The Restavek Freedom Foundation Blog

When I grow up… from Jill Mairn, our Communications Director

Every couple of weeks our Child Advocates in Haiti send copies of progress reports to the US office. I devour them. I love reading the details about the children in our program and living vicariously through our Child Advocates who are with the kids on a daily basis, talking with them, patting their heads and giving them words of encouragement.

Today we got a new batch of updates and I thought I’d share a few details!

In this round, many of the kids talked about what they want to be when they grow up. As it turns out, almost half want to be nurses! There are also several doctors, two engineers, two computer engineers, a mechanic, an architect, a pilot and one said simply, it would be great to be “a good cook”!

I wondered if so many children chose healing professions – like nurses and doctors - because they lost a parent or witnessed the earthquake. Just under half of the children in our program were sent into restavek when their mother or father died and the surviving parent could not care for them. Lack of health care and clean water combined with infectious diseases, AIDS, tuberculosis, and cholera make the average lifespan in Haiti nearly 20 years shorter than in North America (61 vs. 78).

The child who wants to be a pilot is a girl. I had to pull up amazon.com to see if by some miracle a book on Amelia Earhart had been translated into Creole or maybe the autobiography of a famous female Haitian pilot would pop into my recommendations. No luck. I do, however, see a brainstorm in my future to find ideas for sharing the stories of inspiring role models with our kids. 

On the surface this all may seem very normal - hearing kids describe what they want to be when they grow up, but for children in restavek this is huge! Restavek children are so often treated like inferior servants. After years of having no one care about their wellbeing or their opinions, they often lose hope that their life will ever change. It is a big victory for us, then, to see that the children in our program gaining enough confidence to begin to see bigger, brighter futures for themselves.

After spending some time reading I have such a mix of emotions. In Haiti only 25% of adults work full time, so to see our kids thinking about important careers makes me want to clap and shout out loud!. Yet I also know how rare it is for a Haitian child to finish high school and this makes me bite my nails. (According to the Haitian Education and Leadership Organization, only 60% go to elementary school, 20% to secondary and less than 1% to university).

And children in restavek have even more obstacles to overcome. They have to do homework and wash their own uniform and still finish all of their chores. They have to find the inner strength to keep going despite the fact that they do not have family to cheer them on or parents to help with their homework. I am so thankful that our Child Advocates step in this gap and help encourage these kids.

One of the future nurses is 16 and in 4^th grade. She will have to have so much tenacity to stick with it and get to “filo” (the last year of high school) by the age of 24.

Another nurse-to-be is struggling in school, but her advocate writes “she believes she will make it. She believes education will change her future.”

One young guy, currently in the second grade, wants to be a doctor. His advocate shares that he is having trouble in several subjects, but “he is willing to make more efforts so that he will always have success”.

It gives me a lump in my throat to read how thankful they are to go to school, how willing they are to work so hard.

Perhaps, the best summary I can give is this quote from Gardy, the child advocate of our little Amelia Earhart. “She is now in 8^th grade. She is an orphan and believes that with education her life will change. She did well in the first term and is grateful for that. I want to thank you so much for helping her having this education that can change her future. She dreams of becoming a pilot, so please pray for her.”

Indeed.