Due to the catastrophic earthquake that left at least 1.3 million Haitians homeless, Haitian parents are abandoning their children in the hope that rescue organizations will offer them a better way of life, aid workers say.
A week after a 1-year-old toddler was found in a dumpster, his father showed up, only to abandon the child once again.
The baby wriggled in his cot, smiled and held up his arms. When the father didn’t touch him, the baby started to cry and kick his legs.
The man left moments after he arrived, never to be seen again, according to a report written by a social worker at the Saint Catherine Hospital in the Cite Soleil slum, where the child was taken.
Even before the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the island nation in January, poor parents were leaving children at orphanages where they would at least receive one meal a day. Now the number of abandoned children has skyrocketed, according to 37-year-old Tamara Palinka, who helped coordinate logistics at the University of Miami-run field hospital on the grounds of the airport.
In the week after the quake, the SOS orphanage announced on the radio that the orphanage had room for more orphans. The next day, the orphanage nearly doubled in size after staff found 120 children lined up outside the gate. In the three months since, the orphanage has tripled in size.
The SOS quickly realized that most of the new children were, in fact, not even orphans at all, according to spokeswoman Line Wolf-Nielsen. One mother dropped off three of her own children, whom she claimed were orphans found after the quake. Other parents have sent their children to the orphanage with neighbors or friends, making the task of locating the family even more difficult. One family went so far as to instruct their three sons to memorize a fictitious last name to complicate efforts to find the real parents. –ramone mack
