The Year of the Great Seventh by Teresa Orts

Many of my kids were born in that dreadful slum. The Santa Chiara Children’s Center is in a very poor area not far from Cité Soleil. It is in this environment of relentless, barbaric violence that I operate a home for 50 abandoned children. People are beheaded or burned alive for opposing the local gang leader.

Murder, rape, kidnapping, looting and shootings are common. More than 30 armed gangs roam these streets, each controlling a few blocks apiece. Parents are sometimes forced to give up their children to servitude because they cannot afford to feed them. Half the children in Cité Soleil will die before age 5. Intestinal worms may consume as much as 20 percent of an infected child’s daily nutritional intake. People eat “pies” made of mud and contaminated water. Women and children squat in rancid, insect-infested rubbish to defecate and urinate. Pigs rummage through trash in search of food. Some are forced to stay awake all night and beat rats away with sticks. Children run around naked or in tattered clothes. Open sewers and the stench of rotting garbage intensify the ugly reality.

On rainy nights, the poor sleep in the mud. People here live in porous, rusting tin shacks, most without electricity. More than a quarter million people are crammed into its three square miles, making it the sprawling capital’s largest slum. According to the U.N., 234 people were killed or injured in the Port-au-Prince slum of Cité Soleil during one four-day stretch in July alone.Ĭité Soleil means “City of the Sun.” But even under the stunningly bright Caribbean sun, Cité Soleil is a dark and dangerous place, a district so wretched few outsiders dare enter it. By July, the scale of insane violence was dominating all facets of life. Gangs have taken over poor neighborhoods and blocked the roads that connect the city with the rest of the country. In the first six months of 2022, the United Nations documented 934 killings, 684 serious injuries and 680 kidnappings in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Violence and chaos were woven into the fabric of life here long before the bloody revolution that finally birthed this nation in 1804, but today they have spread anew and intensified to unthinkable levels.

Haiti is a profoundly impoverished country teetering on the brink of anarchy.

The Year of the Great Seventh by Teresa Orts