June 6, 2004
Carmel grad devotes life to Haiti’s street kids

Doug Perlitz, a 1988 graduate of Carmel High School in Mundelein, didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do when he went to Fairfield Universty in Connecticut. But Perlitz found his calling, not in the classroom, but on a volunteer service trip to Haiti between his junior and senior years.

After graduation, Perlitz worked for two years in Belize with Jesuit Volunteers International, then returned to Boston College for a master’s in theology. He went back to Haiti in 1996 to help Jesuit Father Paul Carrier lead a group from Fairfield, and was invited to stay and work at a hospital for six months. Eight years later, he’s still there.

Since 1997, Perlitz has operated two programs in Cap-Haitien, the nation’s second largest city, for boys who live on the street or whose families are so poor they might as well. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with staggering rates of unemployment, AIDS and other infectious diseases and an average life expectancy of less than 50 years. Rebels recently ousted the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in fighting that many of Perlitz’s young charges witnessed.

He spoke by telephone with Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin.

 

The Catholic New World: Why did you go back to Haiti?

Doug Perlitz: When I was a junior (at Fairfield University), I was chosen to go to Haiti in the summer of 1991—the summer between my junior and senior year. … We spent two weeks in a very, very, very simple living situation, in a convent with nuns, and went every day and worked with Mother Teresa’s sisters in one of two ways.

The first was feeding babies. The poor in Haiti drop their babies off at the home of Mother Teresa’s nuns, and being who they are, they take them all in, and then you have rooms and rooms of crying, hungry babies. They’re always looking for someone who is willing to change their diapers or feed them or whatever.

The other thing we did was work at a home for the dying. The (nuns) drive in the streets of Port-au-Prince and pick up people who are dying. They bring them home and give them a bed and kind of have them die with peace and dignity; they bathe them every day and pray with them and give them food.

I think when you do that when you’re 18 or 19 or 20, and you’re in the middle of Haiti, so there’s no foothold on what’s normal to you, you get changed profoundly.

 

TCNW: What do you do with the street kids?

DP: We have a two-step program. There’s the 13th Street Program, which is on 13th Street, so when the kids hear it, they know where it is. It opens at six in the morning and closes at five in the afternoon. They come in the morning and have quiet time. They have a shower, they have food—bread and bananas, and coffee sometimes, and sometimes spaghetti—and we have lockers where they can put their clothes.

About 9 a.m., they do games—soccer practice, checkers, things like that. At 11:30 they eat, and then we start school in the afternoon.

At school, we divide them up into age groups or ability groups. Some of them have been on the street for a year, but were in school before then, and some have never been to school, so we have kids who are learning to hold a pen to kids who would be like in fifth or sixth grade. Then they have a meal at the end of that too, at about 4:30. So they get three meals a day, education, we take care of their medical needs and their basic needs, and they’re not on the street.

Right now, we have about 50 kids coming to 13th Street.

 

TCNW: What about longer-term needs?

DP: We have a social worker and she tries to find out their histories. If there’s a kid who’s there every day, who’s really trying to follow the rules, she’ll try to find out about them: Do they have a mother? Do they have a father? Or can we find some kind of adult in the kid’s life who’s willing to be a support person?

We always find somebody. Maybe it’s somebody they helped, or somebody that had a restaurant and the kid came at night to wash dishes, who now will come and vouch for the kid. If the kid’s there everyday for six or seven months and we can find some support people, we would move them out to the Village.

 

TCNW: What’s the Village?

DP: The Village is the program for the kids who have really shown us they can do it. Among them, there are two categories: people who live in town, who have somewhere they can stay, and who would commute. Other kids are from farther out; their families might be two or three hours a way from Cap-Haitien, and they would live at the Village full-time.

During the day, we have school and a vocational program. Some of the kids who lived on the street when they were younger and ... if they didn’t get too much into drugs or anything, they go to private Catholic schools in town and then come back to the Village in the afternoon.

They come back together for the vocational program in the afternoon, which is sewing or woodworking or welding. In addition to that, they have a soccer team and music group. There’s a lot of other activities they do as well. We have 40 kids at the Village.

And we’re working on a third component, to help them transition back to life Haiti. That’s this year’s work.

 

TCNW: Are the programs co-ed or just for boys?

DP: It’s really just boys. For girls, the situation is even sadder. The girls—they have a word in Creole, they’re called “restaveks.” That would be a girl from a poor family who would be taken in by another family that might not be as poor and can give the girl something to eat and a place to stay.

Often, the girl will live in the family and do the grunt work for the rest of the family. If she’s lucky, she might be put in school, but she’s considered property of that family more or less. … The mother doesn’t mind, because at least she’s getting something to eat, and the mother can’t provide anything.

The poverty in Haiti is amazing, and people will do anything to survive. As they get older, often these girls are sexually or physically abused. Those girls wouldn’t even have the freedom to show up at the doors of 13th Street, and if we were to take them away, we’d be taking the families’ property.

 

TCNW: With Haiti being so poor, will the boys be able to find work, even with vocational skills?

DP: The model is to be multi-skilled. Say we’re going to teach a kid how to be a carpenter—it’s nice to have that skill in his pocket. But to really get by in Haiti, they need to be able to drive a car, so they can line up jobs driving; they need either welding or sewing; and they need a lot of little skills, too.

There’s land where the kid are growing and selling flowers. A couple of kids have rabbits that they’re producing and selling. Some kids have chickens and they’re selling the eggs. If they can get five or six skills to get by, they’ll have a better chance. There’s still no guarantee.

 

TCNW: What else do they get from the program?

DP: But then you have to look at issues of character. Are they going to be honest people? Are they going to be spiritual people? Are they going to be good?

Emotionally, these kids have just been through hell and back. If they’re not going to be able to live in a place that’s stable, they’re not going to be able to process what’s happening inside them. They’re not going to be able to hold a stable job anywhere because they’ve been terrorized their whole lives. Those aren’t really vocational skills. Those are more personal skills—emotional strength, trusting. In Haiti, people are just trying to survive, and you can’t trust your neighbor all the time. If there’s an advantage, you’ll take it because you have your own four kids to feed.

There are no guarantees that they’re not going to be poor. But are they going to be better parents because they were in our program? Yeah. Do they have a better chance of getting a job? Certainly. Are they going to better neighbors? For sure. They go and spend their Saturdays at the old folks home, taking care of those people, and those are skills that you can’t put on paper, caring for others, self-esteem … In a way, they’re seeds that we’re planting in Haiti, and I guess that’s where the faith comes in. How they’ll grow, we don’t know. We don’t what’s going to happen.

 

TCNW: Is there a religion component?

DP: There is. We have a chapel at the Village called the Chapel of the Miraculous Catch, based on the Gospel story where Jesus told the apostles to throw their nets in the water. We pray in the morning and also at night, and we have church on Sunday. The kids are not all Catholic and not everybody has to be. We do a prayer that is very ecumenical, but it’s very important that they pray and that they do service, like at the old folks home.

 

TCNW: How have the events of the last several months affected the kids?

DP: There were two or three days in February when what was happening in Cap-Haitien was the top story in the world. The rebels came in and buildings were burned and people were killed and people were arrested, and it was very scary, especially for street kids who had no place to go.

We opened again after this whole thing happened, and we had a lot of violence going on, a lot of violent behavior. These kids have grown up being abused, be it emotionally or physically or sexually, just being kicked in the street as people go by. They really are the grime of the existence in Haiti. In the U.S., we would have social workers and counselors and so forth. We don’t have that. We have a thin staff, and we’re asking them to deal with kids who have been through a lot. A lot of them grew up without any family, and they come back after seeing buildings burned and people killed and their country was under attack … too many things were upside down, and it was tough for them to get a foothold on anything. The only thing they really did have was the project itself.

We didn’t miss a day of the program, because two days before the rebels came in, we sent the kids home for carnival, which is the week of Ash Wednesday. It was a scheduled visit for them. When the kids came back, things pretty much were over. So we never told the kids we had to close down.

 

TCNW: How do you handle kids who are dealing with so many problems?

DP: It’s a challenge to keep the kids as focused on the activities as possible and to make them feel like they have a place where they can be normal kids. That’s more the case at the Village, because at 13th Street, the kids come and go. At the Village, it’s like you’re here, you have three meals a day, if you’re sick, someone will take care of you, no one’s going to hit you while you’re sleeping, here’s your bed, no one’s going to be in the bed with you.

They’re able to let it all hang out, and sometimes you have kids who are really, really quiet on the street, who don’t say a peep at the 13th Street program, and when they get to the Village and they’ve left the street entirely, a totally different personality will emerge. They might become really aggressive or they might become really angry or they might become really happy. They might be really aggressive at 13th Street and then become quiet, because they’re really a quiet a kid but they had to be aggressive to survive. The village is like, be who you really are. Our job is to water them. Or to give them as much rope as we can so they can run with it. We have to discover their talents.

I think we’ve done a pretty good job. When you find a kid who really, really loves something, whether it’s soccer, or going into the studio to record a song, or he’s got two or three rabbits and birds in a cage, or they love going to church on Sundays, that’s really cool. These are things they couldn’t do on the street

 

To learn more about the 13th Street Program or the Village, contact Jesuit Father Paul Carrier at Fairfield University by calling (203) 254-4000.

 INTERVIEW Archive