Haiti: Siding with KIDS to end cruelty

Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF version

Photos by Tom RobertsIf countries took psalms as slogans, Haiti’s certainly would be the lament uttered from the cross: My God, why have you abandoned me? Psalm 22 ultimately resolves in hope. And if there is hope in Haiti today, it is due in no small measure to the fact that this tiny country is teeming with religious women and men who have taken up residence at the heart of the despair, at times with little more to go on than the promise of the beatitudes.

They survive with the conviction that somehow, all instincts to the contrary, the wretched and broken mess they see around them in this poorest country in the hemisphere is “blessed.”

Immaculate Heart of Mary Sr. Martha Vanrompay, an 81-year-old force of nature, is one of them, arguably one of the more provocative. Sr. Martha, as she is known here, refers to herself repeatedly as a “wrinkled old orange,” though she slips easily into the skin of youthful, hard-edged hope.

Sr Martha VanrompayShe has become a smiling insurgent, a master infiltrator intent on transforming one of Haitian culture’s most shameful elements -- its system of restaveks, children in involuntary servitude -- into a “new, redeemed reality.”

Hers is a hope, a theology of hope to be precise, that leans lightly on money, foreign connections or quick results, and heavily on persistence, the long haul and fidelity. After eight years of battle against all odds, she is seeing results.

The restavek system is not what one might expect, the exploitation of the poor by the rich. In Haiti the exploitation of children -- three-fourths of them girls -- occurs in shantytowns and horribly poor communities clinging precariously to the sides of mountains. It is the use of the most abject poor by the desperately poor.

Studies estimate that there are some 300,000 restaveks in Haiti, an astounding number in a country no larger than the state of Maryland. The term derives from the French, rester avec, meaning “to stay with” or “to remain with,” and can refer to the child or to the system. A restavek, according to the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights, is a Haitian child, often from a rural area, who moves in with a family in the city and “becomes a house slave when she is turned over by her parents to a family that agrees in principle to care for the child, provide schooling, food, shelter and clothing in exchange for domestic labor.” Such children can be as young as 4, though most are a few years older. Those seeking to end or change the system claim that the exchange generally involves a burdensome amount of servile work and little in the way of schooling. Restaveks are often sexually abused or beaten and in various ways demeaned.

It was not unusual, say four former restaveks in recounting their own experiences in interviews during a recent visit here, to be forbidden to look directly at their adult keepers, made to sleep outdoors, away from the rest of the family, and prohibited from eating the same food as the rest of the family -- food the young restavek had prepared.

Poverty climbs the mountainsides around Port-au-Prince.As is the case with so much in Haiti, those experienced in the culture may have different understandings of a system that seems all but incomprehensible from the outside. Some say restavek families may offer protection for children whose parents have died or whose natural parents can’t provide for them. No one denies, however, that abuses of restavek children are widespread, though some reject the term “slavery” and warn against measuring the practice entirely with a view from the developed world.

In recent years, with publicity spreading about the system, cries have gone out from the human rights community for an end to restavek. “Aba Restavek” one report is titled in Creole, “Down with restaveks.”

Sr. Martha largely rejects the confrontational approach. “Aba Restavek” she repeats, “Down with, down with,” she barks, pushing down with her hands. “Such language will only bring more violence. And we don’t need any more violence.”

The approach of her program, known here as MVM -- short for Mouvman Vin Plis Moun, loosely translated, “People become more human” -- is to transform rather than confront. It employs battalions of “monitors,” a growing army of older teenagers to adults, many former restaveks themselves, trained by MVM to quietly, slowly, go about insinuating themselves into the lives of the restaveks and their families. They gather the children into nutrition centers and ad hoc classrooms to feed them and teach them basic reading and math and engage them in different levels of crafts.

Stitching placemats

Roodnir Joseph, an attractive 18-year-old monitor, one of Sr. Martha’s liberated restaveks, was, on one day during the recent visit, surrounded by some three dozen youngsters from age 5 to early teens. She and her charges were huddled midday in a bunker type concrete structure, the shell of an unfinished church with earthen floor and no electricity, situated in an endless string of teeming neighborhoods in the heart of Haiti’s capital city. This day the children were stitching colorful designs on burlap, making the sousplats or placemats that have become one of the staples of the program.

A monitor stitches a placematGroups such as this, working with Sr. Martha’s monitors all over the city, are stitching along the lines of drawings provided by MVM’s artist in residence, Ronald Ridoré. The finished mats are sold to raise money for the program.

From place to place, in the poorest of circumstances, out come the tablets that have been provided for basic language and math lessons, and children proudly display the colorful yarn outlines sewn into patterns depicting life in Haiti. In the crowded and dusty popular markets, amid a rich array of grains, beans and produce, women who became interested in the program because their restaveks charges came home displaying new skills, now attend informal classes once a week and open their copy books for visitors.

Joseph was one of the movement’s earliest “rescues.” As a restavek, she served a family whose adults were often violent with her from the time she was age 8 until she turned 14. Since her rescue, she has gained a different perspective from other liberated restaveks, most of whom might hope for regular meals and some education, but rarely get outside their own neighborhoods, much less experience life outside of Haiti. A year ago, Joseph traveled to New York, one of 10 girls from around the world who had the opportunity to tell their stories as the guests of UNANIMA, an international nongovernmental organization specializing in the issues of women, children and immigrants.

In whatever space

MVM monitors pray at the start of a meetingWhatever education occurs in Sr. Martha’s restavek program begins at the most fundamental level in whatever space is available. Lessons are taught in cramped alleys, in open front rooms of the shanties heaped one upon another, in austere rental space with room for a few tables and sewing machines. These are the neighborhoods of poverty as they crawl up the side of a mountain in random stages and with whatever can be carried up increasingly steep paths interrupted intermittently by open, running sewage and huge pits of garbage.

Teaching materials are primitive and the pace is slow. Monitors know to look for the signs of disease and worms, for the telltale indications of malnutrition -- the glazed look in the eyes, the bloated bellies, the legs that shake when making the trek up the mountain, often with a five-gallon bucket of water on the head, and the brittle red hair that should be black and supple.

Sr. Martha’s modest home/office serves as a kind of nerve center for MVM and its growing staff of young Haitians. They have become Sr. Martha’s legs, her own so arthritic that she “can no longer climb the mountains.” They’ve become her eyes and ears and hope in Port-au-Prince’s grim slums.

Meetings often occur around a table on the front porch and include Ronald Valme, who knew Sr. Martha during her 17 years in Haiti’s interior and knew of her work with restaveks there. He was one of the people who helped persuade her to develop the program in Port-au-Prince.

Ridoré, the resident artist, said he first was attracted to the movement because he thought that a white woman from outside of Haiti would have money and be able to provide resources for the school where he worked. But then, he said, he realized that the formation he was receiving “surpassed money.” In the slow English he is working to conquer, he said, “I realized that what was really important was the transformation that was going on inside myself and the reality of the restaveks.”

The open-air market in Carre Four Feuilles, where informal classes are heldOne gets the sense that, for many of the monitors, the experience is the same. In their year of training, information and skills are laced with formation, which comes in bursts of thought that punctuate whatever pedestrian task Sr. Martha is engaged in. She could be going through records she keeps -- currently the organization is keeping track of more than 1,200 restavek children -- when she blurts: “This is a work of love. God is a God of love. He is not asking for results. He asks for fidelity.”

Or talking generally about Haiti, she will reach a pitch of animation: “Missioners have to learn new patterns, and a new language and a new role and new methodology. The new role is to be a presence, and not to be a dictator. We need to be educated before we begin educating. We need to know their language, customs, taboos, wishes.”

Others on the staff include Renise Alce, an administrator who worked with her for 12 years in the interior; and a nurse, Dieudonne Vieux, an assistant director who coordinates care with medical institutions.

Their meetings begin with prayers run by one of the monitors or staff and include singing -- the light Haitian harmonies and rhythms that infuse Christian worship here. It is a group of mixed religious affiliation. Sr. Martha will not allow the term Protestant to be used; she finds it combative, violent to her ear. “People here must know the names of the other denominations -- Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist. And they must know something about those religions,” she said.

Eager for the missions

Sr. Martha, a native of Belgium, was 24 when she entered the Immaculate Heart of Mary order in 1950. She was professed three years later, in May 1953, and by July had enrolled at Fordham University. After several years at Fordham, she grew impatient for the missions. There is a maverick edge to the way she has shaped her calling. She is one of those women who has wrung religious life for all it might offer by sometimes pushing the limits of obedience and propriety.

"Rescued" restaveks share stories of hard labor and mistreatment.Just off the plane and beginning her first mission assignment in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she was assigned to tend the money box at a parish festival. She quickly found someone to take her place. Admonished by her superior for leaving her post, Sr. Martha told her, “I am a missionary. If I am a missionary, I must be with the people.”

The incident prompted a letter from her order’s headquarters in Rome. Her superior counseled greater diplomacy, but added a caveat that the younger nun clearly took to heart. “She also told me not to lose my spirit,” Sr. Martha said.

Her activism and her approach to organizing trace their origins to Belgian Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Catholic Worker and Young Catholic Student movements. His oft-cited methodology -- see, judge, act -- was eventually incorporated into other movements as the idea spread across Europe and to the United States, becoming most evident in the Christian Family Movement which flourished during the middle decades of the 20th century.

Cardijn, who died in 1967, had a deep belief in the integral place of the laity within the church and in the dignity of workers. His thought is said to have formed the heart of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra and the Vatican II documents “Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World” and the “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.”

Getty Images/AFP/Walter Astrada: A woman sells vegetables near an open sewage canal in Port-au-Prince.In the daily chaos and grinding poverty of Haiti’s major city, Cardijn’s ideas are working in tandem with a deeply ingrained Haitian notion called kombit, which grows out of the country’s agricultural tradition. In short, it is the idea of working together, described as “communal achievement,” and representing more than the work of a committee or a team.

Sr. Martha describes kombit more by what it is not than what it is and says it has taken her 20 years to really understand it. But now kombit is a model through which “see, judge, act” is accomplished.

She has been influenced too by creation spirituality, an earth-based spirituality formulated by Matthew Fox. Her sabbatical to study it in 1994 was her only break from 26 years in Haiti. So its message that all Christians should be the living Gospel in action comes easily to her, as do these lines: “I cannot say this is my sun only and not your sun too.”

Bullets in the chapel

At the rear of her house is a tiny room that serves as a chapel and it seems here that the fullness of Sr. Martha Vanrompay’s life is expressed, if any one room could actually contain it. In the middle of the room is a hollow wooden post, a poto maton in Creole, a central support that is integral to the practice of voodoo. Voodoo is as close as one might get to an indigenous religion, “and it, too, is terribly misunderstood,” she would say, exclaiming in the same breath that the world largely misunderstands and misuses Haiti.

Bullets left behind by a would-be killer“But,” she says, raising her arms up the post, “Jesus understands.” About eye level on the post is the door to a tabernacle, where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved.

The tabernacle also contains two bullets wrapped in cloth. She pulled them out and, to explain their origin, told the story of a gunman who had broken into her home one night intending to kill her. She recalls hearing a noise and deciding not to investigate. When she got up the next morning, she found in the front of the house a note. The intruder had written that he had come to kill her, but unable to carry out the act, had left the bullets intended for her.

The gunman may have been someone angry about her program, which, whether done in a confrontational way or not, is disruptive of the social order. Or he may have thought the white woman from outside of Haiti would have money. Sr. Martha doesn’t know.

The bullets went back into the tabernacle: elements among many others that are somehow connected with the Haitian culture -- elements to try to integrate, perhaps to sanctify, in this universe of desperation and hope, of lament and gratitude, that over a quarter-century in Haiti, Sr. Martha Vanrompay has made her own.

Tom Roberts is NCR news director. His e-mail address is troberts@ncronline.org. Sr. Therese Proulx, a Sister of St. Anne now stationed in Marlboro, Mass., who worked for 10 years in Haiti, served as interpreter.

Tom Roberts visited Port-au-Prince to learn more about Sr. Martha Vanrompay, a master infiltrator who is liberating restaveks, kids trapped in Haiti's shameful system of abuse. Since visiting Haiti in late winter, severe food riots, prompted by shortages and rising costs, have broken out in Haiti -- as in many countries around the globe. For our report on the global food crisis click here.

National Catholic Reporter May 2, 2008
Haiti: Siding with KIDS to end cruelty