An interdisciplinary and international caravan for the social accompaniment of Haitian children in street situations

Meeting others is what helps us grow and develop as human beings. It’s in this spirit and with a strong desire to build a common and meaningful project that various Haitian, Belgian and Canadian (from Québec) actors related to health and social work met in Jacmel, Haiti, in May 2019.
How the collaboration started
Point de Rue organization, member of the ATTrueQ (Québec’s national platform) has been working and initiating solidarity projects since many years with Tètkolé, a member of the Haitian national platform, la Planatruch.Together they have set up projects that develop social integration through art and culture. On the other hand, Dynamo International and la PLANATRUCH are partners on a project financed by the Wallonie Bruxelles International administration in order to strengthen the capacities of social street workers and to advocate for the recognition of the profession on the island. The idea was to see how those projects could interact and have a bigger impact on everybody.
For one week, representatives from 7 regions of Haiti came together with their international partners to think about the best ways to join forces. Different workshops and animations highlighted the Haitian workers’ needs and the possible ways to help them for their international peers, accordind to those needs.
An international caravan…
The idea that came out of those discussions was to create an interdisciplinary and international caravan as an alliance between social street workers, health professionals and artists from Quebec and Haiti. In the long run, this caravan should travel around all of the Haitian departments of Haiti, building links and interactions between people in a spirit of knowledge exchange.
More specifically, this project and la Planatruch share a common objective which is the accompaniment of children in street situations in Haiti and their social inclusion. The caravan will support this objective through 2 types of activities: social visibility actions (direct actions in the street, band, games, etc…) and concertation/partnership actions between different actors that are in contact with children.
Mixing professionals and trainees through this project will also aim to reinforce the experiential training of all the participants involved.
Such a collaboration, respectful of the stakes of each organization, makes sense from the perspective of the international network. The possibility for ANNF (Spanish platform) to join the dynamic was also mentioned … and the door remains open for all other platforms that would like to join the adventure.
Written by Francis Lacharité, representative of the ATTRueQ
Benito Cignac, representative of PLANATRUCH
& Mathilde Dufranc, representative of Dynamo International