As the safety crisis in Haiti continues, the humanitarian aid group Haiti Family Care Network is urging U.S. Christian donors to refrain from worsening the situation by donating to orphanages and to redirect their efforts as a substitute toward initiatives helping parents support their children.
“There are literally higher ways to take care of the needs of kids than constructing and supporting orphanages,” said Heather Nozea, chair of the network.
In 2021, five humanitarian organizations created Haiti Family Care Network to vary how relief for kids works within the impoverished, often chaotically led nation. In 2011, the yr after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake killed some 300,000, mostly across the capital, Port-au-Prince, orphanages proliferated from about 300 to 754, despite their failures to supply appropriate care for kids.
“Everyone assumed that the most effective strategy to respond was by constructing and supporting latest orphanages and it became an answer to problems without actually addressing the actual problem,” said Nozea, who has worked in Haiti for eight years for Rapha International, a company that fights human trafficking.
In many cases, parents placed their children in orphanages to ensure they’d receive consistent meals, health care and education. In some instances, children have been separated from their families simply to fill voids in orphanages, ensuring that the orphanage industry would proceed to grow.
“More than 80% of them, they’ve families they will be connected to, so we prefer to call them residential care centers,” said Frédérique Jean-Baptiste, a toddler protection program manager for Catholic Relief Services based in Port-au-Prince.
The creation of those privately run agencies was made possible largely by international donations, mostly from American Christians. According to a Lumos report, Americans donated $1.4 billion within the months after the earthquake, the majority of it from faith-based groups. American Catholics alone were chargeable for some $85 million of the full.
A 2017 report by IBESR, the Haitian adoption authority, revealed that only 30 of the 754 orphanages in Port-au-Prince met minimum standards of care. The report said the overwhelming majority presented a risk for kids and really helpful their immediate closure.
Jean-Baptiste said cases of physical and verbal abuse are frequent within the orphanages. The Lumos report also draws attention to the suffering endured by children with disabilities.
A childhood in an orphanage has long-lasting effects on young people’s development, said Nozea, noting that, with many rules and every day structure, children aren’t given a probability to develop independence. Sometimes residents’ cognitive and private development is slowed. Once they leave the orphanages to pursue life on their very own, most of the young adults who grew up in orphanages show an absence of emotional, social and life skills.
Nozea said she has seen young adults unable to take care of themselves and manage money. “The biggest populations that I’ve seen struggle in Haiti are young adults coming out of orphanages, who have not learned the life skills that a toddler naturally learns as they grow up in a family,” she said.
Armed gangs now control 80% of the capital through acts of terror, recurrently resorting to physical and sexual violence and to kidnappings. Since January, 35,000 people have been displaced because of gang violence, and 1,500 have died.
This crisis has put additional strain on families’ capacities to supply for his or her children, and humanitarian staff share renewed fears that the 2010 scenario will repeat itself and more children will find yourself in orphanages.
In this context, the network has made efforts to persuade Christian donors to shift away from funding for orphanages to deal with family-strengthening initiatives. But since many congregations and other donors have strong ties with the agencies they support, diverting the flow of money is difficult. Many churches recurrently bring donor congregations’ representatives to go to the orphanages and meet with the kids, cementing the bonds between donors and orphanages.
“When you begin to learn and realize that perhaps it is not what’s best for youths, that generally is a really hard thing to return to terms with. So we get that, and we’re really empathetic to that. We don’t judge people,” said Nozea.
Direct discussions with pastors and individual donors have proved to be probably the most efficient in these situations.
“We wish to ensure that that on this current crisis that Haiti goes through again, that welfare organizations or good folks who wish to help don’t repeat the mistakes of the past,” said Jean-Baptiste.
© Religion News Service
