(Reposted to follow rule no. 3...I hope)

An interesting article by Dady Chery on the culture of Haiti and why there were never any abandoned children for foreigners to adopt or 'rescue'.

http://www.dadychery.org/2014/06/14/homage-to-my-mothers-restavek-vodou-and-haitis-stolen-children/

Dady Chery is the Editor of Haiti Chery and the author of We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation. In addition to being an associate professor in the biological sciences, Chery is Haitian-born journalist, playwright, essayist, and poet who writes in English, French, and her native Kreyol.

There are no orphans in Haiti!

After a long silence at the other end of the line, my friend Jordan murmurs: “Come again?” He must be thinking I lost my senses. I realize how I sound. Someone else might imagine that I am ignorant of the extreme poverty in which most Haitians live, but Jordan and I have known each other more than 20 years.

Okay. I did not mean that there aren’t any orphans.Of course, many Haitian children lose their parents. But these children are never abandoned. Our families are very extended. When a child cannot be cared for by a living parent or becomes orphaned, a grandparent, aunt, uncle, sibling, cousin, or some other relative, adopts the child. If after the child becomes a teenager the family still cannot care for her, she is placed with a more prosperous family well known to the parent – often the home of a godparent. One cannot talk about orphaned Haitian children without confronting two highly controversial and interwoven subjects: Vodou and restavek. Both are part of the very fabric of the Haitian family, which is currently under vicious attack. The system of partial adoption that I described to Jordan, especially the case where a child is placed in the home of a more prosperous, though often unrelated, family is the restavek (to stay with) system. This system, which is well on its way to becoming as vilified as Vodou, is now a pretext for calling Haitians slavers even while they are being enslaved and their children are being stolen. In reality, for hundreds of years this kind of partial adoption has safeguarded young Haitians from the depredations of foreigners. The restavek system is profoundly subversive in that it intimately binds Haitians of different socioeconomic classes.

The theft of Haiti’s children is underway. Loving Haitian families who fit every qualification for the adoption of children are regarded as slavers and not permitted to adopt Haitian children. An adoption black market, with all the attendant corruption in Haitian high places, has grown to serve the needs of wealthy and middle-class whites who fail the criteria for adoption by normal routes in their home countries. Sexual predators come to Haiti to establish schools and orphanages. Some have been exposed, most have not. Grifters obtain young children by persuading the biological parents that their offspring will maintain contact with them. As for the poor teenage girls, there are always the garment factories with a going wage of about 40 cents per hour, or there is worse, much worse.

How ironic that Hillary Clinton writes a book It Takes a Village about the need for people to develop a culture of working together to raise children, and she and Bill were the ones who destroyed the culture that did.