Mentoring Program Can Help End Child Slavery In Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE - Living in a tent after an earthquake left a million Haitians in the streets. One woman named Orena Joseph says she cannot support her three daughters and is ready to give them away to foreigners if she can't find a good home for them. Despite her desperation, Orena said she would never turn 11-year-old Betie and 6-year-old Gina over to a Haitian family, as tens of thousands of other poor parents have done. “Not a Haitian family. Haitians will make them suffer,” Orena 39, said. “They ... force the child to work like a animal. They don’t really take care of them.” Deeply ingrained in the culture of the impoverished former slave colony, the practice of poor families giving away children to wealthier acquaintances or relatives is known in the native Creole as “restavek,” from the French words rester avec, or “to stay with.” Critics call it slavery. The children, they said, are taken in as servants, forced to w...