2023-06-13 06:22:02
SAINT-LOUIS-DU-SUD, Haiti (AP) — Mylouise Veillard was 10 years old when her mother left her in an orphanage in southern Haiti, promising her a better life. For three years, Ella Mylouise slept on a concrete floor. When she was thirsty, she would walk to a community well and carry heavy buckets of water herself. Food was scarce, and she lost weight. She feared for her younger brother, who suffered even more than her at the center.
It’s a familiar story among the approximately 30,000 Haitian children who live in hundreds of orphanages scarred by reports of forced labor, trafficking, and physical and sexual abuse. In recent months, the Haitian government has redoubled efforts to remove hundreds of these children and reunite them with their parents or relatives in a major effort to close the institutions, the vast majority of which are private.
Social workers lead the charge, sometimes armed only with a photo and a vague description of where the child lived before. It is an arduous task in a country of more than 11 million people without landline telephone listings and where many families do not have a physical address or fingerprint.
“They’re almost like detectives,” said Morgan Wienberg, co-founder and CEO of Little Footprints, Big Steps, one of several nonprofit organizations that help reunite children with their families. “It certainly requires a lot of persistence.”
Social workers tour cities and towns. They climb hills, search labyrinths of tin-roofed shacks, and knock on doors. With a smile, they hold up a photo and ask if anyone recognizes the boy.
They discover that some orphanages moved children without notifying their parents, or families were forced to flee violence in their community and lost contact with their children.
Social worker Jean Rigot Joseph says he sometimes shows children photos of recognizable buildings to see if they remember where they lived. If he locates the parents, he first determines if they are open to a reunification before revealing that he has found their son.
Like more than 80% of children in orphanages in Haiti, Veillard and his brother were considered “orphans of poverty.” Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and around 60% of the population earn less than two dollars a day. When parents cannot afford to feed their children, they temporarily send them to orphanages where they believe they will be better cared for.
“When parents give their children up to orphanages, they don’t really see it as giving them up forever,” Wienberg explained.
Some 30,000 children of the roughly 4 million living in the country live in some 750 orphanages across the country, according to government figures. Many were built after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed at least 200,000 people. In the months that followed, the number of orphanages in Haiti skyrocketed by 150%, leading to increased trafficking, forced labor and abuse.
A 2018 report by the Haitian Institute for Research and Social Welfare and other organizations found that just 35 of the 754 orphanages – less than 5% – met minimum standards and were authorized to operate. At the other extreme, 580 centers scored the lowest, implying that the government had to order their closure.
In response to the report, the Haitian government has prohibited the construction of new orphanages and the closure of several that already exist. But closing orphanages can be dangerous. Officials have received threats or been forced into hiding because the owners want the generous donations from abroad to keep coming. One of the main sources of donations for orphanages in Haiti are American religious communities, according to Lumos, a nonprofit group that works to reunite children from orphanages around the world with their families.
There is no group or association that represents orphanages in Haiti, as the vast majority are privately owned.
Housing is a must for children whose parents cannot feed them or protect them from violence, said Sister Paesie, who founded the religious organization Kizito Family in Port-au-Prince. The institution houses and offers free education to some 2,000 children from impoverished villages.
“The idea is to get them out of the violence,” he said, and parents are invited to visit.
Gangs control up to 80% of Port-au-Prince, according to the United Nations, and have been blamed for a rise in murders and kidnappings, especially in areas where the Kizito Family children come from.
Sister Paesie condemned orphanages associated with the profitable business of adoptions.
“It gives rise to a lot of abuse instead of trying to help parents, like we always try to do,” he said.
But reuniting children with their parents is difficult when they have fled violence and are homeless, she said.
“In the last month I have seen many mothers sleeping on the streets with their children,” she said. “I have dozens of mothers who ask me every day to take their children in because they don’t have food to give them.”
Reunification efforts have been successful in more rural parts of the country where gangs do not have as much power and families can grow their own food.
In the rural south of Haiti, some 330 children have returned to their families. When the day came for Mylouise, now 17, and her brother, they were so excited they ran out of the orphanage and left their sandals behind, recalled Renèse Estève, her mother.
They met with Estève, his new partner, their new daughter and other siblings in a one-room house at the foot of a mountain, where people grow corn, potatoes and vetiver, a plant whose oil is used in luxury perfumes.
Wienberg’s nonprofit organization built Estève’s house as part of a campaign to help families avoid financial hardship after reunification and prevent another separation. Other initiatives include hiring an agronomist to help families grow crops to eat or sell, amid skyrocketing inflation that has deepened poverty for Haitians.
There are only two small beds in the house, and two of the children sleep on the floor. Near the beds, the children have their only toys: a small moose and a stuffed bear, a Hello Kitty bag and a “Black Panther” lunch box.
Estève said that leaving the children at the orphanage was painful, although he did visit them occasionally. He did not have a job or a partner to help care for and feed them. During his visits, the children told him that they were not well and asked for food. Estève herself had trouble eating, and she thought of hers two children of hers.
“At times I thought about committing suicide,” he said.
One day, scared by the weight the children had lost, she decided to take them with the help of social workers. She was convinced that they would be better off in extreme poverty than in the orphanage.
A key to reunification efforts are mentors like Eluxon Tassy, 32, who works with children living on the streets, in orphanages or in transition preparing to return home.
“I understand exactly what they are going through,” he explained.
He was four years old when his mother left him in an orphanage on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where he lived for almost 15 years. He said he, too, was forced to spend two years with a family that exploited him as a child domestic worker, a figure known in Haiti as a restavek. He never went to school, despite the family’s promises to enroll him in exchange for him cleaning the house and taking care of the farm animals.
Tassy’s priority when helping children manage the transition back home is building confidence. She uses art and music, and sings the alphabet with the little ones. She asks how they feel about the orphanage, but she is careful not to question them too much.
Sometimes you have to explain the concept of family and the importance of affection, if a child does not remember his parents or has spent too much time away from them.
In Estève’s case, her children reconnected with her almost immediately. To celebrate, she prepared two meals that day: the traditional Haitian breakfast with spaghetti and, later, rice and beans with fish sauce.
“It was easy,” he said. “We were a family again.”
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