A Nation Loses Its Childhood

"I made them mad at me," the skinny 15-year-old recalls of the two women who had paid a pittance for her six years ago and then put her to work as a maid. "I broke the heel off my shoe, so they beat me with their sandals."

Their anger not fully vented, the women she called Auntie and Maman then singed her chest and arms with jolts from a frayed electrical cord, Madeleine recounts, nervously rocking and shifting her legs, stork-like, at the memory.

"They wanted to mark me so that I would remember."

Dispatched to the slums of the Haitian capital when she was 9 by parents unable to feed her, Madeleine had been delivered by a trader into a life of unpaid domestic servitude in exchange for food and shelter. Like an estimated 300,000 other children in this poorest of Western countries, she had no alternative except homelessness and hunger.

Foreign relief workers and Roman Catholic charities lately have been encouraging Haiti's child slaves to come out of the shadows to seek help -- and to expose a century-old practice that has subjected them to shocking abuse. Their growing numbers have prompted questions about whether the world's only successful national slave rebellion 200 years ago was really a victory.

As Haiti approaches the Jan. 1 bicentennial of its independence from French colonial rule, the plight of child slaves is threatening to overshadow official celebrations. It is also a measure of this ravaged country's progress in the two centuries since the slave rebellion.

"How can we be celebrating the bicentennial when this is still going on?" says Father Pierre St. Vistal, sweeping his hand to take in the barefoot, scarred and ragged children huddled around the doorway of his overwhelmed mission. "How can we as Haitians celebrate anything when our kids are on the streets, dying of hunger? This isn't a time for celebration but for being ashamed."

St. Vistal's mission offers hot meals and a crude, wood-planked sleeping loft under its tin roof for 45 of the most mistreated girls from the surrounding shantytown of Cite de Dieu, or City of God. Six hundred others, still toiling in nearby hovels, come in for food and lessons when their patrons allow it. The Catholic priest says he is sometimes confronted with machetes when he urges the keepers to let the children take advantage of schooling paid for by foreign charities.