PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Living in a tent after an earthquake left a million Haitians in the streets, Melila Thelusma says she cannot support her two daughters and is ready to give them away to foreigners if she can find a good home for them.
Despite her desperation, Thelusma said she would never turn 11-year-old Gaelle and 6-year-old Christelle over to a Haitian family, as tens of thousands of other poor parents have done.
“Not a Haitian family. Haitians will make them suffer,” Thelusma, 39, said. “They … force the child to work like an 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 work without pay, isolated from other children in the household and seldom sent to school.
“A restavek is a child placed in domestic slavery,” said Jean-Robert Cadet, a former restavek who now runs a foundation to improve the lives of restavek children (www.restavekfreedom.org).
After the Jan. 12 earthquake, the Haitian government warned that child traffickers could take advantage of the ensuing chaos to prey on vulnerable children. The well-publicized drama surrounding 10 U.S. missionaries caught trying to spirit 33 children over the border seemed to reinforce the threat.
