Is there hope for the lost children of Haiti?
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: There is an effort to train up to 250 people with skills to help reunite "lost" children like Sterling with their families...
Every two months on a Saturday, it’s Parents Day at the Les Maison des Enfants de Dieu (House of the Children of God) orphanage, in the Delmas section of Port-au-Prince. That’s where we found Yzener and Sylla Fanon visiting their 2-year-old twins, Stephanie and Stephane. The twins share a tent with other infants. The young married couple, only 21 and 19 years old, and devoutly religious, didn’t think it would end like this ay. Everything changed on January 12.
In Haiti, on the radio and in daily conversations, no one even calls it “tremblement de terre” (earthquake). They just call it “bagay-la”, in Creole, “the thing”, because no one can find the words to describe the destruction it caused and the chaos that has come into their lives.
For the Fanons, their infant twins are now part of a system of care, that seems to run parallel to traditional family structures. Just calling the institutions orphanages and the children orphans is a false starter to so many assumptions about children in Haiti. Assumptions that got the 10 Baptist missionaries from the Idaho church into a world of trouble.
Centers like Les Maison des Enfants, which has 171 “orphans”, are technically known as “centres d’accueil”, centers for the care of children. There are hundreds of them operating in Port au Prince, a large number of which are illegal and unlicensed. According to UNICEF as many as 80 percent of the children in all the centers actually have 1 or 2 parents.
The centers have become repositories of care in a society that is so impoverished, that the family structure in Haiti has been fractured. Yzener and Sylla lost their home in the quake and are among the 1.2 million Haitians now homeless, living in makeshift tents camps or in the street. They live under a tarp in an alleyway, in almost subhuman conditions. Living in an alley off Georgia Avenue, would be better off than living amidst the waste and disease we saw. They brought their children to the center in February.
Yzener wants to plan for the future and wants to find a job. He wants to be a journalist. Johanna is traumatized both by the quake, and by not having her children at her side. Out of compassion, the center allows them to visit the twins, though the director candidly admits that by year’s end they’ll probably be adopted.
For children’s rights advocates like Marie de la Soudiere, who is a UNICEF consultant, this should not be the solution. “When the own family of the child wants that child but says please take the child because I dont have a sack of rice a month and you dont only have a sack of rice but you have many, and a house, and cars, and a TV, and you say I deserve this child because I have money. You dont deserve your child because you dont have. Actually this is a message that is unfortunately being given too often right now.”
[NBCVIDEO source=”UNIWGT” video=”http://wgtclsp.nbcuni.com/o/4a784acd2b1a7e80/4ba90f160fecd001/29stxd1cWsRdSZkQM1RVKiIDAAZD/e0e6a91e/-cpid/8fb7148a4c7c39cd” w=”400″ h=”400″ id=”W4a784acd2b1a7e804ba90f160fecd001″]
In an allusion to the actions of the American missionaries who were detained for trying to escort a busload of children out of Haiti, she’s especially critical of those exploiting a situation when it’s in a moment of chaos. “In this kind of emergency. where there’s not enough food, not enough shelter, parents are very worried about what’s going to happen tomorrow, whether theyll be moved somewwhere else, schools are not open yet. Many of them want the child but perhaps they can’t care for the child. For a small amount of something, it’s our duty to give that small amount instead of thinking we have a lot so the child belongs to us.” Adoption she says, should only be a last option for pursuing what’s in the best interests of the child. Because the poverty in Haiti is so stifling for family development and the government is barely functional in the best of times, the adoption course has sometimes outpaced any effort to develop a policy addressing the matter of saving the Haitian family.
Yzener and Johanna say, if either of them had a job, or a place to call their own home, they would take the twins back the next day. Alexis the director says this is also the reality for the parents who have given their children to the center. “If we can give them jobs, they will take them back. This is the best situation for the children to stay with their real families. We are obligated to find families for them becasue their real families cant take care of them, but if the chld can stay with the real family, that’s the best way.”
The quake only made things more acute for children. By UNICEF estimates, at least 10,000 children were separated from their parents by the confusion caused by “bagay-la”. They are now at risk, because they are technically without any identity, and could be picked off the street, placed in “orphanages” or worse. The story of Sterling, which we recently aired on NBC’s “Nightly News”, told the story of a 6 year old girl, who was coaxed by Marie into remembering key things about where she used to live, after she was found lost in the streets after the quake. She was only reunited with her family 6 weeks later.
WATCH THE NBC NIGHTLY NEWS SEGMENT ON STERLING HERE:
[MSNBCMSN video=”http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640″ w=”592″ h=”346″ launch_id=”35652930″ id=”msnbc16b071″]
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
