Children's Rights Volunteers Prepare for Petition Effort

Last week, the 88 community members who will volunteer as petition workers for the next two months gathered to attend a seminar on children's rights hosted by COSEDERF, Fond des Blancs' new children's rights committee. The petition is the people of Fond des Blanc's first effort to eliminate the community's restavek system, a form of child slavery present throughout Haiti that involves the trafficking of a child by his or her parents to a family, which agrees, in principle, to care for the child, provide schooling, food, shelter, and clothing in exchange for domestic labor. The system fails to protect the child's rights when, in many cases, the employer deprives the child of schooling and family life and replaces it with long days of work with no pay and living conditions inferior to those of the overseer’s family. COSEDERF hopes to deliver 10,000 signatures to the Haitian Government, the United Nations, and the international community on December 10, International Human Rights Day, so as to formally demand that the chosen recipients make available to the children of Fond des Blancs a list of basic services that they are currently without, including their constitutional right to free and compulsory primary education. The SBHF wishes to support the group in all its work as the foundation believes that COSEDERF's dedication to children's rights follows its own mission statement to improve the quality of life of all people in Fond des Blancs.

A Sign of Economic Growth in FdB

As a result of a goat-breeding project organized and maintained by RATRAP, the largest local peasant cooperative in Fond des Blancs, and supported, in part, by the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation, Fond des Blancs today sells an average of 1,000 goats per week to residents all across Haiti's Southern Department. The goats, which Haitians buy to raise, sell, or eat may also be indirectly responsible for an increase in school attendance in the past few years, as residents often use the monetary supplement that the goats provide to send their children to school each Fall. RATRAP leadership believes that the program may have set Fond des Blancs on a path to become the goat-market capital of the department.

Hospital's New Sonography Capabilities

With the arrival of long-term St. Boniface volunteer and sonography technician, Vicki Bales, students Kenide and Sergo (pictured above) have the opportunity over the next several months to train on the indispensable machine, which has already found that over 85% of its sonographies turn up positive for pathologies.