In pictures: Hardship and hope in Haiti

[seemslikeadream]

Street kids

Michael Brewer, centre, is an American who provides food and shelter for 25 "restaveks" - Haitian children who have been sold into slavery, usually by poor rural families.
These children, who regularly end up on the street, often bear the brunt of the worsening security situation. Mr Brewer says some have even been murdered, execution-style, by out-of-work former soldiers and police. Four children who stayed with him have been shot dead in the past two months, he says.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/americas_hardship_and_hope_in_haiti/html/5.stm

[seemslikeadream]

1. Haiti's Dark Secret: The Restavecs

Josiméne, 10, and photojournalist Gigi Cohen.
Credit: Gigi Cohen
© 2004

March 20, 2004 -- Freelance producer Rachel Leventhal presents the moving story of one of Haiti's estimated 300,000 restavecs -- young children from the rural countryside literally sold to work for families in the poverty-stricken nation's urban areas.

Josiméne, 10, is a live-in maid in a two-room house outside of Port-au-Prince. Her parents are small farmers in Haiti's remote and mountainous heartland.

Among other duties, Josiméne cares for two younger children, cleans the house, washes dishes, scrubs laundry by hand, runs errands and sells small items from the family's informal store.

As part of the Child Poverty Photo Project, photojournalist Gigi Cohen briefly got to know Josiméne. In the course of her work, Cohen heard about the life the young girl lives as a servant and the life she left behind.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1779562

[redqueen]

2. I wonder why Haiti is so easy to ignore in the US...

considering the input this country has had in that country's situation.

It's enough to make one want to cry.

[Just Me]

3. It has made many of us cry.

:cry:

What the Bush administration did is simply incomprehensible. God, I hope the whole lot of them are recycled back down to earth to suffer the same atrocities for which they are responsible.