When I was about seven years old, on my first trip to Haiti, I remember seeing skinny, dark-skinned girls sweeping front paths, carrying buckets of water on their heads and hoisting heavy bins, while other children their age walked to school in crisply pressed uniforms.

I recall taking an interest in these girls because they were barely older than I was yet something in their faces disturbed me; they were young but they had weary expressions that belonged to tired old women.

I didn't know the name for these children until I was older and picked up a book called Restavec, by Jean-Robert Cadet. When I asked my parents more about it they said it was a shame but true, it was their country's dirty little secret.

The term restavec (or restavek in Creole) means "stay with" and refers to poor children taken in by families as servants. The children are supposedly given food, clothing, and even schooling in exchange for work. But the majority are not sent to school or allowed to play. They are essentially child slaves. Reports on the topic, from former restavecs and children's organizations have shown that restavecs, mainly girls, are beaten, left to sleep on floors, poorly nourished and given raggedly clothes to dress in. That's why it was so easy for me to recognize their status when I was only seven, they are at the bottom of the Haitian caste system.

It is a tragic irony, because Haiti was the first country to abolish slavery (see my post from 1/2/09). Yet today, there are still restavecs in Haiti despite the international attention that has been focused on the situation. In fact, we only have boys in the Clermont Center for Homeless Adolescents because the girls have usually been snatched away to be restavecs.

To learn more about restavecs, check out Fondasyon Limyè Lavi an organization dedicated to ending the restavec situation in Haiti.

Tonight's episode of Law and Order deals with a child slave trade ring between Haiti and New York, (NBC 10pm/9 Central). American Current readers, do let me know what you think of the episode, as I'll only be able to see it later and online.

Thanks for reading this and do pass it on!

This post is from my blog: http://currentsbetweenshores.blogspot.com

I love my right to free speech as much as the next blogger and being a journalist, I happen to be a big fan of the US Bill of Rights. The problem is, those rights are extended to ignorant and bigoted fools as well. The right to bear arms is a prime example of an American freedom gone awry, with every wacko and potential psychopath having only to walk to Walmart to exercise that right. But I won’t go into the number of Americans who die from guns now. That’s another post.

What I’ve been considering lately, as have German politicians, is how to deal with the freedom of speech, expression and peaceable assembly, when some citizens happen to be bald-headed, combat-boot wearing thugs who have a strong dislike of Jews and immigrants. The German constitution protects their rights too, although it’s illegal to present or wear a Swastika in public and the old Nazi salute was banned after the war.

But even without wearing Swastikas or rigidly extending their arms, their beliefs are obvious. It’s not illegal to hate someone for being non-German or Jewish, as long as it doesn’t result in violence. But often it does. In some parts of Germany, some degree of neo-Nazi violence (from vandalizing Jewish cemeteries to physically attacking foreigners of color) is an almost daily occurrence.

The violent neoNazis are easy to arrest, throw in jail and make a news story out of, until the shock dies down and the incident goes into the archives. Harder still are the far right political parties in Germany that have actual representation in state parliaments, and are getting more popular!

As unemployment rises, factories close and the welfare state becomes less generous, far right parties like the NPD garner more votes from people who aren’t necessarily mentally challenged bigots but Germans simply afraid their jobs will be taken by a foreigner (sound familiar America?)

Last Saturday, a neoNazi knocked on the door of a Bavarian police chief, stabbed him in the stomach and passed on “greetings from the national resistance movement.” Since then, the fundamental problem of neoNazis has come back to the limelight. Now, it’s getting scary. They’re not only going after immigrants, they’re attacking prominent Germans.

The incident has got politicians and pundits worked up in a frenzy. Some German politicians call for banning far right political parties, but they can’t always prove ties to neoNazi thugs. And, well, there is that whole freedom of expression thing.

As despicable as neoNazis are (and we have plenty in America, too. And lots of other nuts like that church that holds up “We hate fags” signs up at funerals of US soldiers who fell in Iraq), we can’t infringe on their right without infringing on everyone else’s. We learned this all too well in the aftermath of legislation like The Patriot Act and similar laws passed in the EU.

It is quite a quandary, because to ban them is undemocratic but to let them grow and thrive is dangerous. What do you think?

This post is from my blog: http://currentsbetweenshores.blogspot.com

I’ve told my eldest son several times that pirates are not real, which is pretty much true since the parrot-toting, one-eyed characters in his books don’t really exist.

The problem is, my son has caught on to the fact that pirates sure seem to be mentioned a lot in the news as of late. He doesn’t watch TV but he does listen closely when I try to get in a couple minutes of English-language radio every day. “You know mom,” he said, “I don’t think you’re right about pirates. Are you listening to this?”

Indeed, I was listening to the news and I regretted having left it on. I had two options. Tell my son the full, very complicated truth: These pirates are not cute little boys in costumes but poor and desperate people watching ships transport valuable commodities past their homes. They're probably being manipulated by a bigger mafia that organizes the stints and leaves the "pirates" with as little money as big-time drug dealers do their errand boys. And, like drugs that eventually poison a community, the pirates even prevent aid from getting to their own shores. And do I tell him that these pirates don’t have swords and canons but Kalashnikovs that traumatize unsuspecting sailors? Or do I go with option two and sugar coat it?

I looked down at his excited eyes and opted for a combination of the two.

“Well,” I began. “They are talking about pirates but not the pirates you see in your books.”

“So?”

“So, I just mean that these pirates are different. They don’t have patches or hooks.”

“But they do have ships!”

“Well, they have boats.”

“Then where do they put all the gold?”

“They don’t have gold, they don’t have anything. That’s why they’re robbing the ships.”

“They’re robbers?” I saw a light in my son’s eyes dim. “Are they bad guys?”

I thought about all the times I told him to tell the truth, how lying would only get him into trouble because the truth always comes out. So was I lying when I told him about Santa Claus? He’s eventually going to figure that one out, unless reports of a fat man in a red suit start airing on the radio. But as I watched a report about the pirates on television, while my son slept, I realized the truth wasn’t completely true either. Yes, robbers are technically “bad guys” but then I remembered what one of the masked pirates told the TV journalist, “We won’t hurt the sailors and we’re not political. We’re just hungry.” This truth, I decided, was far too complicated for my five year-old.

“Not all of them are bad guys but they’re doing a bad thing by robbing the big ships,” I said. “That’s why they, er, that’s why they have to swing away really fast on the ropes.”

“So they can get away!” my son exclaimed.

I sighed. “Yes, so they can get away.”

“Do they always get away?”

“Depends on how fast they are.”

“And what about the parrots?"

“The parrots? Oh well, the parrots have it easy. They can just fly away.”

“Do you think Santa will bring me a parrot for Christmas?”

I cringed at the thought of the noise level such a creature would bring into our already loud house. “Well, maybe not a real one, they’re hard to find on the North Pole. But a stuffed animal parrot, I bet Santa could manage that.”

This text appeared originally on my blog on December 9, 2008 at http://currentsbetweenshores.blogspot.com