PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The floors were concrete and the windows were broken. There was no electricity or running water. Lunch looked like watery grits. Beds were fashioned from sheets of cardboard. And the only toilet did not work.

But the Foyer of Patience is like hundreds of places that pass as orphanages for thousands of children in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Many centers are barely habitable, much less licensed. They have no means to provide real schooling, or basic medical care, so children spend their days engaged in mindless activities, and many die from treatable illnesses.

And in the wake of an earthquake that has left this city in ruins, there is growing concern that an already-strained system is being overwhelmed, that inadequate orphanages are taking in more children than they can handle, and that vulnerable parents are turning to unregulated and often shady organizations for help.

Haitian and international authorities also fear that less scrupulous orphanages are taking advantage of the chaos to round up children in crisis and offer them for sale as indentured servants and sex slaves.

Haiti's child welfare system was broken before the earthquake struck, a casualty of poverty and ineffectual government. The earthquake intensified both problems as it shattered homes and drove hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, multiplying the number of children in need of care.

But it took the arrest last weekend of 10 Americans caught trying to leave the country with 33 Haitian children to focus international attention on the nation's most vulnerable population. There is no clear evidence that the Americans, who said they were trying to rescue the children from the earthquake, meant any harm.

But international children's advocacy groups say the ease with which the Americans could scoop up a busload of undocumented children points out the lack of safeguards in the system.

"This has called the world's attention because it is the first clear piece of evidence that our fears have come true," said Patricia Vargas, the regional coordinator for SOS Children's Villages, which provides services to abandoned children around the world. "Our concern as an organization is how many other cases are out there that we are not aware of."

The front line of the system is the orphanage, which in Haiti runs the gamut from large, well-equipped institutions with significant international financing to one-room hovels where a single woman in a poor slum cares for abandoned children as best she can.

Most of the children living in them, authorities said, are not orphans at all, but children whose parents are unable to provide for them. To desperate parents, the orphanage is a godsend, a temporary solution to help a child survive a particularly tough economic stretch.

Many orphanages offer regular visiting hours for parents, and when their situations improve, parents are allowed to pick up their children and take them back home.

But instead of protecting vulnerable children, the authorities fear that some orphanages have become tools of their exploitation.

"There are many so-called orphanages that have opened in the last couple of years that are not really orphanages at all," said Frantz Thermilus, chief of Haiti's National Judicial Police. "They are fronts for criminal organizations that take advantage of people who are homeless and hungry. And with the earthquake, they see an opportunity to strike in a big way."

There is no precise count of the number of orphanages in this country, the number of children living in them, or the number of Haitian children who are victims of trafficking, although UNICEF estimates that number in the tens of thousands per year.

Authorities said thousands of those trafficked were sold as servants, known as restaveks, for well-to-do Haitian families. Others, officials say, are smuggled into the Dominican Republic to do domestic and agricultural work, often in appalling conditions, without any rights.

Haitian authorities acknowledge that the efforts of a financially struggling government plagued by corruption have proved little match for the highly organized, multimillion-dollar criminal networks.

In the wake of the earthquake, the authorities put all adoptions on hold pending a review of hundreds of applications already in process.

Ginger Thompson,

The New York Times

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