“Little Eyes”: Haiti’s street youth

By Emmanuel — February 26, 2010 | 2 comments

For the past few weeks, I’ve been wanting to tell a story about the big, overcrowded street market in the heart of Petion Ville, where the merchants lay their products on the ground from the pedestrian path to the driveway. A story about the women who leave their houses very early in the morning to work and only get back late at night. They work in a market where dangerous things are everywhere: electric wires over tilted poles, smoke, trash, and all sort of things that can harm their health.

I tried in vain to interview some of the merchants today. Some of them pretended to be too busy to be interviewed, while others complained about being interviewed too many times without ever seeing any changes from it. Because nobody wanted to be interviewed, but would permit me to photograph, I took some pictures in the morning, hoping they would tell some of the story for me.

When I came back in the afternoon to try the interviews again, my eye was caught by a little boy on the street. He had bare feet, dirty clothes on, and was begging along the street where fast cars were passing by. At first I thought he was crazy, or homeless and orphaned from the earthquake.

I followed this boy for a little bit, because I couldn’t understand what was going on. It’s not that there aren’t lot of kids in the streets, but they’re usually in squads. As I kept on following him, I realized he was really all by himself.

I decided to talk to him, even though I doubted he could provide any information. The first thing he said to me was “Gimmie some money, I’m very hungry, I’ve been walking and begging for hours and nobody gave me a thing”.

I gave him ten Haitian dollars, and asked his name; he told me “Ti Je” (”Little Eyes”). I asked him where he was going to, and he said “home”. Since I wanted to tell his story, I decided to follow him to his home nearby, a place called “Place Boyer”.

Once we arrived at his tent he earlier had called “home”, I met the woman who is in charge of him when his mother is selling goods at the market.

Knowing that she had neglected her responsibility, she did not want to be photographed with him (she told me he was a “wanderer”). But she allowed me to take pictures of him and answered all my questions.

This woman told me she was the family’s neighbor, which is why she had to keep an eye on him. She said that people call him “ti je” due to the deformation of his eyes, and that before the earthquake, he and his family were living in a slum village not too far from Petion-ville, but away from the city centre.

Because now it is possible for anybody to build a cottage in the street, or in any public place, the mother moved the family to Place Boyer; Ti je’s father disappeared during the earthquake.

Before I left, Ti je bought some plain rice and pea soup with the money I gave him in the camp and started eating.

I had to ask myself: in the years to come, what’s going to keep Ti je from all the downfalls of the streets: drugs, theft, prostitution, and all the lessons that come with them?

Port-au-Prince student, fixer and researcher Emmanuel Midi is blogging for Inside Disaster from Haiti. You can learn more about him in these blog posts, or connect with him on Facebook .

Emmanuel volunteers with the youth organization Fonds D’Actions pour le Développement, profiled by Nicolas Jolliet earlier this month.

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