Haitian Kids Face Abuse Working As Near Slaves

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — During his first few days as a live-in servant with an affluent family here, 11-year-old Dieusibon Delci thought he'd found paradise. Though he slept on the floor and worked from dawn to late evening, for the first time in his life he had enough to eat.

Then the matron of the house began striking him in the head with hot, cast-iron pans to make him work harder. When he nodded off one day while washing dishes, she slammed a gigantic pot filled with boiling oil on his left hand, smashing his fingers.

"She kept beating me and telling me to work more," whispered Dieusibon, whose left fingers are fused at the knuckles and whose temple is flat and shiny from repeated blows.

After two years of abuse, Dieusibon ran away from his keepers. But nearly a tenth, most of them from impoverished families, continue to work for nothing but room and board in the homes of relatives or strangers.

Haitians call the children restaveks, a Creole term from the French phrase rester avec ("to stay with"). Human-rights and labor organizations call them slaves.

"At the least, most of these children don't receive the schooling or care that they should," said Merrie Archer, senior policy associate for the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, who recently co-wrote a blistering report on the restavek phenomenon. "And many are subjected to physical, emotional and sexual abuse."

Haitians, particularly in the countryside, have sent their children to live and work with wealthier families since the 18th-century colonial era. But with four-fifths of the country's 8 million people struggling to survive on less than a dollar a day, the practice continues to flourish — a bitter irony to many observers, given that Haitian slaves two centuries ago ousted the French and established the world's first black republic.

"The very slaves who fought for independence wanted to live as their former masters had, so they took the children of those who were even poorer and enslaved them," said Jean-Robert Cadet, a teacher at the University of Cincinnati whose 1998 memoir, "Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American," helped focus attention on the issue.

As a restavek three decades ago, Cadet said, his masters beat him with the same kind of leather whip the French used on slaves. "To be a restavek is to be an untouchable, the ultimate have-not in a society of have-nots," Cadet said.

An estimated 300,000 children who are 14 or younger work as restaveks, and a fifth of those are younger than 12, according to the National Coalition on Haitian Rights. The group's report, like many studies, accuses Haitian authorities of doing little to combat the problem. Officials counter that they are doing the best they can with few resources in what is the hemisphere's poorest country.

Many restaveks work for Haitian families that aren't wealthy enough to pay for servants and who often aren't much better off than the children's parents. Still, many Haitians believe the children will fare better than at home.

"The lady who took them told me she'd treat them well," said Rosanna Saint-Hilaire, a widow who in the past six years sold two of her nine children to a restaurant owner here for the equivalent of $60 apiece.

The children, both boys, were 11 and 8 years old when she sold them. "Anyway," she added, her lips tightening, "I had to sell them because otherwise, I had no way to feed the rest of my children."

Meanwhile, Saint-Hilaire's two restavek sons said they'd been forced to work 19-hour days scrubbing and lugging 25-pound jugs of water at the restaurant before they fled. Val Michelet, 17, ran away three years ago and helped his brother, Robinson Joseph, 11, escape this year. They now live at Haitian Street Kids, a shelter for homeless boys in Port-au-Prince.

"Mostly, all she fed us was the burned crust from the rice pots. She beat us every day with a wire cable," Val said of the restaurant owner.

The two boys slept on a dirt-floor porch with no mattress or blankets. The restaurant owner's two young sons would urinate on them during the night, the youths said. In the morning, Val and Robinson had to take those same sons to school.

After dropping the children at school, Val and Robinson had to return to work. Three-fourths of restaveks don't attend school, according to a 1998 study by Haiti's Psychological-Social Institute of the Family.

Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former parish priest, last year called the restavek phenomenon "one of the cancers on our social body in Haiti that keep democracy from growing."

Still, Haitian law lets children work as domestics from age 12 and doesn't require them to be paid until they are 15. A government hot line to report abuses against restaveks and other children is understaffed, making follow-ups on complaints minimal.

Government officials said they are working on education and rural-development projects and also have started a program to help return restaveks to their families of origin.

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company