The Restavek Freedom Foundation Blog

Roslyn talks about living and working in Haiti. 

So I have been back in the US for nearly 4 months now.  Everyday I wake up, get dress and go about my American way of life as I did before I went to Haiti to work for the foundation.   It would seem that I am the same person that I was before my time in Haiti.  However there is one difference between who I was then and who I am now.  I now know slavery exists.  I am having trouble living with the fact that the same world that has given me so much is the same world that has taken so much away from them. 

            While in Haiti I served as the Child Advocate program coordinator.  I was responsible for managing a group of child advocates and keeping up with the children in our program.  I started out thinking I knew what I was doing, only to come to the realization that I did not.  I found out very fast that reading about restavek and child servitude in India is very different from actually working on the ground in Haiti.   Additionally, as many Americans who have worked in Haiti may have found out, the work culture in Haiti is very different from that in the US.  Firstly, there are many more obstacles in the way of getting things done.  For instance, to get to our partner schools by public transportation to see our children was often a 3 hour ordeal.  There were times when we would make the trip to see one child who we had not seen for a few days, only to get to the school and realize the school director decided not to have school that day.  Other times we would attempt to get to schools only to get half way and have to turn around because of violent riots in the streets.   

            Another important, and perhaps the most crucial, lesson I learned from my job was that my way of doing things is not always the best way.  I learned that to get work done efficiently I had to be able to humble myself and simply learn form those who know more about Haiti and the restavek system than I do.  I think often it is very easy for us who have lived or gotten educated in the west to believe that we know what is best for the poor.  We attempt to help people by teaching them our way of doing things.  This leads to the belittling of individuals and a disregard for their experiences and the things they know.  Naturally, this leads to a resistance of what people see as a dominant force.  We in turn have a difficult time understanding why people are resisting something that will be beneficial to them.  Being somewhat of an aggressive person, this lesson was difficult for me to take in.  However, at the end I had no choice; I was either going to continue trying to do things the way I have always done them and be frustrated or I was going to be a less aggressive and learn HOW to help children who in restavek.        

            Along with managing the program I was also a child advocate for children in a few of our school partners.  This was the hardest part of my job.  So what does one say to a child who wakes up everyday living not as a child but as a slave?  And once a person has learned of such realities and heard the personal stories, what does one do with this knowledge? It turned out there was nothing I needed say.  I only had to listen and care.   As for what do I do with the stories that I was told; I hope that the stories I retell will motivate Haitians, Americans and the global community to take more action to end child slavery in Haiti.

            As I reflect on my time in Haiti and especially the time right after the earthquake I wonder if I could not have been more helpful or acted in a way that meant a betterment in the life of more people.  After having settled down from the shock of having gone through an earthquake we set out to locate the 400+ children in our program.  Although we were able to find most, many were unaccounted for. 

We assume many of them were sent back to the countryside, but we don’t know for sure.  The likely case scenario is that they continue to be restaveks at different locations.  Often, in my time of stillness their stories will come back to me and I am overwhelmed with the burden of knowing this reality exists. 

            In A Midsummer Nights Dream, Shakespeare closes the play by saying:

“if we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended…if you pardon, we will mend.”  I suppose for those of us who work in the area of social justice, we relate to this idea well.  We play out the act as we think it should be played; when the time calls for it we give our best with sincere and honest hearts and hope that in some minimal way or another, what we did and the ways we chose to act will lead to some greater good.  We pray that our actions will be judged, not for the visible results or lack of, but for how they were intended.  Seeing as there are still so many children in servitude in Haiti as before my two years of working for the foundation, it is hard for me to see what I did as being of great significance.  I am a different person now than who I was before I went to Haiti because I can no longer live my everyday life without remembering that somewhere,  not too far away and in my birth country there are children living as slaves.