17378: Severe: LA Times Story on restavecs (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Constantin Severe <csevere@hotmail.com>

A Nation Loses Its Childhood

In Haiti, 200 years after a successful slave rebellion, thousands of rural
children work for the urban poor for no wages and little else.

By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

November 21, 2003

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Madeleine Vilma describes the beating that drove her
to the streets as if she deserved it.

"I made them mad at me," the skinny 15-year-old recalls of the two women who
had paid a pittance for her six years ago and then put her to work as a
maid. "I broke the heel off my shoe, so they beat me with their sandals."

Their anger not fully vented, the women she called Auntie and Maman then
singed her chest and arms with jolts from a frayed electrical cord,
Madeleine recounts, nervously rocking and shifting her legs, stork-like, at
the memory.

"They wanted to mark me so that I would remember."

Dispatched to the slums of the Haitian capital when she was 9 by parents
unable to feed her, Madeleine had been delivered by a trader into a life of
unpaid domestic servitude in exchange for food and shelter. Like an
estimated 300,000 other children in this poorest of Western countries, she
had no alternative except homelessness and hunger.

Foreign relief workers and Roman Catholic charities lately have been
encouraging Haiti's child slaves to come out of the shadows to seek help —
and to expose a century-old practice that has subjected them to shocking
abuse. Their growing numbers have prompted questions about whether the
world's only successful national slave rebellion 200 years ago was really a
victory.

As Haiti approaches the Jan. 1 bicentennial of its independence from French
colonial rule, the plight of child slaves is threatening to overshadow
official celebrations. It is also a measure of this ravaged country's
progress in the two centuries since the slave rebellion.

"How can we be celebrating the bicentennial when this is still going on?"
says Father Pierre St. Vistal, sweeping his hand to take in the barefoot,
scarred and ragged children huddled around the doorway of his overwhelmed
mission. "How can we as Haitians celebrate anything when our kids are on the
streets, dying of hunger? This isn't a time for celebration but for being
ashamed."

St. Vistal's mission offers hot meals and a crude, wood-planked sleeping
loft under its tin roof for 45 of the most mistreated girls from the
surrounding shantytown of Cite de Dieu, or City of God. Six hundred others,
still toiling in nearby hovels, come in for food and lessons when their
patrons allow it. The Catholic priest says he is sometimes confronted with
machetes when he urges the keepers to let the children take advantage of
schooling paid for by foreign charities.

Its name notwithstanding, there is no hint of divinity in Cite de Dieu,
through which flows a filthy river carrying the city's wastes and rainwater
out to sea. Narrow mud paths strewn with rocks and refuse left behind by the
rainy season's inundations make passage perilous on foot and impossible by
car. Rivulets of wastewater and sewage flow from beneath the single-room
shacks of tin and plywood. Salvaged tires, peddlers' baskets, wood stoves
and broken appliances litter the unmarked streets and alleys.

The children, called restaveks — from the French rester avec, to stay with —
are not servants of the wealthy but of those just slightly less poor than
the parents who sent them here.

As Haiti slips further into extreme poverty each year, the wave of children
— some as young as 4 — flocking to the cities has become a deluge, forcing
most to settle for whatever offer of shelter is on hand. Children who are
not brokered go door to door looking for a place to stay.

"Most of these patrons want someone they can have do anything they need done
without the conditions that come with employing an adult domestic," St.
Vistal says.

"With kids, there are no limits. They have no rights and can be made to do
anything."

A June report by the U.S. State Department about human trafficking accused
Haiti's government of tolerating the abuse of child servants. Education
Minister Marie Carmel Paul-Austin responded with assurances that legislative
action had been taken to outlaw domestic servitude for those younger than 12
and that education reforms were underway to help more children get
schooling. Neither Paul-Austin nor another official responsible for child
welfare was available to discuss the issue, said the ministry's spokesman,
Miloody Vincent.

Parliament adopted a measure early this year restricting the use of
restaveks, but even the Social Affairs Office charged with registering
unpaid domestic workers acknowledges that there hasn't been a single
instance of enforcement.

The plight of the children is heart-rending to those fighting for them.

"When kids come from the provinces to the city, the families treat them like
slaves, like lower life forms," says Patrick Bernard, who has worked at the
Foyer Maurice Sixto refuge in the sprawling Carrefour slum for seven years.
"That reaffirms their sense of inferiority, that they are treated like
property and not people."

Restaveks first appeared in the capital in the 1920s and '30s, when wealthy
families, as "an act of solidarity" with the rural poor, offered shelter and
education in exchange for domestic labor, explains Wenes Jeanty, director of
the Maurice Sixto program, named for a playwright who first exposed the
plight of the restaveks in the 1960s. But as the gap between rich and poor
widened drastically in recent decades, children coming from the countryside
became so numerous that they were forced to work for anyone able to make the
daily pot of beans and rice go one mouth further.

"The wealthy families don't want to get involved anymore. They say this is a
form of slavery and they don't want to be associated with it," Jeanty says.
"That has left [the children] to the poor and less educated in the cities
who are interested in getting help in their own homes for next to nothing."

In a report two years ago that first disclosed the breadth of child
enslavement in Haiti and the blind eye turned to the practice by government
offices that ostensibly protect minors, the National Coalition for Haitian
Rights detailed cases of murdered servants, police complicity in beatings
and detention and official indifference to what the group estimates afflicts
at least one in 10 Haitian children.

Merrie Archer, the group's director of human rights programs, attributes the
widespread mistreatment of restaveks to social acceptance here of brutal
forms of corporal punishment. "The violence that children face in Haiti on a
day-to-day level is different from what we're used to," she says.

For most restaveks growing up far away from their families, there is no
caring soul to help them.

"The households that take these kids in see them as chattel," Archer says.
"Often their own parents see them as chattel, as a means of getting support
for themselves once the kids get work in the city."

In reality, few ever escape their servitude to find paying jobs. Some
restaveks remain servants well into adulthood.

Raising the child slaves' self-worth is crucial to combating the problem,
Archer says, as well as making Haitians sensitive to the indignity that
enslavement brings on the nation.

Guardians at the Timkatec boys' shelter in Petionville, a hilltop town a few
miles above Port-au-Prince that has been subsumed by decades of slum
expansion, try to restore their 40 wards' sense of humanity by training them
to care for plants and pets.

"Some of these kids have never felt affection," says Alabre Michelet, a
nighttime caregiver at the shelter, one of the more comfortable refuges with
its solid roof and tiled floor. "Here they learn to be a family to each
other. We'd like to do this for all of the street kids, but we have far too
few resources."

Inhibited by a mouthful of broken teeth, 16-year-old Jean-Robert Meto slowly
divulges the indignities of his years as a servant, when he was forced to
sleep curled up alone outside the room where his host family's children
slept. He doesn't remember how old he was when his family gave him to a
trader but reckons he was 6 or 7. "They treated me differently, not like a
brother," he said of the three years he spent with a family. "They went to
school, and I didn't."

Like many of the servants kept clandestinely, Jean-Robert wasn't allowed to
leave the house even when his chores were done. His keepers feared that he
might be noticed by the humanitarian aid workers who occasionally comb the
slums to rescue children exposed to particularly harsh abuse or to pressure
the hosts to pay for their restavek's schooling.

It is the prospect of an education that draws many children to
Port-au-Prince, Cap Haitian and other urban centers, although few of those
who take in restaveks — paying the cost of their transportation and a
nominal fee of a few dollars to the traders — can afford to send them to
school.

Secondary school costs about $145 for annual enrollment and $20 a month,
plus uniforms and books, putting it out of reach for most Haitians, a
majority of whom earn less than $1 a day. If not for the remittances sent by
relatives abroad, Haitian schools would be empty, says Gernie Grandpierre, a
matron at the Sixto refuge.

"Most of these children are not well treated," says Colette Lamothe,
coordinator of an umbrella restavek program. "They seldom are sent to
school, so they learn no other skills. They start this kind of work at 5 or
6 and never know any other life."

About 300 restaveks from Carrefour come daily to the Sixto shelter for a
meal and two hours of schooling; a handful of other shelters also aid the
enslaved children. The slum, home to more than 1 million Haitians, is
thought to house more than 100,000 underage domestics.

Jeanty, the Sixto program director, acknowledges that aid projects like his
are probably helping only about 1% of the children.

Most of the children who are sent to the capital to seek their fortunes
disappear into rat-infested slums like Carrefour, La Saline and Cite Soleil
— shantytowns that house most of this city's 2.5 million people.

In Carrefour, berms of mud-encrusted trash line the rutted alleyways
climbing up from Dessalines Boulevard, a one-lane link named for the slave
revolt's victorious general. It is choked with battered cars and the rickety
pickups called tap-taps that serve as buses. Jobless men and boys shovel
sludge that flows down the denuded hillsides, clearing space for women to
hawk their meager wares of bouillon cubes, batteries, plantain chips and
root vegetables.

Families often have no idea where their servants come from, having bought
them through intermediaries, Jeanty says.

"Often a kid gets out of a big family that can't take care of it, but I
believe in my heart that it's better for them to stay with their suffering
parents and brothers and sisters than be sent to strangers who treat them
like animals," says Clarmei de Rameau, a cook at the Sixto shelter,who has
worked there for a dozen years and rescued four restaveks by taking them
into her home. "A mother's love can't be replaced."

Although most involved in helping the restaveks condemn official
indifference, they also acknowledge that the practice does help feed
children and brings them in out of the rain.

"It wouldn't be so common if there wasn't a need for their labor and their
need to be fed and clothed," says Bernard of the Sixto shelter. "If child
servitude was suddenly eradicated, there wouldn't be any place at all for
these kids to go."

Those trying to help Haiti's enslaved children scoff at the government's
claims that it is addressing the problem. "There has been a law against
child labor for years, but it has never been enforced," says Jean Lherisson,
head of Haiti Solidarity International. The human rights group warned last
year that the problem was reaching epidemic proportions.

Lherisson argues that today's servants are even worse off than the children
of slaves in the colonial era because then there were legal — and honored —
prohibitions against using anyone younger than 10 for labor. Children as
young as 4 now are sent here to work as servants, like Fredlin Alfred, a
child thought to be that age found six months ago outside St. Vistal's
mission.

Since slavery was overthrown by a 12-year revolt culminating in the
proclamation of the first independent black republic on Jan. 1, 1804,
"Haitian children have never been seen as subjects in the eyes of the
state," Lherisson says of the country's 200-year succession of corrupt and
abusive governments.

Lherisson says the rural poor continue to send their children into servitude
because they cling to the illusion that they will have better chances in the
city.

"Parents have no choice but to let their children dream. Here in
Port-au-Prince, there's light and television and at least a hope of getting
someone to pay for a child's education," he says. "You can't blame them for
wanting to believe they are doing their kids a favor."

Williams was recently on assignment in Port-au-Prince.

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