I woke up one morning last week with a first-world dilemma.
I have a rack of mostly Italian-made silk ties — all bought over the years from Goidel, a hole-in-the-wall clothing shop on New York City’s Lower East Side. For some reason, I had trouble choosing which one to wear with my light-blue dress shirt and black slacks. The blue with the beige swirl? The blue with horizontal gold stripes? How about the one with the mostly dark blue border and the yellow midsection? It took me about two minutes to decide, an eternity for me and probably most men I know.
At the same time a few miles away in St. Paul, Vednita Carter was busy sending out a last-minute appeal for medical supplies for her trip to Haiti this week.
“This is the first time I’m going there,” Carter told me when we got in touch. “I hear it’s pretty bad.”
Carter runs Breaking Free, an advocacy group that has helped rescue and provide assistance to prostituted young girls and women for more than 18 years. Such victimization and trafficking remains a constant battle. Girls as young as 12 and 13 are peddled daily on the streets, online, in back alleys, rest stops, private homes and motels here and across the nation.
According to Carter’s group, nearly half the “johns” busted by Minnesota cops in 2013-14 were married and had daughters. More than 87 percent were white, nearly 60 percent were in the 30-to-49 age range, and 72 percent either attended a college or graduated from one.
HAITIAN CHILDREN SOLD
But what’s going on in Haiti, particularly after the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 310,000 and displaced 1.2 million people, is off-the-charts disturbing. Kids are brazenly being sold — by strangers and relatives — into forced labor, indentured servitude and prostitution as easily as chickens or fish at an open market.
UNICEF estimates 225,000 are “restavek,” or child domestic slaves (“restavek” in Creole means “stay with”). More than 3,000 are smuggled across the Haiti/Dominican Republic border annually, many of them sexually exploited by a growing child sex tourism industry from America and Europe.
According to a U.S. State Department report, “Dismissed and runaway children from domestic servitude make up a significant proportion of the large population of street children who end up forced into prostitution, begging, or street crime by criminal gangs in Haiti.”
The smugglers pretty much operate with impunity on either side of the border.
“All the officials know who the traffickers are but don’t report them,” Regino Martinez, a Jesuit priest and director of the Border Solidarity Foundation in Dajabon, a Dominican border town, told the Miami Herald in a 2010 expose on the Haitian child-trafficking crisis. The outspoken priest recently was assaulted by unknown men who ambushed him on a town street.
Rose Gbadamassi, a Minneapolis resident and founder of the Haitian Community of Minnesota group, invited Carter on the upcoming trip after she learned about Breaking Free at a recent event.
“I believe she can help with programs about violence and also help with what’s happening with the children in Haiti,” said Gbadamassi, who is of Haitian descent. The humanitarian trip is centered on providing medical and other needs to Masson-Sion, a school for children in a rural section of Port-au-Prince.
VITAMINS AND SOCKS
Carter spent last week making last-minute preparations and filling a suitcase with Tylenol, multivitamins, toothbrushes and socks donated by Breaking Free supporters and others.
“I am really looking forward to this trip, as my hopes are high that maybe I can help the people of Haiti that are lost in the life of sex trafficking to find a way out and know that they are worth much more than being bought and sold,” Carter explained. “I also want to educate the community about the dynamics of the issue of sex trafficking so that they can have a deeper understanding of the issue and continue to provide the needed services as well as educate others.”
I won’t fret that much picking out a tie next time.
Rubén Rosario can be reached at 651-228-5454 or rrosario@ pioneerpress.com. Follow him at twitter.com/nycrican.
