Friday, December 17, 1999
Teacher takes gifts to land where he was slave
Students donated clothing for Haiti's needy children
BY TOM O'NEILL
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Jean-Robert Cadet, third from left, with some students who donated clothing.
(Gary Landers photo)
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Time melts but the memories stay frozen.
As Jean-Robert Cadet did decades ago, some Haitian children still sleep in rags under kitchen tables, uneducated and unloved but not unwanted.
Child forced-labor is more than wanted in Haiti. It's part of the cultural fabric.
But the history and French teacher at Madeira Junior-Senior High — now a father himself — wants to end a system that once reduced his view of the world to the undersides of tables and the outsides of schools.
Mr. Cadet is on something of a mission, and his flight leaves today. He'll return from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, two days before Christmas.
As a small child, Mr. Cadet was forced into unpaid domestic servitude — called a restavec — before joining his “owners” in the United States at age 14. They split soon after.
He will be traveling alone today in his journey to meet with nongovernment agencies that run restavec facilities. But he'll be accompanied by bundles of clothes — and the spirit with which his Madeira High students recently responded to a simple 4-by-6 photo of a boy playing soccer.
The boy wore no clothes, they learned, because he owned only one pair of shorts and his mother was washing them. The next day, students began arriving with donations.
Then more kids arrived with more clothes — skirts, shirts, jackets, pants, underwear, socks. Even a prized Madeira girls soccer jersey.
“Teen-agers,” Mr. Cadet said Wednesday in his Madeira basement family room, where a UNICEF video of child-slavery atrocities in Haiti brought tears that filled his eyes but never fell.
“You think they don't care. But deep down, they care a lot.”
Mr. Cadet is 44, though he doesn't know his month of birth. He was taken aback by the generosity he neither asked for nor expected.
For the students, their willingness to help was fueled not so much by their “good life” but by their respect for Mr. Cadet.
In doing so, however, the students taught the teacher a lesson.
“Because they're people, too,” seventh-grader August Platt said Thursday during a break in Mr. Cadet's 10 a.m. French class. “They're kids, too. They have feelings, too.”
Mr. Cadet, who spoke this month with United Nations officials about the restavec issue, said restavecs in Haiti have feelings but are forbidden to express them.
Restavecs are typically poor children given up by their parents to work for wealthy families in hopes of improving their chances for prosperity.
The children are considered property to be kept, transferred or, as is the case with many teens, put out on the street. Often, they are beaten for misdeeds such as breaking a glass, which happened to Mr. Cadet.
“It is one of the worst forms of child labor, particularly if it has a trafficking aspect, which it does,” Alec Fyfe, senior adviser for child protection at UNICEF, said Thursday. “And it's supported by the wealthy and the middle class. ... It goes unnoticed because it's part of the social fabric.”
UNICEF, an agency of the U.N., estimates there are 300,000 restavecs in Haiti. African slaves in the Caribbean island rebelled against French rule two centuries ago. In 1804, Haiti became the first independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere. But the restavec system of servitude endured.
Mr. Cadet's life was simple: He slept under the kitchen table in rags, then got up to carry to school the books of his owner's children.
He called them Mister or Mademoiselle, never by name.
Then he returned to do domestic work. In Mr. Cadet's case, that included washing the feet and changing the chamber pot of the woman who “owned” him.
“I want to raise consciousness so that the Haitian government can't hide,” Mr. Cadet explained in a soft, measured voice.
Mr. Cadet's father was a successful coffee and chocolate importer who had an affair with his cook, producing Mr. Cadet. When the mother died, his father rejected him, sending him off to be the property of a single woman he knew.
As a child, Mr. Cadet knew no better.
“I think his story is a very compelling one,” said Mr. Fyfe, who met with Mr. Cadet at a United Nations conference this month. “It's amazing actually, isn't it, the way he's risen above it? I thought he was a very powerful advocate.”
Few restavecs rise above their childhoods, as Mr. Cadet did. He arrived in Spring Valley, N.Y., at 14 with the equivalent of a second-grade education. He now holds an undergraduate degree from the University of South Florida and a master's from the University of Cincinnati. He's been teaching at Madeira Junior-Senior High for five years. His wife, Cindy, also teaches there.
Mr. Cadet's 1998 book, Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, detailed his life there and journey here. He returned to Haiti last year. The book also shone a light on a widely accepted practice that violated Haiti's own charter denouncing slavery.
“I want to make the word "restavec' like "apartheid,'” Mr. Cadet explained, adding that Americans' outrage would be stronger if the oppressors in Haiti were white, not black.
“People didn't know what the term apartheid meant until people started talking about it,” he said.
In room 218 at Madeira Junior-Senior High, they did more than just talk.
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