There are only three books to be found at the Foyer de Sion orphanage in Port-au-Prince, serving the 18 children cared for here. There’s a textbook titled Vive Les Maths!, and another called Histoire d’Haiti.
The third is a children’s picture book in English called Prayer for a Child. It’s a poem with illustrations, and begins: “Bless this milk and bless this bread; Bless this soft and waiting bed.”
The book is lying on a rusty bunk-bed, with a thin, dirty mattress on top. There is no milk or bread. Since the earthquake the organisers of the orphanage have run through their last $100 and are down to emergency rations dished out to the children — one meal a day.
The underlying truth of the disaster of Haiti is things were already bad before “le catastrophe”. Many of these children were orphaned by past disasters — the hurricanes of 2008, the deadly storms of 2004 and 2005, the almost yearly flooding — or as a result of wave after wave of political exile in which adults have fled, leaving their children.
In the orphanage there are no toys — not one. The rooms are virtually bare. In the bedroom with the picture book the only decoration on its grey and peeling walls is a thin frieze that runs around the top of the walls, depicting a range of United States sports — a baseball bat, an American football, a basketball hoop.
The American theme is pertinent. A few hours before we arrived a team from a Mormon church came to take 10 children away to Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The children, ranging in age from two to 15, had already begun the process of adoption, but after the earthquake the normal bureaucratic hurdles of visas, passports and adoption papers were simply brushed aside.
Milane Pomelus (15), whose parents died when she was little, was one of the children who were not among the chosen few. A manager of the orphanage tells us she had not been picked by any American adoptive parents. So here she stays.
At first she tells us, defensively perhaps, that she doesn’t want to go to the US in any case. But under gentle questioning she changes her tune: “I’m afraid to stay in Haiti. There are too many bad things happening here. I want to go to America.”
We talk to Wideline Fils-Aime, a girl of nine with braided hair and crooked teeth and an electric smile, wearing a check dress and dirty pink crocs. Or rather we try to talk to her, as she is paralysed by shyness.
Our translator asks her how her parents died. She writhes and flashes that electric smile, and says nothing. A while later, we try again. She stands in front of us like a soldier on the parade ground, stiff-spined and at attention. What happened to you in the earthquake? Silence.
Was there a lot of noise? “Some of the children were injured,” she says at last. Were you hurt? “I lost many friends.”
Are you afraid? She nods. Why? “There are too many people dying.”
According to the United Nations there were 380 000 children in orphanages and homes in Haiti before the quake. Nobody knows how much that figure has increased, but the number of additions to this miserable club must run into the tens of thousands of children now in the care of relatives, or abandoned and alone.
Groups from all around the world have swooped in, seizing the opportunity to help, as well as spotting a good chance, perhaps, to acquire adoptable kids in demand in the West.
Here is the Dutch government dispatching a planeload of immigration officials to evacuate 100 children already in the process of adoption by Dutch parents. Here is the governor of Pennsylvania, Edward Rendell, travelling to Haiti and bringing back 53 children from the Bresma Orphanage in the city. And there is the Catholic Church in Miami announcing that it will repeat its 1960 display of muscle that saw 14 000 children taken from Cuba to the US.
But with every day that passes the contrast between those who go and those who stay grows more overwhelming. About 30 of the orphans from Foyer de Sion have been transferred to the Mormon church in Pétionville, about 1,6km away. About 700 people, rising to 1000 at night, are living there in tents and on blankets. They have each been given a pink ticket that grants them entry into and out of the grounds — a necessary provision as the church has reached capacity and is now turning away all newcomers.
A couple of two-year-old orphans sit on a mat at the end of the church garden. They haven’t eaten yet today. Though food and water has been donated by the Brazilian government, the Mormon church is running out of both.
Back at the orphanage there are a few bags of rice and beans in a cupboard and a few sweet potatoes in the fridge. Outside, a large pot of vegetable gruel is bubbling away over coals. Are you hungry, we ask Wisline Etienne (13). She grimaces and says: “No.” No one believes her.
Pascale Mardy, the bishop’s sister, is in charge of the orphanage today. What can she do, what can she say to the children to make them feel better? She pauses. “I don’t know what to tell the children. I’m afraid myself.”
A warning from Cuba
The disaster in Haiti has inspired an American scheme to bring children to Miami, in conscious imitation of a project half a century ago that spirited children away from revolutionary Cuba. But the architects of the plan might be well advised to think twice.
Operation Pedro Pan involved the exodus of about 14 000 unaccompanied Cuban children from Havana to Miami between 1960 and 1962.
Informally orchestrated by the CIA and the Catholic Church, it responded to the panic aroused in the early years of the Cuban Revolution within middle-class Catholic families, who were led to fear that the new Cuban government was about to substitute state control for the traditional legal power that parents (specifically fathers) wielded over their families.
Cuban parents who packed off their children, aged between eight and 17, to Florida imagined that they might soon come home again. Previously, whenever a radical government took power, conservative Cubans appealed successfully to the United States to intervene.
But with the Cuban Revolution, the wind changed. This time American intervention met with disaster at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The Cuban government declared that those who had gone into self-imposed exile, referred to as gusanos or “worms”, would not be allowed to return. The beneficiaries of Pedro Pan were left stranded in various parts of the US. Children were isolated and alone, families were separated.
Twenty years ago, one of these children, Yvonne Conde, began interviewing hundreds of those who shared her experience. Although most had a positive attitude to what had happened, others had clearly been scarred for life.
Conde quotes from some of their early letters: Hector in Nebraska wrote that “the Americans deal with us but they somewhat avoid us. I know that our English must tire them … I am dying to go back to Cuba.”
One veteran told Conde of her reluctance to answer her survey questions: “I have such awful memories. It amazes me how I can go back to when I was 14 and remember it just like it was last week. It still hurts too much … I do not know when I stopped crying every night of those awful three-and-a-half years, but I should have been drained of tears by the time my parents came.”
The proposed new Miami initiative is different; it aims specifically to bring orphans from Haiti to the US, and several Pedro Pan veterans have offered to help.
“It’s terrible to be alone in a new country where you don’t speak the language or know anyone,” one woman said. “The kindness of strangers is what gets you through … we can be those strangers to these poor kids.” — Guardian News & Media 2010