By Dady Chery

Haiti Chery

“There are no orphans in Haiti!”

“Come again?”

my friend Jordan murmurs after a long silence on the other end of the line.

He is thinking I lost my senses. I realize how I sound. Someone else might imagine that I am ignorant of the extreme poverty in which most Haitians live, but Jordan and I have known each other almost 30 years.

“OK. I did not mean that there are no orphans. Of course, many Haitian children lose their parents. But in Haiti, children are never abandoned. Our families are very extended. When a child cannot be cared for by a living parent or becomes orphaned, a grandparent, aunt, uncle, sibling, cousin, or some other relative, adopts the child. If after the child becomes a teenager the family still cannot care for her, she is placed with a more prosperous family well known to the parent – often the home of a godparent.”

“Oh?”

There is no quick way to explain to this close black-American friend with no direct knowledge of Haiti, the customs of Haitian families. Would he understand, for example, that women routinely adopt and love the children born by the poorer mistresses of their unfaithful husbands? Two of my close cousins come from such arrangements. I could tell him too that a terrible Haitian insult is to be called a “sanmanman”. There is no equivalent word in any other language I know. The literal translation is “motherless”, but it refers to a person who is such a degenerate that no one would mother him or, depending on context, someone who has known no love and is so cut off from his origins to have sunk to the depths of depravity.

Instead I say:

“Jordan, look at the picture I sent you of the little kids strapped into the airplane seats, would you? How is it that every child who had the good luck to be adopted was also not harmed by the earthquake? Every pervert, grifter and religious fanatic is in Haiti packing his load of little children to Utah, Pennsylvania, France, and Holland. These kids have families!”

Within 24 hours and in separate incidents, several men are hanged by irate Haitian families for attempting to snatch their children, and the Haitian Prime Minister, feeling the prevailing wind, declares a moratorium on the removal of children from the country. The swift and categorical response of angry Haitians to the removal of their children hardly registers in the foreign press, except for a derisive article which suggests that vodouist Haitians believe their children to be fodder for werewolves.

Jordan calls me again.

“I get it. I saw the news.” He starts, with characteristic economy.

He is referring to a widely broadcast interview in which the prime minister explained that Haiti’s children are well-known prey to organ traffickers and other predators.

“Why are there so many orphanages in Haiti, if the children have families? And why are all the adoptive parents white?” Jordan asks, bewildered.

“This will take a while to explain. Have you heard of Australia’s Stolen Children?”

I promise him a longer chat in the coming weekend.

One cannot talk about orphaned Haitian children without confronting two highly controversial and interwoven subjects: Vodou and restavek. Both are part of the very fabric of the Haitian family, which is currently under vicious attack.

The word Vodou means God, but a supreme god, indifferent to human affairs and utterly inaccessible. On the other hand, the pantheon of Vodou includes many elemental spirits, some of them similar to the Greek gods. Gods are temperamental, as gods are apt to be, and so one learns to keep one’s promises.

“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius.
Please, don’t forget to pay the debt.”

The analogy to Greece only goes so far.  The Vodou god of death, for instance, is a lewd prankster.  Love is manifested in several Ezulis.  Ezuli Freda is the flirt who can make a grown man blush and Ezuli Danto the mother-warrior who can make him tremble.  Danto is partial to griot, a Haitian twice-cooked pork delicacy.  In fact, without exception, our gods eat local fare.  They are mostly black, though at least two are white.  Larger-than-life personalities and respected family members can acquire the status of gods.  Trees have spirits.  There are no proscriptions about sex.  On Saturday nights, one dances with one’s gods if one feels so inclined.  This extraordinarily joyful religion has stuck a craw in the designs of imperialists for centuries.  It is not the sort of authoritarian and infantilizing religion one can easily subvert into the worship of a king.  Vodou is so entwined with Haitian life that most of its practitioners do not know that their innocent customs, such as their prayers to their ancestors, or the offering of their first yucca crops to their communities in a celebration of their harvests, is a part of a religion.

The informal system of adoption I described earlier, especially the case where a child is placed in the home of a more prosperous, though unrelated, family is the restavek (to stay with) system. This system, which is well on its way to becoming as vilified as Vodou, is now a pretext for calling Haitians slavers even while they are being enslaved and their children are being stolen. In reality, this is a system that, for hundreds of years, has safeguarded young Haitians from the depredations of foreigners. The restavek system is profoundly subversive in that it intimately binds Haitians of varying socioeconomic classes.

But enough polemic. Let me tell you a story.

On my bedroom wall, near a mirror in which I look every day to apply my make up, hangs a picture frame with the photos of my mothers. Each of the six ovals within that frame holds the image of a woman who has braided my hair, clothed, fed, sheltered, taught, and disciplined me. For the purposes of this story, I will mention only two: my biological mother and Angelia.

Mom was a restavek in her paternal grandparent’s house starting at age ten. This arrangement was brokered by her mother who could only support three younger children, a paternal grandmother who felt responsible for her playboy son’s damages, and a maternal grandmother who lived in the same city, kept an eye on the girl, and furnished her books and uniforms for school. Such an agreement between women for the care of a child is typical of a restavek situation. No money is ever exchanged. The child is usually a teenage girl who knows well who her mother is and has family members in the same city.

The main objective of Super p force under the guidance cialis prescription of a good doctor. It generally involves unica-web.com cialis without prescription counselling as well as psychological support to those who are going through a difficult phase in life. The government have also intervened with the view that drugstore best prices on cialis distribution and selling of anti ED medicines. It is also known that Kamagra works safely to turn erectile functions ON and getting one ready to play the game in the bed. viagra overnight no prescription For my mother, this arrangement was not without its emotional scars. Her father and paternal grandmother were cold to her. The grandmother strictly held the young girl to her obligations to do light work around the house, recalling her from school sometimes to clean the dishes or make the family’s beds. On the other hand, the girl’s young cousins treated her as a sister. Her paternal grandfather, on pretext of going blind, instructed the girl in a complete classical education by a daily regime of reading and music. The girl became a phenomenon at school – ever first in her class. Though she was adopted by an aunt when her mother died four years later, her relationship with her grandfather and cousins continued to be a loving one. At seventeen, she graduated at the top of her high school class and was immediately assigned to a job as a teacher in a neighboring city. She took along her aging maternal grandmother and cared for her from then on. As my Mom’s fortunes waxed and waned, she helped Auntie to support her younger siblings or came to live with her. Yes, “Deye mon, genyen mon” (Beyond the mountains, more mountains). In Haiti, things are never so simple as they appear. All that I know of Oswald Durand, CLR James, Joseph-Antenor Firmin, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bach, or Beethoven, among many, comes from my mother by way of her shrewd and loving grandfather.

Such an education was nothing much, compared to what I learned from Angelia, one of Auntie’s (my great aunt) god-daughters, who came to live with us as a restavek when she was sixteen and I was seven.

For one, Angelia was extraordinarily beautiful. In all my life, I have only seen one other woman who looked like her, and I nearly ran into that stranger’s arms thinking her to be Angelia. Angelia’s hair was red as corn silk though kinkier than mine, and her full lips and bold nose were unmistakably those of a black woman.

Another fascinating aspect of Angelia is that she could make things, and she often acted on a whim: like the day she decided to reduce a mixture of milk, sugar, and an assortment of spices into my idea of heaven, or the spring she planted a vegetable garden, gave me my own peas, and awakened in me the idea that I could grow things. To my young mind, it seemed that everything Angelia needed, she could make. She was a seamstress and master embroiderer, who, in a few days, could turn a plain square of linen into a summer dress hemmed with a flower garden. When she needed oil for her hair, she would simply collect some seeds and press them.

By far the most marvelous aspect of Angelia was her storytelling. I never understood what impelled to tell her tales; but on some nights, if the stars were right and the spirits moved her, she would make me cry about the tragic friendship between a fish who lived in a spring and a girl who collected her water there, or she would make me cheer a girl’s power to sing an orange tree to life and make it grow up toward the sky, or down into the ground, to protect it from the greed of her stepmother. There were many other stories, riddles, and jokes — all about rural life. Then there were the rare times when she would turn into a god or goddess for an evening. I did not realize, until more than a decade later, that this was Vodou practice. I fell in love with Haiti because of Angelia.

In exchange for her room and board, Angelia’s job in our household was to cook a daily lunch and launder the family’s clothes. This was hard work, for sure, but it left her plenty of time for her creative outlets. Her job also involved keeping the house clean: relatively light work forty years ago, when the contents of a house were spare, and garbage collection was not yet a concept known to Haitians. Food was sold by passing vendors, and everything uneaten was fed to the neighborhood goats and pigs.

Though Angelia was a displaced teenager, her relationship with Auntie was surprisingly warm, at least at the start. Its first serious test came when an army man requested Angelia’s hand in marriage. Auntie categorically refused, declaring the man to be of bad character. Angelia in turn accused Auntie of holding her back for her labor. Even so, she did not elope. I think she loved the family too much to make a permanent break.

The most trying time by far for Auntie and Angelia came two years later when Angelia became pregnant, and no inducement, insult, or threat would extract from her the identity of her baby’s father. Not even Auntie’s network of female friends could produce a shred of intelligence on the matter. I, of course, was delighted with the idea of a baby and extracted one concession from Angelia: I would be godmother. She kept her promise.

Within a year of the baby girl’s birth, she grew to resemble a married neighbor. Auntie promptly drove him out of town. Many years later, when we could discuss such things, I asked Angelia how the affair began.

“I wanted mine,”

she responded softly.

“I went to find some pleasure with the man only once! I am sorry I didn’t go again, because I have never had a lover since.”

It occurred to me then that even a sexual life is a matter of economics. But that’s another story.

Angelia’s daughter grew up with Auntie, went to school, and moved to her own apartment when she became able to support her mother. For many years, I advised and guided my god-daughter, who grew into a resourceful and independent woman. She married, gave birth to a son, and then moved to the U.S., though far away from me. I never imagined that she would live with me. But when she called me about her abusive husband, I ordered her to get onto the next plane with her boy and then sheltered them in my home for two years. She is happily remarried now and working as a teacher.

Much has changed in Haiti since the early 70’s.

The little Haitian pigs of my childhood are gone: all 1.3 million of them eradicated by the US in 1982 because of a supposed swine flu, despite a demonstrated resistance of these animals to the disease. This genocide, and a calculated dumping of cheap U.S.-subsidized rice in Haiti to bankrupt the local rice farmers, destroyed the agricultural base of the country. Even so, the country hobbled along on the remittances of Haitians living abroad.

What to do?

To make way for neoliberalism, the Haitian family itself would have to be destroyed. The perfect opportunity for an onslaught came in 1998, when a book by Jean-Robert Cadet recounted a harrowing life as a restavek. Mr. Cadet’s experience is entirely atypical of the restavek system. He describes being transferred as a very young child to an abusive family, although very young children, especially males, are traditionally kept within their own families, and children who are placed in different families are never set so adrift. What he describes is, at best, a perversion of the restavek system, and at worst, rings untrue. His story, echoed by many, led to great outrage from liberals and predators alike and a declaration of the restavek system as being a form of child slavery and therefore illegal.

The theft of the Haitian children is underway. Loving Haitian families who fit every qualification for the adoption of children are regarded as slavers and not permitted to adopt Haitian children. An adoption black market, with all the attendant corruption in Haitian high places, has grown to serve the needs of wealthy and middle-class whites who fail the criteria for adoption by normal routes in their countries. Sexual predators come to Haiti to establish schools and orphanages.

Some have been exposed; most have not. Grifters obtain young children by persuading the more gullible Haitian families that their offspring will maintain contact with them.

As for the poor teenage girls, there are always the garment factories with a going wage of $3 per day at best, or there is worse, much worse.

I write this to celebrate my mothers. I write to stop this horror. If you have been a restavek or loved a restavek, speak up and tell the truth. There will have to be an apology to Haitians, as there was to the Stolen Children: the mixed-race Australians who were snatched from their homes and placed with white families to erase the aboriginal from them. It is only fair to give the well-meaning a chance to remove themselves from this great crime, but the criminals must not be permitted to claim they did not know they were causing harm.

Source Haiti Chery