International Save the Children Alliance
Giving children hope in storm ravaged Haiti
Just inside the city hall of Jacmel, Haiti’s Southeast capital, you can hear the sound of children’s chatter and laughter.
More than 150 children, ages 3–17, who left their homes to escape flood waters and took refuge in temporary shelters following four hurricanes, gather each day in an upstairs meeting room to play, learn, and hang out with their friends.
With support from Save the Children, which has been working in Haiti to improve children’s well-being since 1985, the bare-walled conference room has been transformed into a child-friendly safe space. Here children have a supervised, protected place to express themselves, enjoy a nutritious snack, and begin to heal emotionally from their recent experiences while allowing their parents valuable time to rebuild their lives.
Mondesire, a 9-year-old, says she likes to participate in the activities. “I like the safe space because I play and make new friends. But I love school, and I want to go back to school.”
Save the Children is working to provide these unique emotional-support programs to as many as 6,500 children affected by the storms over the coming months.
Gradually, as waters recede from devastated urban neighborhoods and rural villages, classrooms are emptied of mud and school roofs are repaired, this immediate shelter support will transition to getting kids back to school and helping parents recover lost livelihoods.
Stanley, 16, who participates in the safe space along with his 4-year-old brother, Jean Alix, explains the needs. “The hurricane completely destroyed everything we had, even our uniforms and brand new school supplies, which we just bought.”
Save the Children has already begun to create similar child-friendly areas for children in the northern city coastal city of Gonaives, where the majority of its 300,000 residents were affected by flooding from the tropical storms.
However, the quadruple whammy of hurricanes has done more than damage houses and schools. Large tracts of Haiti’s cropland were destroyed by mudslides and floodwaters, destroying up to 80 percent of the upcoming harvest and seriously affecting the means for adults to earn a living and feed their families.
Mondesire’s mother had a small business selling food and personal items. She lost all of her stock in the flood. She doubts that she can send her daughter, an A student, back to school, which is scheduled to resume next week.
Many parents share this uncertainty.
Exilia who has four children enrolled in the safe-space program says she is sure that she will not be able to enroll her children in school this fall since all her possessions were swept away. “My kids are happy since they started coming to the Jacmel center. Save the Children offers them fun activities that I cannot provide while we are living with friends”.
“We feel good when we come here,” says Exilia’s son, Madsen, 10. “We like the staff. They help us play, sing and learn.”
Save the Children in Haiti, which targets hundred of thousands of children and their families annually through its ongoing programs in education, nutrition, health and protection, seeks support for its emergency response to help reach more children affected by hurricanes through the child-friendly spaces activities and other recovery programmes.
