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250,000 Unpaid Child Servants

Celine moved from the lush mountainside farmlands of southwestern Haiti to the teeming middle-class Port-au-Prince slum of Carrefour.  For the past three years, she has worked as a restavèk, Creole for a child who works as unpaid servant and lives apart from his or her family.  Elizabeth Gibbons, the UNICEF Representative in Haiti, told me during my January 1996 visit to Port-au-Prince that there may be as many as 250,000 restavèks in Haiti, a staggeringly high human statistic in a country of 7.1 million people.

I had the opportunity of meeting Celine, who is thirteen years old, when I visited Foyer Maurice Sixto, a special school for restavèks that UNICEF supports.  Restavèk recruiters usually promise families that the child they want to take away from them will go to school but, in nearly every instance, the pledge is never honored.  Instead, Gibbons explained, the children are put to work.

To come to the aid of restavèks, the Reverend Miguel Jean-Baptiste founded Foyer Maurice Sixto in 1990.  Father Jean-Baptiste also serves as a parish priest in Rivière Froide, and he used his influence in this heavily Roman Catholic country to convince families who employ restavèks to send the child servants to his school.

The family Celine works for did not enroll her in a school until Father Jean-Baptiste persuaded them to send her to Foyer Maurice Sixto.  When I met Celine in Father Jean-Baptiste's office, she was wearing a beautiful ribbon in her hair and a carefully ironed school uniform.  She must have weighed a fragile 70 pounds.  She was sweet, polite, and extremely soft spoken, her natural speaking voice a whisper. When she sat down, she didn’t recline.  Her posture was razor straight in the way of most poor Haitians, who carry themselves with great dignity.  She had not seen her family since she left the Jérémie area three years ago.

"What kind of work do you do.  What time to you start," I gently asked her.

"The sun is up when I get up.  I wash the dishes.  I iron.  I cook.  I clean the plates people have eaten off.  I fill buckets with water.  I work for a household of five, including me.  The parents of the family work as a mechanic and as a seamstress," Celine said.

She turned her face towards the floor, drifted her feet in different directions, and seemed hesitant.  Then she told us she is beaten by the family she works for.  Father Jean-Baptiste informed me later that many of his students are regularly beaten and abused by the families that employ them.

Sadly, Celine's tortured childhood is the norm for many of the 350 to 400 restavèk students at Foyer Maurice Sixto.

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