Help 600 Haitian children to enjoy their rights.

“Biggest Change” Evaluation / Baptist Church of Les Cayes Jacmel, Education is a Conversation

On Thursday, February 20, 2025, the Limyè Lavi Foundation evaluated the impact of the ESK (Education is a Conversation) Children’s Rights training on participants of the ESK children’s rights group at the Baptist Church located in the town of Les Cayes, Jacmel (Southeast department / Haiti). To conduct the evaluation, the foundation used a participatory method called: “Biggest change”.

Each participant said the biggest change the training had made in their lives. Then, they discussed the different changes to determine the biggest change the training had made in the group. Here are the three (3) biggest changes that the participants identified in order of importance:

1. It made them understand that all children have the same rights;

2. It gave them the ability to be more patient with children;

3. It made them want to be more forgiving.

The testimonies were very interesting. One of them said that when she was little, she lived in a “restavèk” situation (a restavèk is a child given by her parents to another family to become a child servant in exchange for the family fulfilling bare necessities for her survival) in her godfather's house. Her godfather's wife often mistreated her. One day, she ran away to her parents’ house, because she felt she could not take it anymore. She has been living with major trauma since then. She developed a feeling of hatred for her godfather and his wife. She did not even feel comfortable greeting them.

After the training, she said that she felt healed. The training gave her the opportunity to express herself, to tell what happened to her. During the training she was able to release her emotions, comfortable enough to cry. The group's facilitator, Mirtha Adesca, and participants took the time to listen to her and give her advice. She says that she has forgiven her godfather and his wife now. She no longer holds anger for them in her heart. And, she has come to see the need for community members to be educated on children's rights. If her parents, godparents, and godmothers had been educated about children's rights, she might not have gone through these difficult times in her life. She says she is committed to working as a community activist to ensure that children's rights are respected, especially to work toward ending the restavèk system.