Reply #28: Life is Haiti is horribly difficult. [View All]

[malta blue]

Hundreds of haitians risk their lives everyday crossing the border into the Dominican Republic where they are treated like slaves. I have no link, I speak from personal experience. It has been going on for decades and shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

My family hails from the Dominican Republic. When I was a child in the 1970's my grandfather owned a rather large sugar-cane plantation. In the fields, he had dug pit traps to "catch the haitians" who came in the middle of the night to cut the cane and sell it themselves. (I fell in one of those traps when I was 8 - it was not pleasant). While he may not have been the best human on the planet, my grandfather was only doing what landowners had done for generations to protect their crops.

On a recent visit to the Dominican Republic, a haitian woman thrust her child at me and begged me to take it from her. Her eyes filled with tears, she spoke in thickly accented spanish and told me to take her baby and give him a better life. How I wish I could have helped her :cry: I took her to a store and bought her a bags of rice and beans, and some milk for the baby - even though I knew she had no home. I figured she could find someone who would help her cook the food for the baby.

Yes, 750 miles from the U.S. people are eating dirt. People are eating dirt here IN the US as pointed out upthread.

Now that we know - what are we going to do about it?