She still has the same broken front teeth and those innocently-wide eyes. Her home is still a filthy orphanage on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where you won't find a single toy and where the children sleep, up to eight to a room, on rusty bunk beds. But Wideleine Fils Amie no longer counts a red tartan dress as her only worldly possession: a couple of months ago, she also acquired a yellow school uniform.
|
|
The nine-year-old told me she was "hungry" and "scared" when we first met, on 19 January, in the backyard of the Foyer de Sion orphanage in Pétionville. Then, she was one of 18 anxious girls and boys, aged 2-15, waiting for help that seemed like it would never arrive. They hadn't a drop of clean drinking water left and their entire food reserves consisted of three bags of rice, three bags of beans, a few yams and half a bottle of ancient orange cordial.
Today, she's a healthier, happier child than the traumatised specimen whose plight filled the front page of this newspaper and was later featured on TV programmes, websites, radio shows and in newsprint around the world.
Wideleine, who came to symbolise the tragedy facing hundreds of thousands of Haiti's orphans in the aftermath of January's earthquake, has also learned how to smile.
I finally found her on Friday, at the Ecole Evangelique de Pentecoste de Beraca, a modest school, with roughly fifty pupils, perched on the side of a hill half a mile's walk from the orphanage she still calls home. It was mid- afternoon and students were sitting in a maths lesson, chanting times tables in French from behind wooden desks.
"She's a clever girl," said the headmaster, Herold Lira. "She talks a lot, especially likes reading and is as happy as anyone could expect, given what she went through."
Wideleine, who never knew her father and lost her mother when she was six, is one of half a dozen children from the Foyer de Sion receiving what amounts to a full-time education.
Across Haiti, hundreds of other schools have now re-opened in one of the few good news stories to come out of a still-ruined country where millions remain homeless and reliant on handouts and where the rebuilding effort has barely started. "I am always happy here," she told me, in a shy whisper. "My favourite subject is reading, but I also enjoy learning to count. My favourite way to spend time is with books, so I have decided that when I grow up, I want to be a teacher."
To the delight of Mr Lira, she added: "I think it is very important to be in school, because my teachers have been showing me how to be a better person."
The tale of the girl who now wears a yellow dress doesn't yet have a happy ending, though. The fact Wideleine is still living at the Foyer de Sion means that, like the vast majority of the country's hundreds of thousands of orphans, she remains almost completely institutionalised and seems to have no prospect of being successfully resettled outside of the orphanage.
Click here to continue reading.
SOURCE: The Independant
