Orphaned children bear brunt of earthquake aftermath

Lilian, six years old and alone, still asks when her mother will return from the market on the edge of Les Cayes in southern Haiti, a port badly affected by the earthquake.

When last month’s earthquake struck, Lilian was at home as her mother, Genieve, was selling fruit a few blocks away. When the ground began to convulse, the market partly collapsed. Genieve was hit by falling concrete and buried under rubble. Her death has left Lilian without anyone to care for her. “I don’t see my mum,” Lilian would repeat, according to Ketia Loraus, 40, a social worker who has been overseeing her case. “It was heartbreaking to hear her say that.”

The human tragedy of the 7.2-magnitude earthquake has yet to be fully counted. More than 2,200 people died and 30,000 homes were destroyed across towns and villages still cut off from relief workers. Hundreds are missing, and survivors suspect many will never be found. Tropical Storm Grace, arriving two days later, only piled on the misery.

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

“Most stay at a neighbour’s house, or in a makeshift shelter,” said Loraus. She is working with AVSI, an Italian charity, to provide psychological support for children who survived the disaster. Social workers say the authorities are unlikely to resolve anything quickly, given that the limited resources they had before have been depleted by the earthquake. Relief workers have also reported more children on their own.

“These cases are practically normal now, we’re always finding them,” Loraus said. “In the hospitals, there’s kids being treated without knowing where their parents are. At shelters, we see kids looking for food, separated from their families.”

The risks for unaccompanied children in Haiti are myriad. Street gangs are always on the lookout for young recruits, and girls are at particular risk of suffering sexual violence.

In Haiti, children often choose to flee disaster zones alone. After Hurricane Matthew ravaged southern Haiti in 2016, leaving 546 people dead and causing $2.8bn damage, rights groups saw a marked increase in unaccompanied children moving to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s chaotic capital.

The earthquake that struck the capital in 2010, killing 220,000 people, also triggered a wave of child migration.

Complicating the response for vulnerable children is the damage sustained by so many of the region’s schools. In Camp Perrin, a town 20km from Les Cayes, the Immaculate Mary school was completely destroyed. “We have no idea when we will open again,” said Jean-Pierre Loubeau, 60, one of the school’s governors.

“Whenever we open our classrooms again, that’s when we’ll know the extent of how many separated kids we’re dealing with,” said Loubeau. “The kids will need somewhere to go, because they are at great risk of exploitation if they don’t.”

The schools that survived are closed for the summer holidays, which have been pushed back at least a week to allow communities more time to reckon with the disaster. But when they open again, survivors who have been sheltering in the buildings will have to be evicted.

“It is so crucial for children who have just gone through this traumatic experience to have the normalcy and stability of being in a classroom with their friends and teachers,” said Bruno Maes, Unicef ’s representative in Haiti, after visiting a damaged school in Mazenod, near Les Cayes.

More than 300 schools across the three quake-struck provinces in Haiti’s south were destroyed or partly damaged, affecting 100,000 pupils and teachers, according to the UN agency.

Meanwhile, children are at risk of going hungry. There are 4.4 million people in the country of 11.5 million deemed to be “food insecure”, with 1.9 million children believed to be among them.

“People aren’t going to have anywhere to go, so the kids will look for aid from charities,” said Loraus, as a lorry of aid passes by on the road outside the school without stopping.

“Every time there’s a natural disaster in Haiti – and there’s a lot of them – it’s always the kids who suffer most.”