OTHER CHILDREN

Hungry Haitian kids turn to crime

Homeless boys who sleep in the trampled shrubbery surrounding St. Peter’s Church used to earn their daily plate of rice and beans from a man they call Papa, a surly vagrant who carries a rock in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

The phone doesn’t ring much these days with assignments for the street kids, who earned a few gourdes for dragging chunks of cinderblock into the road to form a barricade in former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s defense, or torching a pile of tires to turn away traffic. For now, at least, the odd jobs of destruction have disappeared. “We don’t eat every day now,” said 12-year-old Robinson Cherie. “We have to beg more now, and wash car windshields. When we get enough money to buy food is when we eat.”

Boys such as Robinson abound in the slums and shantytowns that sprawl along the mucky shallows of the Caribbean and up the eroded hillsides of this Port-au-Prince suburb perched above the sea. These lost, homeless boys number in the hundreds of thousands — some orphaned, others abandoned, all vulnerable to gangland recruiters such as Papa simply because they need to eat.

Long outside the humanitarian relief network, the boys are not even counted among the half of Haiti’s 8.5 million people with chronic malnutrition. Unlike the malnourished children whose mothers take them to neighborhood clinics for monthly weighing and meager rations of rice, corn and beans, the plight of the street kids goes unrecorded.

But their abuse at the hands of those with the power to buy sustenance illustrates the depth of desperation in this nation where food has long been an instrument of control. The boys and their hunger remain a weapon in the hands of anyone willing to feed them.

Aristide’s Lavalas Party was believed to have paid the tab for strategic feeding of these legions of uneducated youths. Before Lavalas, support came from the brutal Tontons Macoutes secret police that enforced the Duvalier dictatorship. Who will next bankroll the feedings — be they politicians, gangsters or drug dealers — remains to be seen. But manipulation through food will continue to determine the quality of life on the streets among the poor whose allegiance is often a function of how full their stomachs are.

Jean-Daniel Jean-Baptiste, who was brought north from Jacmel to the roiling capital and dumped here when he was 9, is typical of the homeless youths lured into political enforcement gangs. Small for his 11 years, he says he never understood why Papa wanted them to set fires and build barricades.

“We just wanted the money so we could eat,” said the boy, who still nurtures hope his own father will one day come to find him.

Jean-Daniel and his friends from the church courtyard all lost their mothers years ago and landed in the capital when traffickers — some would call them slave traders — brought them from the impoverished countryside to earn money to send home to their fathers and siblings. Unable to find work in a country suffering almost 70 percent unemployment, the children scrape together an existence by begging, running errands or inflicting political disruption.

The boys spend their wages of 10 or 20 gourdes (25-50 cents) on a daily bread roll and fried plantains or a dish of rice and beans, all hawked from battered street carts by women nearly as poor as their child patrons.

Most Western aid workers were urged by their governments to leave Haiti in mid-February, when armed rebels seized control of the northern half of the country and threatened to march on the capital unless Aristide resigned and left the country. Although some projects are likely to be revived in coming weeks if a tenuous calm takes hold, food production at isolated plantations, fish farms and orchards is likely to be reduced by the security delays and disruptions.

With prices for scarce food on the rise and wages disappearing for those on the social fringes, all 23 health centers in Port-au-Prince monitored by the World Food Program were reporting a drastic increase in demand for aid since Aristide’s Feb. 29 departure, said Alejandro Chicheri, public information officer for the U.N. agency in Haiti.
 

By Carol J. Williams
22 April 2004
 

http://www.detnews.com/2004/nation/0404/20/a08-127956.htm

home / Previous feature