30233: Durban (pub in UK): Haiti's Hidden 'child slaves' (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com> posts this BBC News item forwarded
by one of his firm's customers in the UK.  (P.S. I can't resist making
an observation at the end of the article)

Haiti's Hidden 'Child Slaves'
By Nick Caistor
Port-au-Prince, Haiti


Haiti was the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery, when it
won its independence in 1804 after a struggle led by Toussaint
Louverture. But thousands live a life of near-slave labour because of
poverty and social breakdown.


Jeanette is walking up a hill in Petionville, a district in the Haitian
capital, Port-au-Prince. She is carrying a huge blue drum full of water
on her head. Jeanette is only six, but has to walk 4km (2.4 miles)
every day to get the water from the public standpipe.

Jeanette was born in the countryside outside the small town of Hinche
in the north of the country. Her parents are among the poorest of the
poor in this country where more than half the population of 9m lives on
less than 50 US cents (£0.25) a day.

Her father one day told her she was going to stay with (French: rester
avec ) distant relatives in the Haitian capital. Ever since, Jeanette
has become one of the estimated 250,000 children used as near-slave
labour in Haiti.

"They are treated as less than cats and dogs," says Soeur Marthe, a
Belgian nun was has been working with the restavecs for several years
now.

"Their families have nothing to offer them, so they almost give them
away."

 We are deceiving ourselves if we say this is some kind of national
tradition. This is child slavery pure and simple
Margarett Lubin, IOM

Most of the children are employed as domestic servants, and often one
of their main tasks is to get water for the households in the city.
Less than a quarter of Port-au-Prince dwellings have running water on
the property: everyone else has to fetch it from public stand-pipes and
fountains, often kilometres away.

So Jeanette is dispatched each morning and evening to secure this
precious cargo. She also looks after the other children in the family,
cleans the house, and does all the laundry.

No documents

What she does not do is go to school, have time to play with friends,
or dare to hope that she will find proper employment one day.


Some local human rights groups are fighting to improve their situation.
Prospery Raymond works with the Maurice Sixto centres which have opened
in Port-au-Prince to try to give the restavecs some schooling, proper
food, and a sense that they too have rights.

"The big problem for them is that they have no official existence,"
says Raymond.

"They often don't have a birth certificate, or any proof of who they
are, and this makes them even more vulnerable to exploitation.

"We try to establish their identity, to get them into schools so that
they can pass exams and get out of the dreadful situation they find
themselves in."

This situation is often even worse when the restavecs reach the age of
15.

This is when by law they must be paid to work; and it is then that the
families either throw them out on the street or force them to continue
as unpaid domestics.

'Slavery pure and simple'

Until recently, the Haitian government did not acknowledge the scale of
the restavec problem. Some officials still argue that this is the
traditional way for poor rural families to help their children get on.

But as Margarett Lubin, who works with the International Organization
for Migration (IOM) in Port-au-Prince, says:

"We are deceiving ourselves if we say this is some kind of national
tradition. This is child slavery pure and simple."

Ms Lubin says that, according to Unicef, the numbers involved have
doubled in recent years, as poverty and political instability in the
countryside have become even worse.

She also points to an increasing traffic in children across the border
that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic in the east of the
island.

"Because economic conditions are better there, some Haitian parents
think they are helping their children get on if they are handed over to
agents who ferry them across the border," she says.

"But those kids have no rights at all in the Dominican Republic, and
they are often abused."

Although care for the restavecs in the cities is important, Ms Lubin
thinks the only solution is to go to the root of the problem, out in
the Haitian countryside:

"We need to show the poorest families that they have a duty to look
after their children - and we need to build schools in the countryside,
so that they have something to stay for."

----------------
Lance adds this comment:  The Restavec problem is hardly news to anyone
living in Haiti, but for anyone commuting down the LaBoule Road every
morning, it might be startling to consider that one of those little
kids toting water down from Tete de l'Eau might just be the 'Jeannette'
in this article.  Why CAMEP or SNEP or someone can't extend the public
pipe the few thousand yards down to the Morne Calvert cut-off is beyond
me.  Be a nice little project... infinitely more useful than the
dirt-pushing exercise undertaken daily by the yellow-shirted
Yele/USAID(?) street sweepers, IMO.