founder of the Restavek Foundation (in whose care Manuchka was left).
At the same time, things could worsen just as easily as they could improve. For one thing, some host families are simply leaving their restavek children behind when they flee the city—and not always with an aid group. And it's still possible that families suffering from the earthquake's economic aftershocks will feel extra pressure to lend out their children, even as it becomes more likely they'll become restaveks. That pressure, combined with the spike in new orphans, means Haiti will probably see a rise in street children.

Ultimately, though, the system itself will stay much as it has been. Like much of the tragedy broadcast out of Haiti, it is a reflection of decades of shoddy governance that has led poor families to believe—perhaps rightly—that this is their children's best chance for upward social mobility. Where there is no state-run social safety net, informal agreements fill the vacuum. That absence will only be exacerbated as Haiti's government struggles to pick up its pieces, and the underlying dynamics that led families to come to those agreements—poverty, dysfunctional politics, and scarce opportunities—remain essentially unchanged. The only alternative to a system of child relocation is through a revision of the basic social contract. Even though this quake will change Haiti radically, nobody thinks it will remake the country's social structure.

The silver lining is that the same culture of child lending that gave rise to restavek abuses may smooth the way for the incorporation of Haiti's orphaned and unaccompanied children into new households. Haitians insist that relocation is beneficial much more often than it's abusive, says anthropologist Gerald Murray. That claim is impossible to verify, and there is evidence that up to half of the children considered legitimate boarders are subjected to restavek-style indignities (like being barred from the family dinner table). Still, with a government unable to respond to the scale of the crisis, people's readiness to take someone else's child into their home can only help. "Just as Haitians themselves had to dig out those buried under the rubble, so it will be ordinary Haitians, not their government, that care for children orphaned by the earthquake," said Murray. Now, as before, and for better or worse, that will happen on their own terms.

Find this article at
http://www.newsweek.com/id/232865

I'm human.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html


Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing.

I second that... I do not know why people are so caught on wanting to know where one from trying to win arguments in order to down the other as lesser than. That is the smartest thing said regardless if you were one, the other or both even neither at all. You said it best with the above answer indeed. Until we find extraterrestrials, this is good enough an answer for me no matter what the Earthly or Earthy disagreement(s).

Maybe s/he Dominican, or maybe s/he is not. Maybe s/he is Haitian, maybe s/he is not... Maybe s/he is both should it really truly matter what one's creed is to have agreements or disagreements?

Whatever creed that s/he is, it does not move the conversation forward if we are to look down upon one another with hatred for what nationality we are or we are no different than what we are looking down upon the other for even with the differences...

S/he Dominican, s/he Haitian... oh wait, s/he is human Sherlock Holmes! The only creed that should matter to us all and when we do find other beings outside our realm, it would still not matter because we are already Universe(ans).

"My decision to destroy the authority of the Blacks in Saint Domingue (then Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as it is on the need to block forever the march of the Blacks in the world." - Napoleon Bonaparte.

Golly,

Is that the hatred hateful example above some of us cling to why even in the face of tragedy our ill deputes still cannot find human decencies, humanely for just a month? Nor can the Haitians or/and Dominicans embrace a Dessalines or/and Trijillo-like mentality in moment like this...

P.S: There comes a time when maturity should exceed stupidity. Arrogance, ignorance or not is no excuse and substitute even for when the beating heart to have compassion.

Geez, remind me if what, when and where are we; in the 1800's or 19th century still?

I now realize, if we want to change Haiti, we have to change ourselves first.

'Rescued': A story that called to me
By Soledad O'Brien, CNN



Haiti is poorest in Western Hemisphere, with 380,000 orphans
Lighthouse orphanage's goal is to support kids as they grow up in their own country
Some see little future for kids as unemployment rate hovers at 80 percent

"My long-term vision is to have a free hospital, free medial, free restaurants," orphan says
Editor's note: This story is drawn from "Rescued," a new documentary to be aired on CNN at 8 p.m. ET Saturday and Sunday. CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O'Brien reports on Haiti's orphans and the challenges they face as a result of the devastating earthquake in January.
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Most of the little ones outside the Quisqueya Church are in playpens beneath trees.

You can hear them whimpering like kittens, but you can't see them. Their caretakers have covered the orphans' playpens with mattresses to block the sun. The heat is trapped inside, and the children are withering.

It is a week after the devastating January 12 earthquake, and as I walk among the playpens, I push the mattresses aside. Flashes of hot air move in. Flies land on one boy's eyelid, and he is too weak to wave them away. A girl struggles to roll over. She is maybe 5. I stop beside boys who are about 2. I know boys this age. My boys were this age once.

Their eyes are missing something. There is no white, just red. Their eyelids droop, unable to withstand even the weight of their tiny lashes. Their lips are so dry, they are almost invisible. And despite the 90-degree heat, there is no moisture on their skin. They are too dehydrated to sweat.
I touch their heads, one by one. The tight little Afro on one boy traps dirt like a bird's nest. On the head of another, tiny blue veins trace his skull like a roadmap. I kneel down to meet him. He stands, tilting like a drunk. He can barely lift the weight of his dirty diaper.

I stroke his back, and he falls forward against the railing. His head tilts toward me. His mouth is half open. I look into his eyes and see nothing.

I stop. I begin to stand up, to walk away. He cries out. His tiny chest heaves, and his head wobbles unsteadily on his neck. I fall back down.

"Don't cry. Don't cry," I say.
He has no reaction.

Then suddenly I cry, too. Our foreheads touch. His is dry, mine moist. His body trembles. My spine collapses into a hunch.

Some of these children will die this week. Some will wither away regardless of whether word gets out that they need help. They were barely better off before the ground shook and took an estimated 250,000 lives, before a legion of rescue workers and journalists descended on their homeland for the umpteenth time in history to tell the story of Haiti's woes.

The agony of this boy overwhelms me. I can do nothing for him. Nothing right now. Nothing tomorrow. Nothing at all, except cry.

A story that called to me

It was a low point in my first reporting trip to Haiti. I had arrived there less than a week after the earthquake and spent several days focused on telling the stories of the country's orphans. But too often, I felt helpless.

The earthquake had laid bare to the eyes of the world the country's orphanage system, and the facts were wrenching.


Natural Disasters

This island nation is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, with 380,000 orphans and an additional 5,000 to 10,000 street kids in 2007, according to UNICEF. These were the children whose faces captured your heart in worldwide appeals for charity.

I knew that I had to return to Haiti, to tell more fully the story behind those faces. It is a complicated story, and the assignment would take me to an unusual place: an orphanage called the Lighthouse, where the goal is not to get children adopted abroad but to nurture and support them as they grow up in their own country.

There, I would come to know two orphans: Cendy Jeune and Marc Kenson Olibris, who are featured in the documentary "Rescued."

At 6, Cendy is a bright girl learning to read in a country where half the children never see a classroom. At 21, Marc Kenson is the orphan we rarely see: one who grew to adulthood in his own country.

In him, we found hope for Haiti's future.

The journey of a grown-up orphan
Marc Kenson Olibris didn't come running to meet me the day I arrived at the Lighthouse. Just a month after the earthquake, he was busy trying to help the institution that transformed his life, and where he now worked as a caretaker, hold things together in crisis.

All of the children had survived the quake. But the orphanage kept running out of food. It had no electricity and limited water. One wall of the girls' home had fallen, and there were cracks along the walls of the boys' home, the school and the clinic.

The children were sleeping outside because aftershocks made being indoors too scary. And that worried Marc Kenson (pronounced Mackenson) because it compromised the children's safety. Even the Lighthouse's limited resources were attractive to thieves.

When things settled down enough for him to sit down and talk, I was struck by how calm he was under pressure. Marc Kenson has one of those faces that look happy even when sad: large, bright eyes and an easy smile.

Bill and Susette Manassero, directors of the Lighthouse, are parent figures to Marc Kenson. He was among the first 12 boys to come to the orphanage when it opened in 2005.

The couple had visited Haiti in 2004 at the urging of their daughter Ariana, then 8. She had become captivated by the Haitian orphans she saw in photos. A year after that visit, the couple uprooted their family to fulfill her dream: to build an orphanage, school and church. Their goal: to raise the children in Haiti, to give them and their country a bright future.

At first, the gangly teenager was suspicious of these white Americans. He had heard from kids in other orphanages that they might treat him badly. But he got food, an education, a home. And faith.
His own parents, he told me, were Baptists who also practiced voodoo. He adopted the Christian fundamentalism of the Manasseros.

"I was lost, you understand. After I found the word and understood the word, it changed my life. It made me know what was good and what was bad."

We talked about his wretched childhood in Cap-Haitien, where his parents struggled to provide for him and his sister, Mona, before finally selling them for $12. He was 11; Mona was 9.

I asked if that made them both a Restavec, Creole for "stay with" -- the name given to Haiti's legal child slave trade. He mumbled yes and looked down.
It was hard to tell whether he was shamed by that fact or just sad that it is true. Was he angry? No, he said.

His humility and calm were unnerving. How could he not be angry, I thought. That's when Marc Kenson said something that stirred deep admiration.

Haiti, he explained, is a place where many people have nothing, where even the hardest-working young man can never seem to find a job. How could he be angry with his parents if they had nothing to give him and no way to feed him? Selling him and his sister meant they would get to Port-au-Prince and maybe find a better life. Selling their own children to a stranger was a way of giving them a future.
He had become an orphan, a word with many meanings in Haiti, where children who are not being raised by their parents are considered orphans even if their parents are alive.

I asked Marc Kenson to jump atop a jeep and go with me to visit the place where he had lived as a child slave. I wanted to understand how 50,000 children could live legally as slaves and how a young man who had suffered so much could be so resilient, so strong in the face of this latest indignity: an earthquake hitting an island already hit hard by poverty. We drove to La Saline, a ghetto by the edge of the sea.

The conditions there were so miserable, it was hard to tell what was earthquake damage. A flotilla of garbage topped the sewage that runs in canals along the homes. Large black sows poked through the trash, competing for food with naked and bone-thin children.

Marc Kenson led me through the narrow alleys that divided structures made of discarded tin and cardboard, wood scraps and boxes. We passed by unattended children, many crying and clearly ill. Some did as he used to: running into the streets to beg, facing a beating if he returned home with nothing.
His past flashed by him: child slave, street beggar. This life of desperation had ended when he approached a car driven by a volunteer from the Lighthouse. She took him to the Manasseros.
But here, now, the people who once lived beside Marc Kenson could not believe their eyes. Here he was, surrounded by photographers, arriving in a car, well-fed, well-groomed. Children crowded around him in awe.

We came upon a woman whose home Marc Kenson had occupied with his sister and the lady who kept the two of them as slaves. She let us see the hut where they lived. It was hot but neat, with buckets of food packets from a recent distribution of aid from World Food Programme. I was overcome by the smell, the heat, the intolerable conditions. He was sweating profusely but wearing a wide smile.

"What do you think when you come here?" I asked him.
"I thank God," he said. "I thank him."

And then he said something surprising. He thanked me for taking him to see where he'd come from. "I could have never come here on my own," he said.
"Why not?" I asked.

He smiled and looked around him. It was obvious. To come back with a film crew and a story worth telling was a triumph. Instead of feeling sad when he revisited his past, he returned to celebrate his good fortune.

Marc Kenson had been through so much in life that he did not see the earthquake as daunting. It was a reason to work harder.

To stay or leave: not always a choice
Marc Kenson had a dream for the future. And naturally, it included his sister, Mona. She is his only real family, the only relative who has been around his whole life and accompanied him on his journey. She, too, was taken off the streets by an orphanage. The place where she lived, His Home for Children, was not far from the Lighthouse, and Marc Kenson had been able to visit her often.
But he'd been working so hard since the earthquake that he hadn't had a chance to see her for some time. Some orphanages had irreparable damage and a heavy loss of life. They were calling aid organizations, desperate for food and water or a way out of Haiti.

Knowing we would profile Marc Kenson, we asked Bill and Susette Manassero to check on his sister. They learned that a family in Texas had adopted Mona. The paperwork was expedited because of the earthquake, and her brother had never had a chance to say goodbye.
We were going to visit other orphanages, and asked Marc Kenson if he wanted to go with us to His Home for Children. He agreed. Knowing Mona was gone didn't soften the blow of walking through the iron gates of her orphanage and seeing the emptiness she'd left behind.

Marc Kenson's eyes scanned the premises, seemingly hoping to see her pop up at any moment. Several stuffed animals sat atop her bottom bunk bed. Jammed beneath it was an old suitcase. It was obvious how much he missed her.

Hal Nungester, director of the orphanage, showed us pictures of Mona on the computer. His mission is to support adoptions, and so a small amount of tension hung in the air.

Marc Kenson struggled with his emotions. "It was her choice, and I'm happy for her," he said of his sister. But he also lamented that she would be one less young person around to build a future Haiti.
I asked if he was sure he would stick around. He nodded affirmatively. "Even if I left for a while, I would return," he said. "My country needs me."

Nungester listened in, and his face grew red.
"I'm angry that there are factions that are saying we should turn these kids back in to their families, when Marc Kenson obviously can't even take care of himself, let alone his little sister," he said. "He's living in an orphanage, so he can't provide for himself."
"How did Mona come to you?" I asked.

"She was on the street," he said, "about 12 years old, little teeny tiny thing. She had scars all over her body where she'd been beat. It's just starting to come out now about some of the abuse that she suffered. While she was in Haiti, she was afraid to talk about it. But she's talking with her family about it now in the States."

Nungester said he sees no future in Haiti for kids like Marc Kenson and Mona, because the unemployment rate hovers at 80 percent.

"The people who are hungry now, who were hungry before the earthquake, they're getting fed somehow because the internet and international community has stepped in, and we do appreciate that. But what's going to happen when they step out? We're going to go right back to what we had before," he said.

Getting adopted out of Haiti has never been easy. Just 338 Haitian children were adopted by parents in the United States in 2009, according to the U.S. State Department. After the earthquake, the government waived the two- to three-year wait and cleared nearly 900 children for adoptions. But some child advocates feared mistakes, that some children might be separated from biological parents who wanted them or that children would be trafficked. Aid organizations like Save the Children and UNICEF called for the government to freeze adoptions, and they virtually have.

Mona was among the last wave of orphans to leave Haiti quickly for adoption -- before a group of missionaries was caught taking kids across the border to the Dominican Republic, allegedly without permission.

Nungester said Mona dreamed of going to the U.S. to live with a new family and getting an education. His orphanage taught her English to prepare her for adoption.

Though he believes Haiti's orphans are better off sent abroad, Nungester commended Marc Kenson for staying behind to help rebuild his country.

"I don't think he's naïve. I think he's the hope of Haiti. I really believe that if we had more young men like him, we could do something, rather than just wallowing in hopelessness," he said.

A few days later, back at the Lighthouse, it was hard to imagine a Haiti without Marc Kenson. Steady supplies had finally begun to arrive, and he helped sort and distribute them. With volunteers, he worked to fix the walls of the Lighthouse buildings and open the school where the children are now returning to their studies even as most Port-au-Prince schools remain closed.

One day, he will leave this place, but not Haiti. He will go home to help his people. That's his dream.
"My long-term vision is to have a free hospital, free medical, free restaurants," he explained. "Have a place where kids can come and eat, they don't have to pay, like Susette is doing. Have an orphanage and give vaccinations. Give the kids an opportunity to stay at home."

I felt so grateful for Marc Kenson. The future of Haiti will no doubt be enriched by his presence, as I was in getting to know him. I thought back about that boy I'd seen in the playpen a week after the quake. His vacant expression. His tears, and mine.

I would never know his story. But in Marc Kenson's, I saw hope.