Haiti gangs take aim at disabled children
Born with cerebral palsy and a build-up of fluid in his brain, Wasserman, 7 years old, hadn’t eaten in days when he and two other severely disabled children were rushed from their orphanage outside Port-au-Prince to a hospital in the Haitian capital because they were suffering from uncontrollable seizures. As they passed a soccer field near a shantytown along a major thoroughfare, their truck suddenly stopped. Heavily armed men had taken over the road and were ordering traffic to turn back. “The gangs cracked our windshield and threatened to shoot our tires if we didn’t turn around,” said Susie Krabacher, who has been caring for Haiti’s disabled, abandoned and orphaned children since 1994 and was tracking the trip three weeks ago from her home in Aspen, Colorado. “Even though we had a dying kid in the car, they were just laughing at us.”
By the time the truck made the hour-long trip back to Krabacher’s HaitiChildren orphanage, Wasserman was dead. The other two, Jean Claude, 14, and Babette, 20, died soon after. “We’ve had three kids die within three days of each other and another one this morning because of all this violence,” said Krabacher, who co-founded the orphanage with her husband.
Two years after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, the violence in Haiti by all accounts grows worse daily. More than 80% of the capital is controlled by armed gangs continually battling over turf. Children are unable to go to school, families are starving and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes amid an unending frenzy of rapes, kidnappings and killings. And yet, even among a population facing daily depredations, the country’s abandoned and disabled children stand out.
There is a solution at hand for the 62 disabled kids and adults at HaitiChildren, a lifesaving opportunity that would get them out of the country and into the care of an internationally renowned charity in Jamaica until it is safe to return. A respected Catholic priest, a former U.S. ambassador and the prime minister and foreign minister of Jamaica are pushing for the move. But as with all things in Haiti, nothing is easy. Krabacher has been trying to move the kids, many of whom she has been watching over since they were infants, into the care of Mustard Seed Communities in Jamaica since June. But her efforts are being blocked by an entrenched Haitian bureaucracy, a troubled child-welfare system and a disturbing history of children being whisked out of the country in times of crisis never to be seen or heard from again.
Abandoned by their families in hospital wards or on roadways, the kids at HaitiChildren have been diagnosed with a variety of disabilities, including Down syndrome, multiple sclerosis, autism and brain injury from seizures. At least one little boy is HIV positive. Those who do not use a wheelchair have difficulty walking. They are conditions that not only require specialized care but also make them outcasts. Stigmatized, they are called kokobe, meaning “cripple” in Creole. A gang invaded the orphanage last week, pointing their guns and searching the place as they taunted the kids in wheelchairs. “The gangs have been shouting, ‘You need to put those kids out of their misery or we will put them out,’ ” Krabacher said.
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