Buried in the rubble of the latest immense tragedy of Haiti are also the ‘restavek’ – or ‘restavec’ from French ‘reste avec’ i.e. ‘stay with’ – a small population of over 225,000 children of families so poor that they are forced to give them up, sending them to live and serve families a little less poor, just to be able to feed them. Various reports and surveys were published in the past years to denounce what many consider a serious social scourge by the Pan-American Development Foundation (PADF), specifying that two-thirds of these “new little slaves” are girls between the ages of 6 and 12. “The restavek is the first to wake in the morning, works from 12 to 16 hours a day and doesn’t go to school; the restavek has to do jobs of all sorts: fetch water, clean and reorganise the house, go to the market and take the other children to school though he/she doesn’t attend. The restavek can be beaten (there is a type of whip considered particularly handy for this use), injured and even killed”, indicates a report of PADF entitled “Lost Childhoods”. The recruiting of these children, many reduced in conditions of actual slavery – specifies the report – is a result of the extreme poverty of wide sectors of the population, in a country where between 70 and 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. It is not difficult to imagine that the quake will worsen the conditions of the restavek that survived and increase the number.
[BO]