Most children grow up eating cake, opening presents and hearing “Happy Birthday” sung to them once a year.
This was not the case for Jean-Robert Cadet, a former child slave, who could only guess at his true age. Cadet, the founder of the Jean R. Cadet Restavec Foundation, an organization that works to educate and liberate child slaves in Haiti, visited the Fairfield University Quick Center on Thursday to share his life story and discuss the goals of his foundation. Cadet, whose name was given to him by his owners, endured physical and emotional abuse as a child slave from the ages of 4 to 15. “If I broke a rule, the punishment was severe,” said Cadet. “I thought this was normal. I grew up in it.” The former child slave told a group of mostly students that he arrived in New York after the family he worked for in Haiti moved to the United States. His owners enrolled him as a sophomore in high school, where he was fortunate to have a teacher take interest in his education. This experience ended abruptly, however. School left him little time for his chores and the family for whom he worked forced him to leave. “I met anger at the house because the work was not being done,” said Cadet. Helped by friends and his history teacher, Cadet was able to find work and graduate from high school.
After serving in the Army for three years, he utilized his GI Bill and attended the University of Southern Florida. Cadet attributes his success to his opportunities in education and wanted to create similar chances for the child slaves that still populate Haiti today. “I created the foundation to take direct action. So many people have studied the problem. They evaluate and create reports that are now on a shelf somewhere gathering dust,” he said. According to Cadet, the foundation currently sponsors 75 child slaves in Haiti, mostly girls, by paying for their school tuition, uniform and a case worker who checks in on the students. His goal is to have 1,000 children in the program.
Cadet added that the families who house child slaves “begin to see them as human beings because someone is taking an interest in them.” His mission remains to help these children and will continue to fight for these innocent victims, through speaking to the United Nations and promoting his book, “Restavek: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class America”. Student audience members said that they were moved by the speech, including Bill Vogler ’10. “I think the fact that he has managed to make so much of himself out of such a horrendous situation speaks for itself, and I look up to his ability to make the best of any situation,” he said.
Lauren Buckley ’10, agreed that Cadet’s strong spirit is remarkable, considering his history. “I think that Jean Robert Cadet, a man with a cruel and rough past, has overcome and accomplished so much in his life. His life is inspiring to many and listening to his story was just unbelievable.”
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