The last time Faida Pierre, 10, went to school, her mother found her stranded on the roof of the school’s building, barefoot and crying, while a gang stormed the surrounding downtown Port-au-Prince neighborhood.
The principal and teachers had called parents to pick up their children as the sound of gunfire grew louder and armed men approached. Then everyone ran for their lives. Faida ended up alone.
“There was a panic,” Faida recalled, “and people were running out of the building. People were saying that the bandits had attacked the neighborhood, so kids were trying to reach the rooftop.”
That was a year ago, and, like some 300,000 other children across Haiti, Faida, who was in third grade, stopped going to school.
Robbed of their education and their prospects for the future, legions of Haitian children are the overlooked victims of the gang violence that has crippled the country: homeless, hungry and often targeted for recruitment by the armed groups they fled.
