An interpretation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom.
A restavec (or restavek; from the French reste avec, “one who stays with”) is a child in Haiti who is sent by their parents to work for a host household as a domestic servant because the parents lack the resources required to support the child. (wikipedia)
I came across this article today, about a 9-year-old restavec named Sende Sencil.
Beaming, and in clean clothes for the first time since the earthquake, Sende, who was thought to be an orphan, returned to the hospital’s tents with the doctors.
As they walked, a man approached them on the street and reached out to grab Sende.
“I’m looking for her. She’s my family,” the doctors remember the man saying in broken English. “I’m taking her home.”
Pediatricians Tina Rezaiyan and Liz Hines, had been looking forward to the day when Sende’s parents might come to claim her, but this was not what they’d anticipated.
“She was trembling and hiding behind us. She was so scared of him,” said Hines, a second-year pediatric resident at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Flashback to 1982: Walking home from school with my best friend, Sheila.* We’d been best friends since the first grade; we walked home from school every day together, hand in hand–though not that day, because one of her arms was in a cast and she needed the other one to carry her books. My eight-year-old self didn’t even notice the cast; it had been there for a few weeks, it was part of the scenery. Only my thirty-six-year-old self stares at it, remembering how Sheila got it.
“So can you spend the night tonight?” Sheila asked me.
I could, and I did, though even my eight-year-old self dreaded it a little. Not a lot, because Sheila was there and she was my best friend and we always had such fun–putting her mom’s 45s on the plastic record player upstairs and setting it on “78″–who needed an actual Alvin & The Chipmunks record when you had a stack of 45s and a record player with a “78″ setting? And eight-year-olds think that what they see and live is the way it is for everybody–they don’t resist the system because they aren’t even aware that there is one. But the night Sheila’s stepdad broke her arm was still fairly fresh in my memory, and I had no cozy feeling that I was entirely safe from him either–he’d hurt me before too, though nowhere near to the degree he hurt Sheila.
But Sheila did need a lot of help–there were all the newspapers to fold and rubber-band, stacks and piles and mountains of them, for her paper route the next morning, and there were her little brothers to take care of, and there were dishes to wash and the bathroom to scrub and all the floors to vacuum–I especially hated the dishes. The water was thick and sludgy; it reeked and clung to my hands, wrists, arms–it made my stomach heave, the look and the smell of it.
Nobody there ever cleaned anything but us, Sheila and me. When we got to her house, I had to step around a mushy, skidded-up pile of pancakes on the floor–I only knew they were pancakes because I’d seen one of her little brothers, in a tantrum, throw them there the weekend before, the last time I had spent the night. We cleaned those up, of course, while we were cooking dinner (spaghetti, with ketchup because we couldn’t find any cans of sauce and neither of us had the faintest idea how to make anything else to put on it).
Sheila’s alarm clock went off at 5 am–it was pitch-black outside and freezing. I helped her strap the newspaper bags on, two of them, then wrestled my own up over my shoulder, balancing my backpack with my schoolbooks and hers both stuffed into it on the other shoulder. We slogged out of the house and set off on Sheila’s route. I never, ever wanted a paper route of my own.
“I can’t wait for summer vacation,” I puffed–Sheila had tireless legs and even though I was the faster runner, I couldn’t compete with her ability to walk, walk and keep on walking at the same steady, unwavering pace. “I can’t wait for summer.”
She was silent, then she said, “I have to go visit my dad.”
“Not all summer?” I was horrified–I couldn’t go all summer without seeing her!
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I have to ask my mom.” Silence again, for a while–I was getting too breathless to speak much anyway, between Sheila’s soldierly pace and the need to hurl a newspaper every fifteen yards or so. But something did occur to me–
“He doesn’t–” I skipped forward a few paces, to catch up with her. “He doesn’t–hurt you like your stepdad does, does he?” There was a curious taboo in ever really articulating these things, even though I’d watched them and she of course knew I had watched them happen–but the taboo was there. Impossible to explain it.
Her face was pale and cold under the streetlamp. “He doesn’t hit me,” she said. She quickened her pace; I fell behind, despite my best efforts. “When I’m twelve,” she said to me, over her shoulder, “I’m going to go live with my grandma.”
“Oh really?” I asked. Her grandma lived in town–I brightened. So she wasn’t going away, at least. “You can do that?”
“When you’re twelve you can pick who you want to live with,” she said. “My grandma already said I can come live with her.”
I couldn’t imagine my mother letting me go live with my grandmother, and I would really miss my little sister anyway–it never occurred to me that Sheila might miss her little brothers, though. It wasn’t even remotely the same situation. Her brothers didn’t love her–they treated her like a not-particularly-valued nursemaid and mostly all they ever did was get her into trouble.
Following the earthquake in Haiti some people have been pushing for adoption of Haitian children by folks in the global north. This includes Penny Young Nance, CEO of the anti-choice, anti-feminist organization Concerned Women for America.
A group called the Adoptees of Color Roundtable has issued a Statement on Haiti written from the perspective of a group of adoptees of color who oppose international adoption of Haitian children.
This statement reflects the position of an international community of adoptees of color who wish to pose a critical intervention in the discourse and actions affecting the child victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We are domestic and international adoptees with many years of research and both personal and professional experience in adoption studies and activism. We are a community of scholars, activists, professors, artists, lawyers, social workers and health care workers who speak with the knowledge that North Americans and Europeans are lining up to adopt the “orphaned children” of the Haitian earthquake, and who feel compelled to voice our opinion…
…about what it means to be “saved” or “rescued” through adoption. (via)
Not that Sheila was a restavec, of course. Besides the fact that she wasn’t Haitian, the people working her like a dog and physically and sexually abusing her happened to be her own parents as opposed to second cousins or aunts and uncles. Would anyone have been horrified at her loss of the unique American cultural upbringing and knowledge of her own genetic peoples’ history if she’d been “saved” or “rescued” by adoption into a wealthy, stable Haitian family..? Would she have been?
Even if Sende is doing okay now, some doubt whether anyone in Haiti — a poor country with few services to protect children even before the earthquake — will keep track of her to make sure she hadn’t been sent again to the man who terrified her.
“The agencies will fail in looking after her,” said Dr. Art Fournier, associate dean for community health at the University of Miami, who met Sende at the hospital. “I would have kept her at the hospital until they brought the mother forward and they could get a detailed history of Sende’s circumstances.”
Fournier, who’s been doing medical missions in Haiti for 15 years and is author of “The Zombie Curse,” a book about the country, said he worries the parents will give her away again.
“The parents aren’t bad parents. These are the survival choices they have to make, and desperate times make for desperate survival choices,” he said. “Hopefully Sende can make an impassioned plea not to be sent back to the godparents.”
Because impassioned pleas made by children in these circumstances have any impact at all, whatsoever, on what decisions their parents make about the uses they are being put to..? If that’s the plan, Sende’s pretty much fucked. And I find the attitude about the parents not being “bad” parents interesting. I am a parent, and I would sell myself long before I sold one of my children to someone else into a situation where the best outcome appears to be “house slave but allowed to drink a Coke every day and go to school.” I don’t remember Sheila getting Cokes but I do recall all the Kool-Aid she could drink being one of her perks, along with, indeed, elementary school. We were very good at making Kool-Aid by the 5-gallon jug. I can still remember the big sugar scoop we used to make it–just what every growing kid needs most!
I do understand the concern the self-identified adoptees of color have with the concept of “adoptee farming” and the long history those of Western European descent have of essentially committing cultural genocide by kidnapping all the kids and declaring them “orphans” or “better off faux-white” so they can be “brought up properly.” After all, I’m a quarter Native American myself and not only am I a blue-eyed blonde, I wouldn’t know a word of any Apache language if it bit me in the ass and I have only the haziest notion of the history and culture of any of the Apache tribes. (In short, I’m a great living example of how successful these programs of cultural and racial genocide can be.) However, I wonder how many of these adoptees of color were restavecs themselves.
We uphold that Haitian children have a right to a family and a history that is their own and that Haitians themselves have a right to determine what happens to their own children. We resist the racist, colonialist mentality that positions the Western nuclear family as superior to other conceptions of family, and we seek to challenge those who abuse the phrase “Every child deserves a family” to rethink how this phrase is used to justify the removal of children from Haiti for the fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Western and Northern desire for ownership of Haitian children directly contributes to the destruction of existing family and community structures in Haiti.
Just as long as we keep the relative ordering of the hierarchy of needs firmly in mind, people.
*Not her real name.
Amazing. Absolutely wonderful and insightful post! I’m mulling this over and will probably be back to comment once I’ve organized my thoughts properly.
“I am a parent, and I would sell myself long before I sold one of my children to someone else into a situation where the best outcome appears to be “house slave but allowed to drink a Coke every day and go to school.”
You don’t know what you would do, until you have to do it. If you had, say, six kids, and by selling one, you could be sure that she would eat every day, and the money you got would enable the other five to eat every day for at least a few months . . .
But you can’t even imagine that you’d be in this situation.
Thousands of families were in this situation, in this country, in the 1800s. The problem is that we have a very very short memory in the US. It leads to statements such as yours, where there is no empathy. Think of your childhood friend, and imagine that her family sold her into this situation because they Needed the Money. And imagine that everyone you knew was living the same way. Sleeping in a shipping crate on the sidewalk in front of a respectable business, looking in garbage cans to feed their kids, and feeling lucky when they found someone who would take care of one of the kids, and actually pay for him or her as well.
This happened in the US, in my grandmother’s time.
::shrug:: You could say “you don’t know what you’d do til you’re in that exact, precise situation” about ANY situation that you have not exactly, precisely been in and have a certain degree of accuracy, I suppose. However, I personally am comfortable stating what I think my most likely response or reaction in a situation based upon my detailed knowledge of myself and various past experiences of deprivation etc. Certainly if my choice was between my children starving to death and me selling them, no if ands or buts about it, I’d sell them. Death is The End, after all–no chance at a better life anymore. However, I’m pretty sure I could make some decent money by whoring myself out, and I really am quite comfortable with my inner surety that I’d do that before I’d sell my kids into a restavec situation. To be honest, no, I don’t have any empathy for anyone who’d make the opposite choice. I would a thousand times rather I be sexually abused than any child, anywhere at all, much less one of my very own. Since you clearly feel differently, I’d love to hear how you justify it.
Sende it seems kinda wants to be with her parents anyway or at least be able to be with her mother.