Reply #2: 12-year-old girl on hit list for giving Aristide flowers

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12-year-old girl on hit list for giving Aristide flowers


One of Haiti's 400,000 restaveks (unpaid domestic servants) is in hiding in Northern Haiti. Death squads targeted her after they looted her school, where they found a photograph of her giving flowers to President Aristide. The girl, whose name has been withheld for her own safety, is 12 years old. Her story was read Monday on Flashpoints, the investigative news show broadcast weekdays at 5 p.m. on KPFA 94.1 FM.

It is the words of Aristide that freed me, and it is the words about Aristide that condemn me.

My mother died when I was a child, and my father sent me to live with a family in Cap Haitian. I was four years old. Every day I got up and I washed the floor. I hauled water on my head. I went to the market and bought food and charcoal. I cooked the food and I washed the clothes. I did work all day and my back hurt.

I felt that I was not a person, just a zombie walking around asleep. I was not allowed to eat at the table or sleep in a bed. Instead I ate whatever food was left when others were finished. I slept under the table with the dogs. I was not yet alive. I had not been born.

President Aristide spoke about the restaveks on the radio, and he said, “All the restaveks are people.” I did not know who he was, so it made me laugh because I thought he must be a fool to think I was a person and to say that the restaveks are the future of Haiti.

http://www.sfbayview.com/031004/onhitlist031004.shtml