14261: Florestal: Sun Sentinel - Cemetery, Haven for Haitian Kids (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Jean-Marie Florestal <sonice1953@yahoo.com>

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Hundreds of Haitian street kids find haven in the
capital's huge cemetery
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By Tim Collie
STAFF WRITER

December 30, 2002

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- By night they sleep outside
the gates of the city's largest cemetery, huddled in
raggy heaps only a few feet from the graves of this
troubled country's former dictators, presidents and
moneyed elites.

By day they roam the cemetery's narrow walks and
hidden spaces, doing laundry and hoarding food and
water among collapsed graves, overturned coffins and
dusty corpses looted by grave robbers.

It's as close as the street children of Port-au-Prince
likely will ever come to finding a place among Haiti's
rich and famous. Malnourished, cut and bruised, they
are the poorest of the poor in the most impoverished
country of the Western Hemisphere.

An estimated 7,000 street children live in
Port-au-Prince, according to the best estimates of
international charities. Thousands more can be found
across the island in other cities like Cap Haitien or
Gonaives.

But that doesn't begin to account for the thousands
more who may be just a notch above the streets, barely
surviving in dusty rural villages, working as orphaned
domestic slaves in elite households or living without
education or medicine in vast shanty slums while
parents forage for food.

"Calling someone a street child is a very relative
term here since so many children and their parents
live out on the streets," said Jean-Robert Chery, a
university psychology professor who runs a shelter for
homeless children in central Port-au-Prince. "But what
it means here is children who have no parents, who may
be as young as 3 or 4, and who sleep outside and find
their own food."

Among these desperate youths, the most notorious cases
are those who live around the capital city's main
cemetery. In recent months, they have been targeted by
police and cemetery officials in a get-tough
anti-crime campaign to clean up the cemetery and end
looting. In September, six of the cemetery kids
reportedly were picked up by police and then later
found dead, victims of what human rights groups call
summary execution. The deaths remain under
investigation.

"The cemetery is popular with the children because
it's so big and there's so many places to hide if the
police are chasing you," said Chery, a
Haitian-Canadian who has worked with street children
in Haiti for two decades. "Nobody spends any regular
time there so only the kids are the only ones who
really know all the hiding places."

Chased and beaten

And there are plenty of hiding places. Walking through
here on a weekday morning, a visitor may encounter
pregnant teenage girls, children still in diapers and
the babbling mentally ill emerging from behind
decades-old crypts. Many have stashed clothing and
other items on and inside the tombs, which often have
been plundered of their former occupants.

As Nadege Badio, 19, carried her 2-year-old son
between several crypts to a place where she collects
rainwater, she passed a headless body, bedecked in a
black, dusty suit, hanging upside down from one tomb.
Abandoned when she was 10 years old, Badio has lived
in the cemetery since she was 14.

"We're not afraid here, not of ghosts or anything,"
she explained. "If we get sick, we're already here
among the dead. But the dead are already dead, and
we're alive. So they won't hurt us."

The living are another story.

"We get chased and beat up by the police sometimes --
some of my friends have disappeared," she said. "The
police think we're all pickpockets or robbers. Some of
us are those things, but they get a lot of the
innocent people, too."

Partly out of a survival instinct, partly out of
simple human need for love, the children form informal
families known as cartels. Many don't even know their
ages, barely remember their parents and have reddish
hair, the most visible sign of malnutrition. Badio is
a mother figure who watches out for several younger
children, including Esai Kertidor, 10, who said he's
been sleeping in the streets for three years.

Similar to slavery

"My mother died," he said. "I have an aunt who I was
living with but she was mean to me and beating me, so
I left. I feel more comfortable out here in the
cemetery, and on the streets."

During the day he works on a tap-tap, the small
colorful pick-up trucks that operate as private buses
on Haiti's crowded streets. He collects money from
passengers and earns about 75 cents a day. With this
he buys a small portion of rice and beans that makes
up the day's meal.

Roughly 70 percent of street children are males,
according to Chery and other experts, because young
females often get picked up to become domestic
servants known as restaveks, a Creole term from the
French phrase rester avec ("to stay with"). The
National Coalition for Haitian Rights, a leading human
rights group, estimates that about 300,000 children 14
and under live as restaveks. They describe their lowly
conditions as similar to slavery.

Many of the girls picked up flee these conditions and
then fall prey to gangs on the street. Boys,
meanwhile, often become the target of homosexual
pedophiles who think abusing them will protect them
from getting AIDS.

The only escape from such a life is death and drugs,
particularly the cheap glue sniffed by urchins eager
to feel good about something, anything.

"I like glue because it helps me sleep," said
15-year-old Afe Charles, who reeked of a strong glue
smell as he shuffled barefoot through the cemetery.
"I'm going through a lot of misery here everyday. I'm
always getting beat up by people and I just like to
sleep. That's all I want to do -- sleep."

In a country as poor as Haiti, where more than half
the population is unemployed, climbing out of poverty
as a child is almost impossible. The luckiest may
stumble into some orphanage or charity that truly
cares about them -- the equivalent of winning the
lottery. The rest can look forward to one of the
shortest life expectancies in the world -- 47 for men,
51 for women.

Aristide's orphanage

Haitians, who have among the highest illiteracy and
infant mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere, earn
on average about $450 per year. The most basic social
services expected in other countries do not exist
here. Public hospitals admit only those who can afford
to pay for treatment, medicine and bandages. Education
is largely private, and schooling for one child may
cost roughly half the annual wage of an average
citizen.

If anything, the plight of street children seems to
have worsened during the last decade as a fragile
democracy has taken hold here. The government of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is mired in a
stalemate with political opponents who don't accept
his rule because of disputes from an election two
years ago. The political troubles have stalled
investment, which cripples industrial development and
worsens unemployment.

Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, founded his
own orphanage for street children in the late 1980s,
but it became a target for his political opponents.
Children were wounded in shooting attacks and five
died in a suspicious fire that gutted the building in
1991, the same year Aristide was ousted in a coup.
Aristide returned from exile to resume his presidency,
but the orphanage was closed in 1999 after many of the
street children it served complained of poor services.

"To protect children, you need a society of laws, and
it's simply impossible to have such laws in this
atmosphere of violence and political problems," said
Chery, the psychologist.

"Children don't want to live alone in the streets," he
added. "It's not their natural condition. They want
families. But if they don't have families then it
takes a government of laws and culture that cares
about childhood to protect them. We simply don't have
that here."

Copyright (c) 2002, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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