14309: Lemieux: Houston Chronicle: Haiti's children of the Streets (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>


Crises drive Haiti children to the streets
Houston Chronicle; Houston, Tex.; Dec 15, 2002; IAN JAMES;

LES CAYES, Haiti - On the edge of town, dozens of boys
congregate below a statue of Jesus. It's their home as they
scratch out lives on the town's littered streets noisy with
trucks and motorcycles.

Forced from their homes by poverty and broken families, the
children load and sweep buses for meager tips. They don't
attend school, their clothes are ragged, and fellow
citizens largely regard them as a nuisance.

"I don't know my age," says a barefooted Jean-Claude
George, who has the body of a 10-year-old but the gaze of a
man who has known years of suffering. "I've been on the
street a long time."

Like others among the children who sleep on buses or near
the white statue, Jean-Claude fled an abusive home in the
countryside for this town on Haiti's southern coast, 100
miles from the capital of Port-au-Prince.

He earns small change on the buses to pay for food and
shoes, but the sandals often disappear in the company he
keeps.

"The other kids keep an eye on me all night," he says.
"Once I go to sleep, they steal them."

Street children struggle in cities around the globe, from
Sao Paulo to Bombay. But in this Caribbean nation, the
Western Hemisphere's poorest, the problem of homelessness
among children is especially severe.

Some experts say the situation has worsened in recent years
amid Haiti's political turmoil. Thousands of children
wander the cities, looking for odd jobs, begging or
stealing to eat.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Roman Catholic
priest, has tried to make children's issues a cornerstone
of his presidency, but government efforts have failed to
bring the children off the streets.

In 1986, before he was president, Aristide founded the
Family Is Life orphanage.

His political involvement eventually made it a target for
opponents. In 1991, the same year he was ousted in a coup,
five children died in a suspicious fire at the facility. In
1992, some children were wounded when Aristide opponents
stormed the building and began shooting.

The orphanage eventually closed in 1999 amid protests by
orphans who said promises of jobs weren't kept.

Dominique Esperant, the former regional head of the social
affairs ministry in Les Cayes, hopes to put street children
back on the political agenda.

"I believe they can become good citizens like anyone else
if someone is there to help them out," Esperant says.

Frustrated by a lack of government funds, Esperant is
trying to raise money independently to start a center to
house street children.

"There is no work back home," says Lesene Souverain, 17,
who says he left home when he was 9 because his parents
couldn't pay for school. "At least on the streets, there
are people who can help me."

In the nearby hills, deforested land is turning into
desert. Esperant says most of Les Cayes' street children
come from this wasteland. "They don't have any arable land
to plant anymore," he says. "So they came to the city to
look for life, to look for a way to survive."

Child labor is common even for those who stay at home. Boys
in Les Cayes sell crackers and muffins from trays on their
heads. In Port-au-Prince, some young girls work as
prostitutes to augment family earnings. Sometimes, poor
parents give away children to be servants for better-off
families.

The children often are mistreated, and human rights groups
criticize the practice as child slavery.

In Les Cayes, many people express little pity for the
children, calling them grapiyay, or hustlers.


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