This is what gets me excited everyday, innovations by collaborations in biomedicine. One of my core projects is working with the Centre Léon Bérard to form a bilateral exchange of researchers in training with Johns Hopkins, where I’m a part of the faculty.
This video by Stephen Desiderio, Director, Johns Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, is what I showed to young French bioscience students.
I learned a new word today “restavek” a reminder that the lives of children around the world are a mirror of our global humanity.
This picture is of three children in Haiti with a second-year pediatric resident from my medical institution Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Sende, they found out, is a restavek. The word in Creole literally means “to stay with,” and it’s a not uncommon arrangement where parents send their child — usually a daughter — to live with another family. Sometimes the parents send a child away because they can’t afford to take care of her. Other times they send her away because there’s no school where they live. Sometimes the child is sold for money, other times no money changes hands.
The United Nations condemns restavek as a “modern form of slavery” where children are forced to serve the families they’ve been sent to by doing domestic work.
The Jean Cadet Restavek Foundation estimates there are some 300,000 restavek children in Haiti.
