Caitlin Hu, Etant Dupain and Paula Newton, edited by Eliza Anyangwe and Eliza Mackintosh,CNN.
(Summarized)
Dajabón, DR, and Les Cayes, Haiti
Lina found out she was pregnant with twins,
First she felt a flash of happiness. Then she burst into tears in front of the ultrasound technician.
Lina is one of countless numbers of women and girls around the world raising children fathered by UN peacekeepers.
Lina met the father while she was working as a cleaner at the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince.
“I called the father and told him I was pregnant with twins.
He said, ‘How can that be? From me? I’m going to leave the country, you’ll have bastards.
She gave birth to a girl and boy.
Their father left the country two months later.
Warring gangs have driven thousands from their homes in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, causing prices to skyrocket. Mothers describe a desperate struggle to survive and care for their children. From her hometown, a port city on Haiti’s north coast, Lina hopped on a moto-taxi with her twin infants—one in each arm–and began the hours-long journey southeast, stopping only once, at the country’s Toussaint Louverture International Airport. With no money to buy the babies’ milk or diapers, she knocked on car windows asking strangers for help.
“I did what I had to do.”
Lina presented her twins at UN Mission Headquarters. Officials took photographs. They asked permission for DNA tests. The test results were positive. A few years later small amounts of money for her children began to arrive from a parade of organizations. Documents accompanying the funds, either describe Lina as a victim of sexual exploitation and abuse or said she had been referred to them by UN’s Office of the Victims’ Rights Advocate.
“Imagine you’ve been raped by someone and then a representative of that person’s employer comes to talk to you, and says something like, ‘Oh you know, the wheels of justice turn slowly, but would you like a sewing machine?'”
Lina now lives with her twins in a small apartment in Dajabón, a dusty trading town in the Dominican Republic. The children sleep on a small bed and Lina sleeps on the tiled floor. Her son experiences severe pain from a medical condition. Lina ekes out a living as a street vendor, selling ginger-scented donuts that she makes at home. But ends never meet. Some nights, she goes hungry.
Over the past six years, Lina has received small payments authorized by the UN, coming at unpredictable times, but the sums have been enough to cover school fees for the year, which are about $500 per child. She and others say they have received nothing for this school year, which has already started.
The way funds like these are managed undermines “basic human dignity,” says Beatrice Lindstrom, a Harvard Law School lecturer and former legal director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, who has worked on a variety of victims’ claims. “It’s re-victimizing the women by stripping them of the ability to have agency and to have their rights recognized,” Lindstrom says.
In the seaside town of Port Salut, home to a now-shuttered UN base, Rose Joseph—who became pregnant with a peacekeeper’s child when she was a teenager—asked the UN for help rebuilding her house after it was destroyed in an earthquake. She received only enough money to construct a foundation, Rose and her son live in a lean-to made of sticks at the construction site.
