Supplies and protection for unaccompanied children in Haiti

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Source: United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)

Date: 19 Jan 2010


By Tamar Hahn

UNICEF Regional Communication Specialist Tamar Hahn has been serving as the agency's chief spokesperson in the Haitian earthquake zone. She sends the following update.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 19 January 2010 ? One week has gone by since an earthquake turned what was already a desperately poor part of the world into a full-fledged humanitarian emergency. The race against time to bring relief to the people of Haiti continues.

Supplies are arriving daily by land and by air, and distribution of safe water, food, hygiene kits and other life-saving provisions has greatly improved. Still, every day brings new challenges.

Hundreds if not thousands of people are leaving Port-au-Prince, their belongings tied up in bundles or squeezed into suitcases that they carry on their heads as they make their way to the countryside. But thousands still crowd together at camps set up spontaneously around the capital in squares and schools, and even on a golf course.

Enormous resilience

These camps have become microcosms of survival. In one of them, a man has brought a generator that he uses to charge hundreds of cell phones. Meanwhile, women cook whatever food they manage to forage over open fires. Some camps have even set up committees to coordinate their needs.

Although looting and violence is taking place in some areas, what I have mostly witnessed is enormous resilience on the part of people here.

UNICEF and its partners overcame fuel shortages to dispatch 140 tanker trucks that delivered water to over 140,000 people today. Supplies were also delivered to an orphanage where about 40 children are living and 50 more are expected to arrive shortly.

Also today, we went out to try to ascertain the situation of separated and unaccompanied minors. It is a time-consuming task ? just getting around town takes hours ? but a clearer picture of the situation is emerging, and UNICEF is taking action to provide a solution.

About 900 of these children, who have found themselves alone in the midst of this emergency, will be taken into interim centres set up by UNICEF to house, feed and care for them.

A close eye on children

My first stop was the tent hospital where, late last week, I first met two unaccompanied children ? seven-year-old Sean and two-year-old 'Baby Girl' (no one knows her real name). This time, I went there again with UNICEF Regional Child Protection Adviser Nadine Perrault to take these children and two others ? Sandie, 9, and Medoshe, 6 ? to one of the centres.

But doctors advised us that Sean and Medoshe were not ready to leave; their wounds still not healed and they were at risk of infection. Sean and Sandie have become fast friends, and a woman whose 15-year-old son is also in the hospital has become Baby Girl's surrogate mother.

We felt that it would be best to take all of the children together. So for the next couple of days, they will all be together at the far end of the tent, right by the resting space for the doctors and nurses. This will enable the medical personnel to keep a close eye on them, as several people have attempted to take children out of the country.

Illegal adoption was an issue of concern before the earthquake. Amidst the chaos that followed it has become a concern for Haitian authorities who fear children may be taken out of the country without proper legal procedures being followed.

While adoption can be a viable option for many children who have lost their parents, it is reasonable to think that many people are still out there looking for their children or the children of their relatives. To prevent the illegal departure of many children UNICEF is deploying two specialized staff to control documentation at the airport.

'I just want to go home'

Another child, Marie-Yolaine, 9, arrived at the hospital yesterday with a broken arm. She is a good example of why we need to do what is best for children who are without parental care in Haiti.

Marie-Yolaine is a 'restavek', one of the almost Haitian 200,000 children who were given away by impoverished parents to relatives or to unknown families in hopes that they would be provided with a better life. The reality is that these children are forced to work as domestic servants, kept out of school and subjected to violence and abuse.

When the earthquake struck last week, Marie-Yolaine was out fetching water. When a falling slab of concrete broke her arm, the family with whom she was staying brought her to the hospital and left her there on her own. Now all she wants is for us to take her back to the village of Les Cayes in the south of the country, where she was born.

"My mother is dead, but I think my father is still alive," she says. "If you take me there, I could recognize my house. I just want to go home."

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/MYAI-7ZW4U9?OpenDocument&rc=2&emid=EQ-2010-000009-HTI

 

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Re: Supplies and protection for unaccompanied children in Haiti

This article was published about 3 weeks before the earthquake.

Report says 225,000 Haiti children work as slaves

By EVENS SANON and JONATHAN M. KATZ Associated Press writer ? 2009 The Associated Press

Dec. 23, 2009, 8:59AM

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti ? Poverty has forced at least 225,000 children in Haiti's cities into slavery as unpaid household servants, far more than previously thought, a report said Tuesday.

The Pan American Development Foundation's report also said some of those children ? mostly young girls ? suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship.

The report recommends Haiti's government and international donors focus efforts on educating the poor and expanding social services such as shelters for girls, who make up an estimated two-thirds of the child servant population.

Young servants are known as "restavek" ? Haitian Creole for "stays with" ? and their plight is both widely known and a source of great shame in the Caribbean nation that was founded by a slave revolt more than 200 years ago.

Researchers said the practice is so common that almost half of 257 children interviewed in the sprawling Port-au-Prince shantytown of Cite Soleil were household slaves.

Most are sent by parents who cannot afford to care for them to families just slightly better off. Researchers found 11 percent of families that have a restavek have sent their own children into domestic servitude elsewhere.

Despite growing attention to the problem, researchers said their sources were unaware of any prosecutions of cases involving trafficking children or using them as unpaid servants in this deeply poor nation of more than 9 million people.

Glenn Smucker, one of the report's authors and a cultural anthropologist known for extensive work on Haiti, said he believes the number of restavek children is increasing proportionally with the population of Port-au-Prince as more migrants flee rural poverty to live in the capital.

The researchers surveyed more than 1,400 random households in five Haitian urban areas in late 2007 and early 2008, with funding help from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The most widely used previous number for restaveks came from a 2002 UNICEF survey, which estimated there were 172,000.

The new report used a broader counting system to include children related to household owners but still living in servitude, such as nieces or cousins, and as well as "boarders" living temporarily with another family but are still forced to provide labor.

"Most people working with restavek children ... think that these numbers, both ours and UNICEF's, are actually underestimating the problem," said Herve Razafimbahini, the Pan American Development Foundation's program director in Haiti.

He called for Haitian officials to conduct a national survey to analyze the full scope of the problem, including in rural areas.

Officials with the Ministry of Social Affairs could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/latinamerica/6783415.html

 

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Re: Supplies and protection for unaccompanied children in Haiti

Haiti?s children on their own on shattered streets

<!--//Byline box//-->By Associated Press
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - Added 2h ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti ? The children with no names lay mute in a corner of the General Hospital grounds Tuesday, three among thousands of boys and girls set adrift in the wake of Haiti?s earthquake.

"Hi, Joe, how are you?" the American doctor tried, using a pet name the staff had given a boy of about 11.
There was no response.

"Joe," ?Baby Sebastian" and the girl who didn?t even have a nickname hadn?t spoken or cried since they were brought in over the previous 48 hours ? by neighbors, passers-by, no one knows who. "Sebastian," only a week old, was said to have been taken from the arms of his dead mother.

They?re lucky: Haitian-born Dr. Wisdom Price and the staff were treating them for infections and other ailments. Hundreds of thousands of hungry and thirsty children are scattered among Port-au-Prince?s squatter camps of survivors, without protection against disease or child predators ? often with nobody to care for them.

"There?s an estimated 1 million unaccompanied or orphaned children or children who lost one parent," said Kate Conradt, a spokeswoman for the aid group Save the Children. "They are extremely vulnerable."

The U.N. children?s agency, UNICEF, has established a special tent camp for girls and boys who, one way or another, were separated from their parents in the Jan. 12 quake, and who are in danger of falling prey to child traffickers and other abusers. The Connecticut-based Save the Children has set up "Child Spaces" in 13 makeshift settlements. The Red Cross and others, meanwhile, are working to reunite families.

The post-quake needs of Haiti?s children were nonetheless outrunning the available help. Some youngsters were even being released from hospitals with no one to care for them ? there just aren?t enough beds for them.

"Health workers are being advised to monitor and send separated/unaccompanied children to child-friendly spaces," the U.N. humanitarian office said in its latest situation report.

The plight of the young is especially poignant even in a country where the U.N. estimates 3 million out of a population of 9 million need international assistance in the quake?s aftermath. "We still have a huge distance to go," said John Holmes, the U.N. relief coordinator.


Read more at:
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/i...n_shattered_streets/srvc=home&position=recent

 

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Re: Supplies and protection for unaccompanied children in Haiti

Prof. Survives Haiti Earthquake; Focuses on Preventing Further Public Health Disaster

Released: 1/26/2010 1:15 PM EST

Excerpt:

?Priority should be given to sufficient supplies of both drinking water and water for washing, and to optimal sanitation conditions for the prevention of diarrhea,? she says. ?Oral rehydration therapy and zinc should be widely available to help those who succumb to diarrhea to recover.

?Care should also be given to the kinds of foods delivered to people, ensuring that not only basic energy needs are met but also micronutrient nutrition is addressed. Ready-to-use supplemental and therapeutic foods like Medika Mamba in Haiti are dense in both calories and micronutrients and resistant to bacterial contamination, and consequently, should be used for preventing undernutrition and recovery from severe malnutrition.?

Medika Mamba is a nutrient-rich mixture of peanuts, sugar, oil, vitamins, minerals and powdered milk made locally with locally produced ingredients.

It is distributed in plastic containers for families to feed their children at home and can be stored for several months. It is typically given to children between 6 months and 5 years old. After starting to eat the ready-to-use therapeutic food, children start to show visible signs of improvement about 1-2 weeks. The cost of six weeks of treatment, enough to return a child to health, is less than U.S. $100.

Patricia Wolff, M.D., associate professor of clinical pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, provides Medika Mamba, or peanut-butter medicine, to malnourished children in Cap Haitien, Haiti, on the north coast, through her nonprofit organization, Meds & Food for Kids. Wolff, who divides her time between St. Louis and Haiti, returned to Cap Haitien soon after the earthquake to oversee the continued production of Medika Mamba.

Public health realities in Haiti

Deaths due to diarrhea were already high in Haiti, but with the earthquake there is tremendous potential for increases. ?One-quarter of Haitian children are stunted with low height-for-age and over one-fifth are underweight with low weight-for-age,? she says. ?We know now with certainty that undernutrition predisposes children to dying from infectious disease, especially diarrheal diseases. Being underweight doubles a child?s risk of death due to diarrhea, and for those severely malnourished, this risk increases by 3.4 to 9.5 fold.

?Sanitation conditions and access to clean water will deteriorate and increase the risk of cholera outbreaks and acute diarrhea and dysentery from E. coli, salmonella, and other pathogens,? she says.

According to Iannotti, another pre-earthquake statistic foreshadows more silent public health menaces. In Haiti, 61 percent of children 6-59 years are anemic and over 70 percent of children less than two years are anemic; nearly half (46 percent) of women of reproductive age are anemic.

?Anemia in developing countries usually results from a lack of iron in the diet, parasitic infection including helminthes and malaria, and chronic inflammation,? she says. ?Blood loss also causes anemia. Anemia can have many short- and long-term health and livelihood consequences, such as compromised cognitive and physical development in young children, poor birth outcomes in pregnant women, and in severe cases, increased risk of mortality in certain populations.?

Read more at:
http://www.newswise.com/articles/pr...-on-preventing-further-public-health-disaster