Haiti- The poorest country in the western hemisphere. Your job is to closely look through the pictures, read every caption, and watch the video at the end. Then, complete a paper with your reflections.

A Haitian woman searches for something to recover from the trash at a garbage dump in Port-au-Prince, Saturday, Jan. 27, 2007. Haiti, a former French colony, is one of the poorest countries in the world with a majority of people living on less than $2 per day. 

A Haitian child chases another across a footbridge over an open sewer canal on the sea at the edge of the Cite Soleil slum, in Port au Prince. (Brennan Linsley/AP)

This is the Truttier Waste Disposal Dump near the giant slums of Cité Soleil; it is the largest landfill site for garbage, including medical and human waste, in all of Haiti. Hundreds of children are living here trying to survive by scavenging through the garbage for food or something they can sell.

There are an estimated 400,000 children without parents in Haiti There are an estimated 400,000 children without parents in Haiti. Many were lost in the earthquake; some go off to find work, never to return. Some parents just abandon their children because they can’t feed them. The children often end up with relatives as Restavec (child slave), or just sold as slaves. Theirs is a savage existence in a brutal world.

Many of the children that live in some of the poorest villages such as Sapaterre, the land of mud cookies; the Truttier Waste Disposal Dump; or the salt flats of Gonaïves, never get an opportunity to go to school, rarely get a hot meal, and suffer from many childhood diseases that can often be cured with over-the-counter medication, but the families have no money for food, school or health care, and the children must work all day.

Most Haitian children have “jobs to do” each day, which does not leave enough time to go to school. 

In some of the villages, they can barely survive on what the land around them can provide. In Sapaterre, it is the clay. The whole village is involved with the secretive business of making Bon Bon Tè (mud cookies). It lies in the Central Plateau of Haiti, where food is so scarce that the village children must eat these mud cookies, and they are selling them in the street markets. Even the littlest children are put to work. The youngest children break up the rock that is brought up from the clay mine.

The young girls process the clay and water mixture and get it ready to be made into “dough.”

An older girl mixes water, a little salt and oil to make the batter An older girl mixes water, a little salt and oil to make the batter. Then the cookies are laid out to bake in the sun.

http://www. huffingtonpost http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/10/daily-life-haiti-photos_n_4420743.html http://loveachild.com/2016/08/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-child-in-haiti/

Now, go back to the middle school website to click on the next link called “Haiti video” When you have had time to look at the pictures, read the captions, and watch the video, you will need to get a paper from the sub and answer some questions. Think about each response. Your should not have one sentence answers.