Protecting Children

Orphanages abound in Haiti. In Port-au-Prince alone there are over 200 orphanages that the team I work with has visited in the last month There are some nice places and some not so nice places. Of the many thousands of children that the teams have counted many are not orphans in the true sense of the word. An orphan being a child with no mother or father; many of these children have one or more parents; they receive visits from their parents and even go home on holiday sometimes. In some ways these place are more like boarding schools, a place where parents without money leave their children to be cared for a short amount of time or for their lifetime.

What a desperate decision it must be to leave your child at a center because you can’t care for him, because you believe that place will offer them a better life in some way. Since I arrived I have been trying to figure out if culturally there is a different here than other countries that I have been in related to orphans. So far I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer but I would say to some degree yes and to some degree it is a culture perpetuated by the demand for adoptions from the US and Europe. There are so many more orphanages here than I remember in other places that I have been, so either I have not noticed them before or things are different here. I think it is mostly that things are different here, poorer here and the opportunity to leave you child are easier to access and not well controlled.

Now I will say that I am all for adoption and believe that it can be something very special. However, I have seen here the underhanded way that adoptions can take place and how some people are more interested in making money then truly finding a better life for a child. This exists everywhere but in a place with little government oversight of institutions with children and generally low civil registrations of births. Tracking orphans is difficult at best and nearly impossible in a disaster setting. This means that sometimes, dare I say even often, children with surviving parents are put up for adoption without the proper procedure of the parents approval taking place..

Part of the mandate of the UN under UNICEF is to protect the rights of the child. This includes protecting them from illegal adoptions and child trafficking. That is what I am doing here in Haiti. I am assisting UNICEF in tracking orphanages and assessing their needs My “cluster” within UNICEF the “Child Protection cluster” has three main activities at the moment: orphanages, child tracing, and anti-trafficking. There are intrinsically linked activities. As registering orphanages and visiting them in theory allows us to see what children are there and which ones are newly orphans and in need of trying to trace their families. While requesting children through child tracing and the orphanages in theory becomes a deterrent to child traffickers along with increased border security.

I think most everyone has heard about the American’s that were arrested a few weeks ago trying to cross the border to the Dominican Republic with 30 Haitian “orphans”. Due to the post disaster chaos of separated children and generally the difficult process of tracing children’s parents, the UNICEF suggest a 2 year stop of any foreign adoptions that were not already near completion before the earthquake. This is how long it could take to trace children’s parents and to set up a safe system that is child focused instead of monetarily focused. In the meantime UNICEF along with many wonderful international and local NGOS are assisting orphanages with food, water, tents, and other essential supplies.

My role is somewhat unglamorous as it involves mostly sitting in front of a computer or answering the phone; yet it is a key component of registering the orphanages and in the short and long term establishing a system of monitoring the children that are housed there. Day to day my job includes data entry, data analysis, and mapping of orphanage locations.

I hope that in the next few days I will be able to actually visit one of these places and see a little bit firsthand the children that I am helping to protect and put a better context to my Haiti experience outside the walls of the UN base. To finally have the opportunity to see one of the thousands of children that my work is protecting and maybe get to hold a little one in my arms for the moment, long enough to see in them the hope for a better Haiti and dare I say a better world for poor children all over the world.