Mylouise Veillard was 10 years old when her mother left her in an orphanage in southern Haiti, promising her a better life. For three years, Ella Mylouise slept on a cement floor. When she was thirsty, she would walk to a community well and carry heavy buckets of water herself. Meals were scant and she lost weight. She was worried about her younger brother, who fought even more than her in the facility.
It is a familiar story among the approximately 30,000 Haitian children who live in hundreds of orphanages where allegations of forced labor, trafficking, and physical and sexual abuse abound. In recent months, the Haitian government has redoubled its efforts to remove hundreds of these children and reunite them with their parents or relatives as part of a massive campaign to shut down the institutions, the vast majority of which are privately owned.
Social workers lead the effort, sometimes armed only with a picture and a vague description of the neighborhood where the child lived. It’s an arduous task in a country of more than 11 million people with no residential phone books and where many families have no physical address or fingerprint.
“They’re almost like detectives,” said Morgan Wienberg, co-founder and CEO of Little Footprints, Big Steps, one of several nonprofit organizations that help bring children and families together. “It’s definitely a lot of persistence.”
Social workers are scattered throughout cities, towns and villages. They climb hills, navigate mazes of tin-roofed shacks, and knock on doors. With a smile, they hold up a photo and ask if anyone recognizes the boy.
They find that some orphanages relocated children without notifying their parents, or families were forced to flee violence in their community and lost contact with their children.
From time to time, social worker Jean Rigot Joseph said he shows children photos of landmarks to see if they remember where they lived. If he locates the parents, he will first determine if they are open to reunification before revealing that he found their son.
Like more than 80% of children in Haitian orphanages, Veillard and his brother are considered “orphans of poverty.” Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with around 60% of the population earning less than $2 per day. When parents cannot afford to feed their children, they temporarily place them in orphanages, where they believe they will receive better care.
“When parents give their children up to orphanages, they don’t really see it as giving them up forever,” Wienberg said.
About 30,000 children out of about 4 million nationwide live in about 750 orphanages across Haiti, according to government figures. Many were built after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed at least 200,000 people. In the months that followed, the number of orphanages in Haiti skyrocketed by 150%, leading to an increase in trafficking, forced labor and abuse.
A 2018 report by the Haitian Institute for Research and Social Welfare and others found that only 35 of 754 orphanages, less than 5%, met minimum standards and were allowed to operate. Meanwhile, 580 orphanages received the lowest score, meaning the government should order their closure.
In response to the report, the Haitian government banned the construction of new orphanages and closed existing ones. But closing orphanages can be dangerous. Government officials have been threatened or forced into hiding while the owners seek to keep up the flow of generous donations from abroad; Faith-based donors from the US are the main funders of orphanages in Haiti, according to Lumos, a nonprofit organization that works to reunite children in orphanages around the world with their families.
There is no group or association that speaks on behalf of orphanages in Haiti, as the vast majority are individually owned.
Homes are a necessity for children whose parents cannot feed them or protect them from violence, said Sister Paesie, who founded the religious organization Kizito Family in Port-au-Prince. It houses and provides free education to about 2,000 children from impoverished slums.
“The idea is to get them away from violence,” he said, and parents are invited to visit.
Gangs control up to 80% of Port-au-Prince, according to the UN, and have been blamed for a rise in murders and kidnappings, especially in the areas where the children of the Kizito family come from.
Sister Paesie condemned orphanages that are linked to the lucrative business of adoptions.
“It gives rise to so much abuse instead of trying to help parents, which we always try to do,” she said.
But reuniting children with their parents is difficult when they have fled violence and are homeless, she said.
“In the last month, I have seen so many mothers sleeping on the streets with their children,” she said. “I have dozens of mothers who ask me every day to take their children because they have no food to give them.”
Reunification efforts have been successful in the more rural areas of Haiti, where gangs do not have as much control and families can grow their own food.
In rural southern Haiti, some 330 children are now living with their families again. When that day came for Mylouise, now 17, and her brother, they were so excited they ran out of the orphanage and left behind their sandals, recalled Renèse Estève, her mother.
They joined Estève, her new partner, her new son and another brother in a one-room house at the foot of a mountain where farmers grow corn, potatoes and vetiver, a plant whose oil is used in high-end perfumes.
Wienberg’s non-profit organization built Estève the home as part of an effort to help support families after reunification to avoid further economic stress and further separation.
Other efforts include hiring an agronomist to help families grow crops to eat or sell amid crippling inflation that has pushed Haitians deeper into poverty.
Two of the children sleep on the concrete floor; there are only two small beds in his house. Near the beds, the children keep their only toys: a small stuffed moose and teddy bear, a Hello Kitty bag and a “Black Panther” lunch box.
Estève said that leaving the children at the orphanage was painful, although he did visit them from time to time. She had no job or partner to help her feed and care for them. During her visits, the children told her that they were not well and asked her for food. Estève herself was struggling to eat at home, thinking of hers two children of hers.
“Sometimes I felt like killing myself,” he said.
One day, surprised by the weight they had lost, she decided to pick up the children with the help of social workers. She was convinced that they would be better off in absolute poverty than in the orphanage.
Key to reunification efforts are mentors like Eluxon Tassy, 32, who works with children living on the streets, in orphanages or in transition preparing to return home.
“I understand exactly what they are going through,” he said.
He was 4 years old when his mother left him in an orphanage on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where he lived for almost 15 years. He said he, too, was forced to spend two years with a family that exploited him as a child domestic worker, known in Haiti as a restavek. He never went to school despite the family’s promises to enroll him in exchange for cleaning the house and tending to the farm animals.
Tassy’s first priority when helping children navigate the transition back home is gaining confidence and building confidence. She uses art and music, singing the alphabet with the little ones. He asks how they feel about her orphanage, but is careful not to question them too much.
Sometimes you have to explain the concept of family and the importance of affection if a child does not remember his parents or has spent a lot of time away from them.
In Estève’s case, her children reconnected with her almost immediately. To celebrate, she cooked two meals that day: the traditional Haitian breakfast of spaghetti and, later, rice and beans doused with fish sauce.
“It was easy,” he said. “We became a family again.”