When the light begins to fade each night, thin silhouettes begin moving freely about a treed refuge tucked off the highway on the outskirts of town.
Whether or not there’s food to cook, somebody starts the fire with twigs harvested from the nearby wood; a few sprinkles of gasoline give the flames energy. In the darkness, it’s difficult to tell how many people are living in the handful of flimsy camping tents scattered among the trees.
It’s for exactly that reason that the HIV-positive young women who sleep here – orphaned teens who have been raped and burned and, in one case, blinded in one eye – wait until the sun slips away before they return: If the property owner who lent them space for their tents knew the true size of their group, they would be evicted.
Now, more than ever, they truly have no place else to go.
On Jan. 12, the epic earthquake that rocked Haiti wiped out the downtown safe house that a local HIV-awareness group had rented for the girls to live in.
By then, life had already been especially cruel by several metrics – all were born with HIV and have lost their parents to AIDS. Loss of the space where they had begun to feel human again was crushing: Jacmel is a place where discrimination against people with HIV is rampant. The virus is so misunderstood that people still believe it can be contracted by sharing silverware with infected people.
“When people hear a person has AIDS, he’s fired from his job,” said Moro Baruk, an influential Jacmel-based artist and designer who, after the earthquake, has begun advocating for HIV-infected people. “Children are kicked out of school because they have AIDS. Tenants are kicked out for having AIDS,” he said.
Those who live with HIV know that well.
“A psychologist told me that when you have the virus, you have to live isolated,” said Edeline, a 16-year-old who lived in the house. “He said you can’t live with everybody else. Police should arrest [infected] people for taking from the same water source.”
In the days after the quake, the teens ended up beneath a sheet-and-twig structure on the soccer pitch at Lycee Pinchinat, Jacmel’s largest and most notorious camp for the internally displaced. There, they were taunted and ostracized by others who feared contracting the virus.
And then there was the rape: On a night long before gas-powered light standards were installed on the field, a man crept into the girls’ shanty. His hands fell first upon 15-year-old Katyana. While he forced himself on her, he jammed his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams.
It wasn’t long after that night that Marie-Lucie Mentor, an AIDS advocate with the non-profit group KALMI (which stands for Kombit Aysien Pou Lavi Myio, or Haitian Committee for a Better Life) shuttled the 25 or girls living with the virus at Pinchinat to the new, temporary campsite. She also moved about the same number of infected male teens out of Pinchinat and into an isolated hillside community called LaVanneau, where they’ll stay until she can find better accommodations to replace the safe houses she originally intended for them.
The problem is that there is nothing better emerging on the horizon.
“Every day I’m searching,” said Ms. Mentor, looking exhausted one day recently after returning from a long trek to Port-au-Prince she took in the hope of finding a source to donate food. The look in her eyes says she’s running out of hope.
In recent years, the group has been limping by with sporadic donations from the United States that totalled, in their best year, about $35,000. Before the quake, Ms. Mentor was looking for a more reliable non-government organization to adopt the KALMI cause, which has been credited with helping more than 800 AIDS-affected families here.
