Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince

GINA AND LIANS

Gina—41, codirector, SOFALAM
Lians—34, codirector, SOFALAM

SOFALAM is a center focused on supporting young street girls and their children in Port-au-Prince.¹ Many of the girls Gina and Lians work with have been restaveks, an informal system of de facto slavery that involves the importation of young children, mostly girls, from more rural areas of Haiti to work without pay or protection in Port-au-Prince homes, often in exchange for education.² Restaveks regularly run away from their host homes, or they are kicked out when they are no longer needed or become pregnant. Whether as refugees from a restavek situation or otherwise, the girls who end up on the streets of Port-au-Prince are often young, uneducated, and likely to turn to prostitution to survive. Gina and Lians try to help.

GINA

We work with homeless girls. There are two categories of those girls. Some of them are from the streets. That’s all they know. They grew up there, and ate and slept on the streets. There are others, restaveks, who are only recently in the streets. The restaveks are children that someone—an aunt, a friend, a stranger—took from their home in the province promising them a home and care. But once they get to the city, the child becomes that person’s personal and free maid. Sometimes they run away and live on the streets. There really isn’t much difference between the ones who grew up on the streets and the kids who ended up there.

We take the girls and bring them to SOFALAM. We have specialists, like psychologists, who work with them. We teach them for three years before putting them in schools with other children outside of the center. We have a small school inside the center where we work to get them caught up before they go outside to school. The work varies by whether they went to school before or not. We help the ones who didn’t go to school at all to learn a few things to increase the likelihood of them getting registered to school. In Haiti, the older you get, the harder it becomes to get into school, even if it’s night school.³ When we’re done teaching them, we register them to a public school since our funding isn’t enough for private school. After they finish sixth grade, we look for their biological parents in the province they came from and try to reunite them.

In 1994, the lady who started this project, Kettely Marseille, realized that among the many centers they had in Port-au-Prince, none of them were for girls, only for boys. The other centers used to say that they didn’t want girls because they’re more difficult, and they could get pregnant while at the center. However, Kettely was touched by the state these girls were in and decided to create a center for them, the first one of its kind. It was an open center at the beginning. The girls could come and sleep, and the center’s workers would be paid extra to stay overnight with them.

The first center was CAFA⁴ and we have SOFALAM founded in 2002. Kettely said that she wasn’t going to be there forever. So when she started getting old, some of the girls who benefited from CAFA created SOFALAM to continue with her work.

LIANS

I was at CAFA. I was in the streets. My family didn’t have much when I was a child. My mother was very poor and my father died when I was six. There were five of us children, my two sisters, my two brothers, and I. When my mother died, we became orphans, and the parks near the presidential palace became our home. We stayed alive because of the good graces of people. There were many girls like me at those parks. We were divided into clans. I didn’t have anyone to talk to me and guide me, so I fell into some wrong crowds.

In 1994, Mrs. Kettely opened her center and asked some of us to come and help keep the place clean. We used to go every day, Monday to Friday. What most attracted us in the center was that it was better than where we were in the streets. The police used to come and arrest us all the time at the park. They used to ask us about street criminals —if we told them we didn’t know anything, they would beat or molest us before letting us go.

At CAFA, we received classes on manners, and it helped us in our situation. After that I said to myself that I would never raise my children on the street. When I became pregnant at sixteen, some of us decided to create the SOFALAM center. We approached Mr. Peterson about it—he used to help Kettely and he agreed to write projects and grants for us. He helped me find a place to rent at Carrefour-Feuilles.⁵

We chose to do this work because we know some young people like us who, after leaving CAFA, went back to the street. They gave birth on the street, and their children are growing up on the street. So SOFALAM decided that we would maintain a cradle for these children. We keep these children so their mothers can have time to either have a little business or look for a job without sending their children to work for another family.

The restavek system is real slavery.

GINA

The economy is the main reason. Most of the time what feeds the restavek system is the difficult times that many people encounter in the provinces. Their house is overpopulated with children, and they can’t feed them. I must say, however, that’s what people in the provinces think, but many times, they are better off than a lot of people in Port-au-Prince. They can find any roots or peas to eat, but they think that if the child doesn’t come to the city they won’t go to school. The government is to blame for this. Often when a child finishes the sixth grade at school in the provinces, her parents are unable to find any public school to continue the education.⁶ So they send her to the city. Sometimes, it’s with a family member, but I’d say 90 percent of the time it’s with a stranger. It can be confusing because when you meet them and ask them who they live with, they often say an aunt, which should be their mother or father’s sister. But when you ask, you find out that this aunt most of the time is not even related to the child.

LIANS

For example, say I live in Port-au-Prince and I want a restavek. I would take the bus to Jérémie, or Cap-Haïtien, or Bouvier. These places have many children whose parents would be willing to give them away in order to make sure they get an education.

GINA

You’ll find children also in Saint-Michel.

LIANS

Yes. So many places. And if you take a bus to Jacmel, not far away you’ll find a little town called Seguin. That little town contains some of the poorest people of the country. And so many children! And when they see someone in a pretty dress coming into town, they don’t even care who the person is, they’ll start giving their children away.

GINA

They are usually promised school and food.

LIANS

Yes, and most of the time, they don’t get either one. They wake them up at 2 in the morning when there’s electricity for them to iron clothes. If they have babies, they will wake up the child to take care of the baby instead of taking care of their own child. They have to also cook. They have to mop. They will get spanked if they don’t do these things even if they don’t know how to do them. They usually don’t go to school. You see, the parents, they think that their children are better off, but they are in a far worse situation. When the girls can’t take it anymore, they run off to the streets. Some are as young as six, seven years old and others are as old as fourteen, fifteen years old.

LIANS

Here’s an example of a common problem. If I’m a woman, I may get a child to help me out in the house. However, I’m not always in the house, and the man I live with, if he’s a bad person, might molest or rape that child when I’m not home. It could also be my brother or my son—or all of them.

GINA

We have a lot of cases like that at the center. A lot of them become pregnant and then they send them away.

LIANS

Some of them also catch H.I.V. or syphilis. And when they don’t have anyone providing for them, sometimes they become prostitutes. When they come to the center, they immediately get tested for H.I.V. Some of them have children who also are infected. We take those children and get them cared for. We also educate them on the disease. We let them know it’s not as bad as they think it is if they get treated.

Some of them think that they’ll never get out of the streets, but we share our stories with them. We show them that there’s a way out. We saved many of them like that. A lot of them decided to go back home or to a family member. We always go visit them after that. I have some of them in La Saline near me. I always go visit them and talk to them.

GINA

Unfortunately, we’re going through a financial crisis right now. We don’t receive the resources we used to receive anymore. We’re not sure if they stopped because of the new government in place. Right now, we can’t even feed the children. It’s hard. That’s why we’re looking for other sources for funding right now. Emaner Suisse helped us before. UNICEF used to help a little when it comes to health. Save the Children used to help with education.⁷ However, they all stopped. We’ve had to reduce to fifty children because of the situation. We try. We write grant after grant, but still the money isn’t there anymore.