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NEWS from the front lines
         of the fight against poverty

 

December 21st, 2022

I am so excited to announce that the Women’s Association of Lafon (Asosyason Fanm Lafon or AFL) has signed a lease and is moving into a permanent facility –– a beautiful two-story house in the center of our community –– funded by Cultural Capital Haiti’s
Women's Empowerment Project.

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My name is Fabienne Lerine. I am a native of Lafon, a rural area just outside the Haitian city of Jacmel, and I’ve lived here my whole life. As president of AFL, I make it my job to notice the problems my community confronts every day. Some of these problems are societal –– economics, politics –– but others are more personal, like cases of intimate partner violence, where each case is its own unique story of trauma.

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Fabienne Lerine, President of AFL, holding the "A"


Another problem, which is both societal and personal, is the fact that so many young girls in our community are getting pregnant by the time they’re 15 or 16. The reason they’re getting pregnant at such an early age is that they are not getting sex education at home, or in school either. That’s why AFL is now taking on this role, holding sex education classes to inform these young people about the dangers of unprotected sexual activity. This involves teaching them about birth control methods like condoms and the pill, but also teaching them skills for taking charge of their bodily autonomy and standing up to the men in their lives.
 

These young girls suffer a lot of sexual abuse, at the hands of boys their own age and also grown men. Men often take advantage of the situation when a girl can’t buy her own food or clothing. A guy will spend five or ten US dollars on her and then they sleep with her, and then she gets pregnant. So she drops out of school. These young girls can’t even take care of themselves at that age, let alone a young child.

I see this scenario repeated again and again and again in my community. We need to equip these young women to break the cycle.

 

There is one young member of our association named Wisline. She is a strong young woman who has a lot of capacity. But recently we realized that something was wrong. She came to us and told us that she was being sexually and physically abused. She had a boyfriend that beat her and

Wisline's story

Wisline's story

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abused her verbally. She didn’t want to have sex with him every night, but he forced her to have sex. Because she didn’t have anywhere else to sleep, she had to accept all this aggression. He ended up busting up her head, busting up her mouth.
 

That’s when I contacted CCH. They sent us some money immediately so we could get her out of that situation. We rented her a room, and found her some work through another organization, doing athletic training for younger girls. She is a really fantastic soccer coach, and this work gives her joy.

But there are so many cases like this among the population that we’re serving.

We have another young woman named Francesca. Her mother and father are no longer alive. She lives with her sister-in-law. The husband of the sister is constantly propositioning her, and sometimes touches her at night, because they all sleep in one room, in one bed.


 

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