Project Pierre Toussaint

The lesson still is chalked on the blackboard in the deserted classroom. "Odette bought 19 pineapples," the French scrawl reads. Outside, knee-high prairie grass grows over the walkways. Rodents and insects scurry about the 10-acre compound, their only companions the roaming security guards with pump-action shotguns who are paid to discourage human intruders.

The Village is deserted now. But not long ago, a large iron gate would open here every morning, allowing 100 or so orphaned and abandoned boys to enter this refuge, a place to bathe and eat and learn, an escape from a life of beatings and hunger. The Village was one of three compounds that made up Project Pierre Toussaint, a program designed to give a future to boys who had none.

These days, the boys are back in the streets of this city of 180,000, Haiti's second-largest, living by their wits, begging for handouts, dodging thugs, sleeping in dirty alleyways and on flat roofs.

Link (here) to the full story.