Sleeping Rough in Port-Au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti

Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti. By J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. ISBN: 0-8130-3009-9. 256 pages. $59.95 cloth. Review by Greg Mason, Hunter College of the City University of New York When you conjure up thoughts of the life of a street child in a developing country, what do you see? Chances are that you imagine a poorly-clothed child, hungry and begging for money, without family, without friends, without hope for a better future. In his revealing book, Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince, J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat paints a vivid picture of the lives of street children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. On the one hand, the author, who conducted his ethnography over a ten-year period, would confirm our initial visualizations of street children. On the other hand, the author shows how complex and intricate the lives of street children can be in Haiti. Street children may beg, but they also earn economic clout by performing various forms of work in a country where the average adult generates one U.S. dollar per day. Throughout the book, Kovats-Bernat pushes readers to reexamine their preconceptions of what a street child is, and nudges us not to underestimate their distinct place in Haitian society. Kovats-Bernat is an anthropologist by training, and early on he cites Victor Turner's work on liminal space and time, and its meaning in ritual. The author connects with liminal theory and posits that the street, which is home to hundreds if not thousands of Haitian children in the capital of Port-au-Prince, is a permanently liminal space that is constantly being contested. His method for collecting all of his information was very casual, but certainly not easy. Over a ten-year period, Kovats-Bernat developed rapport with a handful of street children in Port-au-Prince. He convinced them to trust him, and many became his study participants. Yet in some ways, it seems too cold and impersonal to refer to these children as anonymous "social science research participants. " The author reminds the reader that street children have names, faces, sicknesses, triumphs and tragedies. How this be done effectively? Kovats-Bernat sandwiches short biographical sketches of particular street children between his chapters. This underscores both the personal nature of his research as well as the colorful diversity of this bunch of street children in Port-au-Prince. Most are not from Port-au-Prince; some have spent time in school or at missions run by international aid organizations. Many have extensive kin networks either in the city or in the surrounding countryside. These sketches also give Kovats-Bernat an opportunity to convey the personalities of his street children, while the chapters are devoted to the larger forces at work in Haiti that affect the daily lives of the street children. The "back and forth" nature of the text from the micro-level to the macro-level might cause the narrative at times to lack continuity, but this book avoids any confusion with its well-written chapters that give the reader background information (for example, on the tenuous relationship between the Haitian National Police [PNH] and street children) as well as new perspectives (on topics such as the economic agency of street children in Haiti). The book is written by an anthropologist, but seeks to appeal to a much broader audience including sociologists, psychologists, and those in human development and public health, as well as in international affairs and politics. One of the real jewels of this book is the author's ability to show how street children have become an institution in Haiti, as common as the restavek (indentured child servant). This is because the Haitian government has failed to deal adequately with the causes of children living on the street. Then again, how can a government deal with these fundamental issues when a coup d'etat occurs every few years? …