17407: Jepiem: Re: 17396and 17394: Math Jay, Restavecs

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Jepiem@aol.com
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There are other aspects to this problem. Some people do take care of
children
of other families in a genuine effort to help. But it is also true that
there
is an undercurrent of child exploitation whereby families from the cities
take
advantage of the poverty of families in the country and accept their
children
with no other motive than to use them for menial tasks in or outside the
house,
which they do not afflict on their own children. While their own children
go to
school those "imported" children are left to work all day and it wasn't
unusual
to see these children accompany those family's kids to school to carry
their
books and to go back to the school at lunch time to bring them lunch.
Sometimes
those kids were about the same age as the kids they were serving. This is
nothing but child slavery; the comedian and social critic Maurice Sixto's
model
for this is Ti Saintanise. On the matter of punishment, there is no
question
that the punishments usually inflicted on the "imported" kids for minor
infractions were a lot harsher than those meted out to the family's
children.That was the situation in Haiti and I don't know how much of it
still
goes on now. Now what to do with these children? That is a very complex
question and there is not one answer to it. It seems to me however that
orhpanages have never been and never will be the answer to it, because
those
children in orphanages don't have the same origins as those so called
restavecs Like for anything else in Haiti, attacking the problem
of children destined to orphanages or the restavec situation, means
unearthing
a whole slew of problems, like that of overpopulation and growing
population in
the face of dire poverty, families in the country still living under the
antiquated views that having many children is buying security for their
old age
and that they had to produce five kids in order to save one because most
would
die before puberty and also not realizing that it has become may be ten
times
more expensive to raise a child nowadays than say twenty years ago, now
that
the country dweller has become even a lot poorer. Those that can help the
children already here through orphanages or otherwise should do so, but
they
should also be the advocates pushing for the responsible authorities to
take
the appropriate and deeper measures. They shouldn't however delude
themselves
into thinking that they are really solving the problems of child poverty,
children abandonment or children slavery in the country.