"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,
rocking and shifting her legs at the memory. "They wanted to mark me so that I
would remember."
Sent to the slums of the Haitian capital when she was 9 years old 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.
See
also Of Haitian Bondage-Response to New York Times' article
Lately,
foreign relief workers and Roman Catholic charities 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 the
Rev. 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 loft for sleeping
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 visits the keepers' homes to urge them 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 separating the hovels.
The children, called restaveks - from the French rester avec, meaning to stay
with - are not servants of the wealthy but of those 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.
'There
are no limits'
"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.
They're not just slaves to the parents but to the patrons' children as well."
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A report in June 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 children younger than 12 and that
education reforms were under way 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 the Social Affairs Office, charged with registering unpaid domestic workers,
acknowledges that there has been no enforcement.
The plight of the children is heart-rending to people 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."
'An
act of solidarity'
Restaveks
first appeared in the capital in the 1920s and 1930s, 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.
As the
gap between rich and poor widened drastically in recent decades, ragged 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 prospect
of an education draws many children to Port-au-Prince, Cap Haitian and other urban
centers, although few people who take in restaveks - paying the cost of their
transportation and 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.
Jeanty acknowledges that aid projects such as the Sixto program are probably helping
only about 1 percent of the children.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
