29571: Hermantin(News)A path taken (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

A path taken


Charline Noel Jocelyn begged on the streets, enduring beatings and robberies 
from other children to provide for her mother, who was dying of AIDS. Fleeing 
from an attack at age 7, Charline found her way into the arms of a woman who 
put her on a new path.



By Tim Collie
Sun-Sentinel

November 26, 2006



PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti · Charline might become a poet.

Maybe a teacher or a diplomat.

She might become a voice for all the children here who live alone or afraid in 
the city and in villages where people seem to die a lot.

But Charline is just 16.

She is leader of an orphan brood living in a big house on a mountain far above 
the city.

When her mind slips into dark places, when she misses her dead mother so much 
she wants to die too, she doesn't let the younger children see.

Instead, she gathers her strength and leads them in song:

"Those of you who are older,

You are the path that we'll follow

Because children today

will be grown up tomorrow."



Charline Noel Jocelyn takes pride in her role as surrogate mother to the other 
children.

And if she survives, then maybe she will come down off the mountain and tell 
her story to the people below.

If her story is told throughout the Caribbean, in Florida, New York and 
Washington and then around the globe, maybe enough people will hear, enough to 
make a difference, to make sure this generation gets what it needs to survive.

Charline's story begins with a song that she and the others sing:

"Let us, the children, live because we are the hope of the country.

We are like a spring that bubbles forth but never runs dry.

Children of Saline ...

of Haiti ...

of Miami ...

Let the children live in peace."



Here is the first thing to know about Haiti, the bare and brown western claw of 
the Caribbean island of Hispaniola:

It is a nation of children.

Gray hair is getting harder and harder to find.

Eight million people live here.

Four million are under age 14.

Too many of them are children without parents.

Today, a large slice of their generation -- by some official accounts, 250,000 
-- has lost one parent or both to AIDS.

The global epidemic, now in its 25th year, has killed more than 400,000 people 
in Haiti. It has killed tens of thousands more throughout the Caribbean, 
steppingstone islands in Florida's backyard and one of the largest tourist 
playgrounds on Earth.

The number of children orphaned by AIDS will likely continue to grow. Experts 
see no end in sight. They voice concern: If things don't veer from their 
current path, Caribbean society, and the Caribbean economy that relies heavily 
on tourism, will suffer more.

The best and brightest professionals, the thinkers, the artists, will leave. 
And the young people who in the past have grown to be waiters, bartenders, 
chefs, desk clerks, maids and managers -- the working lifeblood of the region 
-- simply will not be there.

Tourism, as the Caribbean knows it, no longer plays much of a role in Haiti, 
the poorest country in the hemisphere, the sixth poorest on Earth.

It has by far the region's highest rate of baby and child deaths.

The highest rate of AIDS deaths.

The highest number of children orphaned by AIDS.

The country has crumbled under three decades of political, economic, social 
and, finally, environmental calamity.

> From the air, it's easy to see which side of this once verdant island, 
Hispaniola, is Haiti.

Look for the brown.

Look for the treeless mountains.

There's nothing much left.

Except the children.

They are Haiti's last hope.

They are about to inherit a new world.

This year, for the first time, anyone living with HIV/AIDS in Haiti can get the 
new generation of drugs that turns a killer disease into a manageable 
condition.

But there are hurdles to getting the drugs: bad roads, distant villages, scant 
information, fear.

At the same time, of the thousands and thousands of young people left, a 
handful will be nurtured in places where they learn about the disease that 
killed their parents. Where they will learn about acceptance over stigma, facts 
over fear. Where, in turn, they will learn to teach others who still fear and 
shun anyone connected to AIDS.

Each of these steps will come against tough odds.

Questions abound.

Will ignorance, poverty and disease destroy this generation of children? Or 
will the children prevail, move forward and help teach others how to build a 
new kind of future?

Charline is one whose life hangs in the balance.

Charline was just 4 when her mother got sick with the wasting disease that the 
child knew only as tuberculosis.

People don't want you to know it's AIDS, if they themselves know.

A father died before Charline knew him.

An older brother left for the Dominican Republic, as thousands of Haitians do 
each year, looking for work.

Charline and another brother took care of their mother the only way they could.

They went into the streets to beg.

Charline:

"Every day, I put on my clothes and went to the street. ...

Me and my brother, we each took a different route ... .

In the middle of the day, I'd come home to my mother.

I'd cook for her. I'd braid her hair, and I'd make sure she drank her medicine 
... .

Sometimes when I didn't get any money to go home, I would send a message to my 
mother that I wasn't coming home that night ... .

Sometimes my friends, the older kids, would take me over by the National Palace 
and I'd sleep under a bench ... "



For Haiti's poorest, childhood hardly exists.

In cities and towns, toddlers play on cinder block outcroppings with rusted 
rebar sticking out at all angles. Razor wire and jagged bottles poke up from 
cement walls surrounding orphanages. Metal spikes and boards of nails cover 
bumpers on tap-tap vehicles to keep children from hitching rides.

Here, the demons and creatures of children's fairy tales take shape in real 
life. The Tonton Macoutes, paramilitary henchmen of past dictatorships, 
borrowed their name from the folk character "Uncle Bogeyman," said to stuff bad 
little children into a gunnysack and carry them off in the night.

Criminal street gangs called Zenglendos take their name from a folktale demon 
who comes to young children in the form of an old man.

He asks the child to stroke his back.

His back turns to shards of glass that slice through the child's hands.

You can't trust anyone, children learn. Least of all police, who travel the 
streets unchecked, often aligned with criminal gangs.

Rumors fly. Police rounding up street children, taking them to landfills and 
shooting them dead. There are no records to prove anything, no missing person 
reports, only stories that others tell you.

Here is the latest bogeyman story that street children hear:

An elegant woman -- it's always a woman -- drives up in a shiny car.

She calls you over.

She carries a bag with a gun inside.

If you want to leave the street, be part of a family, you have to do something 
for her, maybe shoot someone or run drugs or ransom money for street gangs.

She smiles. She asks: "Do you want a mother?"

Charline came to the street when the AIDS epidemic was in its 12th year. The 
disease had already claimed thousands of lives.

About that time, doctors, missionaries and others who worked with children saw 
something different: more kids in the street.

Exactly who they were, and where they came from, was hard to know.

They poured into the cities from a countryside stripped of trees, topsoil and 
streams by people struggling to survive. They came from the slums looking for 
money and food.

It soon became clear: Hundreds were orphans who had lost one parent or both to 
AIDS.

They were a generation shaped by one of the most devastating epidemics in 
history. The children often didn't know what killed their mothers or fathers.

If others knew, those children were treated like walking dead. No orphanages 
would take them.

Something else they didn't know:

They could well be carrying the virus, too.

Roughly one-fourth of children born to HIV/AIDS-infected mothers are carriers 
themselves.

How to find out?

How to treat them?

Track them?

Where to put them?

In the last five years in particular, the number of street gangs has soared, 
and street children are easy targets, willing recruits.

On the street, you sleep in shifts, in storefronts and doorways, at the foot of 
the statues, in broken crypts. To get money, you carry a rag and jump out to 
wash windows of cars stopped in clogged roads. You eat what you find, and you 
do it with one arm free to defend yourself from the others.



If you have shoes, hide them while you sleep. Shoes mean makeshift sandals, 
mismatched sneakers and loafers scrounged from landfills, sewers or churches, 
ripped and never the right size.



On the street, you meet other children and look to find your new family, the 
people who look out for you, called a "cartel." Charline found hers among the 
older kids who slept under the benches in front of Haiti's National Palace, in 
Champs de Mars park.

She stood out among the others.

For one thing, she was a girl.

Ten years ago, street kids were mostly boys.

The girls came later, as the epidemic killed more mothers.

Charline showed up in clean clothes and then went home most nights to a mom. 
She was on the street, but not yet of the street, a big difference in Haiti.

She was not a kokorat, the name for kids who live on the street full time.

Charline:

"Sometimes the other kokorats ... used to beat me in the street. ...

[My friends] didn't want them to do any violence to me.

They were protecting me.

The other kokorats were jealous because people would like to give money to me 
because I really didn't look like a street kid yet.

When they asked me why I'm in the street begging, I'd tell people that my 
mother is sick and I'm looking for life to bring to her."



Just a generation ago, Haiti was a favorite exotic destination for the rich and 
the beautiful.

Mick Jagger, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Jackie Kennedy and Ari Onassis, 
Rockefellers, European aristocrats, American sports figures -- they were all 
regulars in Haiti's hotels and casinos.

The "Black Vienna," some called it.

The first officially identified case of AIDS in the Caribbean: 1982, in 
Jamaica.

In Haiti, it likely first came with tourists who visited so-called towel boys, 
sex workers who frequented the beaches.

The towel boys spread it to both boyfriends and girlfriends; the boyfriends, to 
both girlfriends and wives. The virus traveled along the well-worn paths of 
money and power in Haiti, carried by merchants, truck and tap-tap drivers, 
police and soldiers, traveling men with women in many towns.

The men fell first, in large numbers. The women and children followed.

Women like Charline's mother.

Charline says that she is chimére, slang for "I'm tough, don't mess with me."

So tough, it's the name used to describe Haiti's criminal gangs.

But not quite tough enough the day she takes a bad beating.

She is 7.

A policeman teases her, takes her money.

She cries.

The policeman takes pity, throws her more money, more than she's ever seen.

Then the kokorats jump her, punch her, take all her coins.

She cries more and runs to the street. A car stops.

Charline:

"A man came out and asked what was happening to me.

I told him how the other kokorat attacked me ...

He told me I should go talk to this woman in the car.

I did not want to go ... .

Very often people wanted to steal me because I was a nice girl.

People would always tell me that they wanted to take me to foreign lands ... .

I was afraid that this woman was going to take me away, and I'd never see my 
mother again."

Charline could have been a restavek, a child sold or sent off to relatives to 
work as a household slave.

She could have stayed on the street, become a prostitute, or maybe been sold 
and shipped over the border to the Dominican Republic.

Instead, she went to the woman in the car, a well-connected advocate for women 
and children, one of those unexplained angels sent to save lives.

Charline:

"I mustered my strength and walked over to the car and the woman ... .

She picked me up and sat me on her lap.

She asked me why I was in the street, and I was telling her all about my 
mother. ...

I told her that I hadn't brought my mother anything to eat for a while, that I 
had to go and see her.

And she bought clothes for me.

She bought me sandals."

Next Sunday: Charline's path takes her up the mountain to a new home, a new 
family, and some unsettling news.

Tim Collie can be reached at tcollie@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4573.


Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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