By Adorah Pierre, Child Advocate
This week I discovered a lot of things, but one thing in particular really struck me. In this work as a Child Advocate in Port-au-Prince, I meet and come to know many different children and their lives, but this week I spoke with a girl named Katie* and her story really impacted me.
Her story is not too different than the other children I met with last week; it is a story full of sadness. Katie explained to me: “I live with my aunt, but it is not the kind of life I expected. She’s sometimes kind with me if I have all of my work done. My aunt is not the one who gives me many problems because she’s not there most of the day because she works. Her daughter, however, is really hard on me. She beats me a lot, blames me without any reason. That hurts me, I feel sad and I don’t like when people treat me badly, I feel exhausted living in this condition”.
She ended her story differently than the other children I’ve spoken to and it really impacted me. I understood a new painful reality that I had suspected, but was not sure about. Katie said that when she is alone, she often imagines bringing harm to herself, she thinks her life is too much of a mess.
I realized that many of the children I know and meet with may also be thinking of suicide, but perhaps would not be as brave as Katie to tell me. Because they don’t have the privilege to live with their biological parent, they come to feel that nobody loves them. Because they are beaten and talked down to, treated as nothing every single day, it is often difficult for them to see a future that offers anything positive.
Hearing the sorrow from Katie is heart breaking. It makes me see my work is so important. It is not just to help children in restavek get an education, but to make sure they know they are valuable and that there are many, many people pulling for them. Restavek Freedom is about ending child slavery in totality and today, for me, that means that my job is to help Katie find hope.
Thank you, to all of you who are supporting this work, my work, Katie and all of the children in our program.
There are 300,000 children living in restavek in Haiti...but not for long. We want to end this form of child slavery in our lifetimes. Join us in Standing Up for Freedom.
