Port-au-Prince, Haiti.- It was the worst gang war Haiti had seen in years.
Criminals fighting over territory had blocked nearly every escape route in the country’s largest slum. But under the sheet metal roof of a house, a woman named Mamaille had hope.
She was raising her four children alone, and she had found a way to get at least one of them out of her hellish neighborhood.
Mamaille’s neighborhood, Cité Soleil, is dominated by two rival gangs that fight each other for territory and punish civilians who view their rivals as biased. To assert their dominance and subdue the population, armed groups have become agents of rampant terror.
Among his preferred weapons: rape.
“It’s another way to terrorize the population,” said Sister Paesie, a nun who has opened several schools and shelters in some of the worst areas of the capital.
In one of her units, the nun has received dozens of women and girls who were raped or threatened by gang members. So many women have fled Cité Soleil that Paesie ran out of space to receive them, so she began renting houses in safer neighborhoods for rape victims.
One Saturday in July, Paesie received a call from the principal of one of the schools she runs in Cité Soleil.
Word had gotten out that the nun was prepared to evacuate students from the slum. So hundreds of students gathered at a local chapel to wait for her. Mamaille’s 17-year-old daughter was among them.
But Paesie never showed up, couldn’t even make it to the area because of the violence that broke out that day. At this, Mamaille and her daughter went home.
Just before she reached her home, automatic shots went off, and Mamaille saw her daughter crumple to the ground.
“I felt the pain you feel when you give birth to a baby,” she said.
By the time she was able to take her daughter to the clinic, the girl was already dead.
“I lost my daughter. I lost my heart,” Mamaille declared. “I lost my whole life.”
The next day, Paesie arrived at the edge of the Mamaille neighborhood and told her that she had ultimately helped evacuate hundreds of children, taking them to shelters throughout the city.
The nun has witnessed much death and pain in Haiti. But what happened to Mamaille and her daughter, she said, has made her feel more helpless than almost anything else.
After leaving her daughter’s lifeless body at the clinic, Mamaille wandered the streets screaming in anguish.
Her crying must have drawn the attention of gang members because suddenly, the woman said, a group of men with guns appeared, dragged her behind the house and raped her one by one. There were eight men, she detailed, and they beat her before leaving.
“I would have preferred to die, because when you die, it’s over,” Mamaille commented, crying softly. “You never think about what happened to you.”
After the men left, Mamaille had no choice but to get up, walk home, and somehow resume the effort to survive in Cité Soleil.
When she can safely leave her neighborhood, Mamaille travels to one of Paesie’s nearby schools to collect rice and cooking oil, she turns to churches to beg for money. She collects rainwater and mixes it into a chlorine tablet to purify it enough to drink.
“Sometimes I go three days without being able to feed my children or myself,” she said.
Her daughter was the one who kept her spirits up at times like this, the one who brought buckets of water so she could bathe after a long day. The girl herself wanted to one day work in the houses of the rich, cleaning and doing laundry to support her family.
“‘Mom, don’t get too tired for us,'” Mamaille remembers saying to her.
“One day I’m going to help you out of this misery. I’m going to lift you off the ground.”
