Separated Children in Haiti Often Not Welcome Home
Associated Press
March 31, 2010
Many challenges face aid groups like Heartland Alliance in reuniting families in Haiti.
From Associated Press:
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Stranded since the earthquake, 9-year-old Ana toes the dusty concrete outside her orphanage and tells a social worker she wants to go back to live with her half-sister. Within hours, the aid worker hits pay dirt, finding the adult sister in a sprawling shantytown.
But there’s a problem. The sister, an impoverished woman with two children of her own, was the one who dropped the girl at the orphanage in the first place.
“This is going to be difficult,” sighed Mario Marcellus, a Haitian caseworker for World Vision — one of five international aid groups working to trace children living in orphanages or homeless camps since the earthquake and return them to their families.
The aid groups have already found 700 children they believe were separated from their families by the earthquake, and they expect the number to rise dramatically because of a new hot line set up to report cases of separated children.
The work is tedious, especially for younger children who can’t give phone numbers or details of their families in a city where hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes into makeshift camps. And too often, days of sleuthing lead not to joyful reunions but to parents and guardians too overwhelmed to take the children back.
The smallest aid can make a difference.
Ramsey Ben-Achour, the Haiti director for Heartland Alliance, another of the five groups under UNICEF, said he met one man who did not want to take two of his children home from a field hospital. He had two other children, his wife died in the earthquake and their house collapsed. But after the aid group gave him two mattresses, tent tarps and food rations, he agreed to take back the children.
“He thinks he’s going to be giving them a better life by leaving them there (at the hospital),” Ben-Achour said. “But what’s actually going to happen is they’re going to turn into street children, they’re going to end up trying to wash cars, they’re going to join gangs or be exploited sexually.”