City in Focus: Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Last tuesday an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti. While global relief efforts have poured into the nation, the situation is still dire on nearly every front. We’re shifting the CiF focus this month to Port-au-Prince to contend for a breakthrough of God’s power and light in this hour of crisis.
The History of Haiti is a history of slavery. African-born plantation workers were culled to the island to support the booming sugar trade of the French colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century. At the height of slavery, the slaves outnumbered their masters 10-1. The Haitian Revolution was the only slave revolt in the New World that effected lasting freedom. Port-au-Prince became the first capitol city of the newly liberated Republic of Haiti. Unfortunately, the racial prejudice persisted past the revolution. In fact, the leader of the revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture, although he was determined to abolish slavery once and for all in Haiti, anticipated the insidious turn that slavery would take when he noticed poor, rural, black Haitian families sending their children to the cities, like Port-au-Prince, with the vain hope that they would find education. These children became the slave force of the free Haiti, and known today as the restevèks.
They are completely the property of the household that owns them, and instead of going to school are forced to complete all manner of work, domestic and sexual.
This entire caste of slave children has gone unnoticed by most of the western world. But their condition only worsens with a catastrophe like the recent earthquake. Natural disasters increase the vulnerability of children who are already vulnerable by snatching from them their sole parent or benevolent guardian that stands between them and outright sexual exploitation at the hand of a trafficker. A disaster of the magnitude of the recent earthquake can violently shift the fortunes of thousands of children in a single moment. And historically, of the armies of peace keepers and relief workers providing aid to disaster areas, some workers participate in child prostitution and become the newest market for traffickers.
Pray for revival in Haiti.
Pray for open doors for adoption agencies and Christ-based relief organizations.
ORGANIZATIONS:
Fishers of Men Ministries, International.
A Praying Church dedicated to winning the lost in Haiti.
