‘I don’t see my mother’: Haiti earthquake leaves new generation of orphans | global development

Six-year-old Lillian is still single, asking when her mother will be back from the market on the outskirts of Les Cayes in southern Haiti.

When an earthquake struck last month, Lillian was at home, occasionally checking on her neighbors while her mother, Geneva, was selling fruit several blocks away. When the ground began to convulse, the market partially collapsed. Geneva was hit by falling concrete and buried under rubble. Her death left Lillian without anyone to take care of her.

Lillian was repeating, “I don’t see my mom,” according to Kitia Lauraus, 40, the social worker who oversees her case. “It was heartbreaking to hear her say that.”

The human tragedy of the 7.2 magnitude earthquake was not fully accounted for. More than 2,200 people were killed and 30,000 homes destroyed across towns and villages that remain cut off from aid workers. Hundreds are missing, and survivors suspect that many have not been found. The storm of Tropical Storm, which arrived two days later, only accumulated misery.

Amid the carnage, an unknown number of children like Lillian – whose name has been changed to protect her identity – were separated from their parents and caregivers, who were either killed or disappeared.

“Most of them are staying at the neighbor’s house or in a temporary shelter,” says Lauraus, at a school on the outskirts of Les Caye, a port hard hit by the earthquake.

A girl checks her phone in Li Kai as she sits among the rubble of her home destroyed in the August earthquake. Photo: Orlando Barria/EPA

Loraus works with AVSI, an Italian charity, to provide psychological support to children who survived the disaster. “There are at least 15 children whose parents have not been located and who have passed here today.”

At first, Lillian was greeted by a neighbor, his young daughter was injured in the earthquake and is still in the hospital, then he sent her to his uncle.

Social workers say the authorities are unlikely to solve anything quickly, given that the limited resources they had before have been depleted by the earthquake. Aid workers also reported more children alone.

“There are at least 15 children whose parents have not been located and who have passed here today,” says social worker Kitia Lauraus. Photography: Joe Barkin Daniels

“These cases are practically normal now, and we always find them,” says Lauras, as a group of young children play behind her, singing in a circle. “In hospitals, there are children who are receiving treatment without knowing where their parents are. When we go to shelters, we see children looking for food, and they are again separated from their families.”

The risks to unaccompanied children in Haiti are myriad. Street gangs are always on the lookout for young recruits, while distant relatives who end up looking after them can run them, beg or sell in the streets. Girls are at particular risk of experiencing sexual violence.

In Haiti, children often choose to flee disaster areas, with widespread insecurity and poverty alone. After Hurricane Matthew devastated southern Haiti in 2016, leaving 546 dead and causing $2.8 billion (£2 billion) in damage, rights groups saw a marked increase in the movement of unaccompanied children to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s chaotic capital.

One shelter on the border with the Dominican Republic — with which Haiti shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola — said more young boys arrived in the months since that disaster. The earthquake that hit the capital in 2010, which killed 220,000 people, also caused a wave of child exodus.

Every time a natural disaster occurs in Haiti – and there are plenty of them – children always suffer the most.

Complicating the response for vulnerable children is the damage to many of the area’s schools. In Camp Perrin, a town 13 miles from Les Cayes, the Immaculate School of Mary, run by missionaries since its founding in 1945 and which had 900 pupils at the time of the earthquake, was completely destroyed.

“We have no idea when the school will open again, we have to rebuild from scratch,” says Jean-Pierre Lebo, 60, one of the school’s principals, as a group of volunteers work to clear the rubble. After frantic work in the scorching sun, some are taking breaks sitting at rescued school desks.

“When we open our classrooms again, then we will know how many separated children we are dealing with,” says Lobo, who has been sleeping in his car since the earthquake that destroyed his house. “Children will need somewhere to go, because they are in danger of being exploited if they don’t.”

The surviving schools are closed due to the summer break, which has been postponed for at least a week to allow communities more time to cope with the disaster. But when they open again, the survivors who were sheltering in the buildings will have to be evacuated.

A worker assesses the damage to the Lycée Phillipe Guerrier in Les Cayes. The earthquake destroyed or destroyed at least 300 schools in Haiti. Photo: Richard Perrin/AFP/Getty

“It is very important for children who have just gone through this painful and harsh experience of the earthquake and extreme weather, to have a normal and stable life in the classroom with their friends and teachers,” says Bruno Maes, UNICEF Representative in Haiti. Visiting a damaged school in Maznaud, near Les Cayes, in the days following the disaster.

More than 300 schools in the three quake-hit provinces in southern Haiti have been destroyed or partially damaged, affecting 100,000 students and teachers, the United Nations agency reported.

Meanwhile, children are at risk of starvation. There are 4.4 million people in the country of 11.5 million people considered “food insecure”, and 1.9 million children are believed to be among them.

“People will have nowhere to go, so children will look for help from charities,” says Lauraus, as an aid truck drives by on the road outside the school without stopping.

“Every time there is a natural disaster in Haiti – and there are a lot of them – the children always suffer the most.”

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