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'Life Is Tough': Children in Domestic Labor in Haiti |
| Section: CULTURE / PEOPLES |
| Author: Barbara McClatchie Andrews |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2004 |
| Size: 2,725 Words, 16,491 Characters |
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Nehemie is dressed in a red T-shirt and short skirt. Her clothes are faded but clean. Around her neck she wears a metal cross. She sits quietly, gathered into herself, a watchful expression on her face. She is small and, were it not for this sense of wariness, she would look younger than her thirteen years. Nehemie has come to talk to me about her life. It is not a happy story.
Her account would be all-too-familiar to a quarter of a million young Haitian women, many much younger than she. Nehemie is a restavek, an undocumented, unpaid, unprotected, live-in child worker. A de facto slave.
She gets up at 6:00 a.m. to light the cooking fire and prepare breakfast--most often a cornmeal gruel--for her "family." Afterward she accompanies the three younger of the family's six children to their school. The streets in Cité Soleil are not considered safe. The week before our interview, in the sort of occurrence for which the slum has a reputation, eighteen young men died in a gang war. Returning to the house, while the children are out, Nehemie picks up their used clothes and washes them in a basin of cold water placed on the floor. Later she will press the garments with an iron that has been heated with coals from the charcoal brazier on which she cooks.
She washes the dishes in the same basin and sweeps the floor. This is a task she repeats many times a day because dust permeates everything in Port-au-Prince. Every day Nehemie must also walk several blocks to the water depot. There she will hoist a five-gallon can of water onto her head in order to carry it home. This should be enough for the household's daily supply, bu...
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..., "but there are no funds."
A Haitian proverb says deye mon gen mon ("behind mountains, more mountains"), and so it seems with the issue of the restavek children. The problem is socially complex and economically challenging. With each apparent solution, a new problem seems to arise. While the problem solvers struggle with the uphill battle, Haiti's restavek children remain children at risk.
(1,667 of 16,491 characters)
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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