PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Outside the rusted gates of a boys elementary school, Acelin Lazarre peddles pencils, notebooks and lunch boxes.
When the streets are quiet, she can earn 25 to 30 gourdes, less than a dollar but enough to save school fees for her daughter and buy their single daily meal of rice or macaroni.
On a day when fighting between rival gangs and police closes the schools and empties the streets of potential buyers, Lazarre loses a few days' tuition, 14-year-old Lovely falls behind in her studies and they both go hungry.
Like most adults in Haiti, where 90% of the population lives in dire poverty, Lazarre is struggling for her child's education. In a nation where 53% of those 15 and older can read and write, political unrest has accelerated the decline of Haiti's schools, clouding children's prospects for an education.
Gunfire that rakes poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince has scared away many students, said Michel Metellus, principal of Liberia National Public School.
Since Sept. 30, when the latest wave of unrest broke out, classes have been canceled most days because neither students nor teachers wanted to risk trying to get to the downtown building.
"It goes from bad to worse. We need everything from chairs to books. Parents have no jobs so they can't afford to pay the fees. We can't even get the [state] financing we were promised because of the unrest," Metellus said of the shootouts between police and supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who are demanding his return from South Africa.
A former priest, Aristide rose to prominence in the late 1980s, promising to lift the masses from poverty through better education. He was elected president in 1990, ousted a year later in a military coup, then returned to power in 1994. A rebellion early this year drove him again into exile.
Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, remains economically paralyzed despite the deployment in March of a U.S.-led stabilization force and a U.N. peacekeeping mission that took over in June. Factories looted and burned in the aftermath of Aristide's Feb. 29 departure lie in ruins. Gunmen threatening police and others collaborating with the interim government have managed to shut down the port, through which most commercial goods and humanitarian aid passes.
Now teachers blame Aristide for the violence as well as for the crumbling state of education.
