Suffer the children: 3 leave Utah to help orphans in Haiti

PETIONVILLE, Haiti — The fragile lifeline sustaining 30 abandoned children is coming unraveled. Rebecca Maesato anticipates the bad news as she bounces through the rutted streets toward an orphanage called FOSED. In French, the acronym stands for "Foundation to Protect Disinherited Children."

FOSED is a jumble of bare concrete rooms behind the iron gate at No. 38 Rue Geffrard in Petionville, Haiti, the poorest country on this side of the world. Maesato's last address was idyllic Hyde Park, Utah, 2,817 miles — and worlds — away.

Last year Maesato sold her business interests in Logan, an Internet company and an answering service, to answer a call to service coming from her own heart. A brief experience on a humanitarian project in South America in 2001 persuaded the single mom that service to others was the price of a meaningful life.

She and daughters, Leah, 19, and Ann, 17, were eager for the challenge. So last September they rented out their home and packed up and left tranquil Cache Valley to put themselves in the middle of this.

Rue Geffrard is a steep and squalid street, but it is a better location for an orphanage than the one FOSED had left. Until November its children were warehoused in a corner of a rotting mansion that once belonged to Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

Baby Doc, like his father "Papa Doc," before him, was Haiti's self-proclaimed President for Life. The Duvaliers plundered Haiti for 29 years, until an uprising forced Baby Doc into exile. Since 1986 he has been living the high life in Paris, where he studies solar energy and worships voodoo.

In the ruins of Duvalier's once opulent mansion, the orphanage of FOSED competed for space with squatters from the street. When the squatters prevailed, the orphanage's sponsor, a Haitian financier named Leslie Claremont, moved his shoestring charity to the Rue Geffrard.

Rebecca Maesato knows she won't make many more visits to No. 38 Rue Geffrard, because the orphanage is closing. Claremont's businesses had failed, and just days before this visit to No. 38, Claremont turned up dead in his home, the victim of a murder in a land where chaos often trumps the rule of law. His death ended the benevolence that funded the barest subsistence to 30 of Haiti's 1.2 million orphans and vulnerable children. (The U.S. Agency for International Development provides that staggering estimate.)