Word: haitians
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Michele wishes now that she had grown up in her squalid Haitian birth city of Port-de-Paix. When she was a young girl, her impoverished parents sent her to live with her more affluent aunt and uncle in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, with the promise of a better future. She got instead an old mattress in a closet, 18 hours a day of cooking, cleaning and waiting on her aunt's large family, and years of beatings and sexual abuse by her cousins. Her slavery continued when, a few years later, she was forced to emigrate with...
Child slavery is an entrenched tradition in Michele's homeland: the Haitian government estimates that 300,000 youngsters in Haiti are restaveks, or child slaves. Like malaria and political violence, the scourge was thought to have been left behind in Haiti. But as more young people like Michele emerge from the refugee shadows, they have exposed the problem of slaves being kept in the U.S., undetected by local authorities amid the two-decade-old wave of Haitian migration. Says Danielle Romer, director of the private social services agency Haitian Support Inc. in Miami's Little Haiti: "It's much more...
...Jean Baptiste, a Roman Catholic priest who runs the Maurice Sixto shelter in Port-au-Prince for restaveks who have run away or whose owners allow them a little schooling each day. "Unfortunately, we've carried that mentality with us today." Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear a Haitian say, "Timoun se ti bet": kids are animals...
...late 1990s, Haitian-American community activists like Romer had begun to detect the presence of restaveks in Miami. When the activists began to broach the issue on Haitian radio shows and at church gatherings, they first faced denial and even veiled threats of ostracism from some of the community's old guard. But the phenomenon could no longer be covered up after Oct. 2, 1999, when Florida officials working on a tip from neighbors removed a 12-year-old Haitian girl--filthy, unkempt and in acute abdominal pain from repeated rape--from the affluent suburban home of middle-class Haitian...
...tougher today than it was thirty years ago to make a home--as the Portuguese did--in Cambridge. Despite praising Cambridge for its acceptance of new cultures, for instance, the Haitian immigrant community is slowly leaving after 20 years in the city...