Yes:
The children in our parish schools, as well as the immigrant children who have no access to education, do manual labor. When the children in El Ingenio respond to the question: "What do you do outside of school?" they respond with the following: pick coffee, pick guandules or pigeon peas, get water, get firewood, pick avocados, etc. They work to help their families.
Child labor:
Some organizations find ways to inflame the indignation of folks by decrying child labor. But when you talk with these children and note their reactions to working in the same plantation as their moms and dads, you'd have a hard time finding troubled looks or signs of "forced labor".
Coffee as a blessing:
This crop is labor intensive and thus provides opportunity for work in the mountains. If all the land owners had a crop like avocados growing on their properties, they could eliminate lots of "bateyes" or the residents where numerous Haitian families live together. If the land owners planted only trees for exportation, the number of Haitian families would drop to almost nothing.
Different kinds of coffee:
Coffee growers from as far away as the Cibao (200 miles away) want their coffee to be labeled as "from Barahona" because of the distinctive flavor which is found in the traditional coffee from this region. The traditional coffee plant is low producing but long lasting. It requires less care than hybrids which "out perform" the traditional in terms of quantity. The traditional bushes grow taller than the "advanced" types and have deeper roots. They show stronger resistance to the bugs and diseases. Some coffee farmers want to plant the "caturia" variety in order to have a larger harvest, but most understand that they will benefit in the long run by keeping the traditional variety alive.
Working children:
On most small ranches in Nevada, the children learn to work at an early age. So it is with the Haitian immigrants in the mountains. What would you rather see: children working, or children begging on the streets of a large city like Santo Domingo? The coffee work can be compared with cutting sugar cane. The latter requires long hours in the sun, whereas coffee in this region grows under shade trees. Sugarcane cutting covers one with stingers plus an outrageous number of biting ants. Coffee picking can be done without these hardships. A coffee picker works at his or her own pace. Immigrant parents have not been spotted driving their children to over work or meet repressive quotas. The kids play as they work and work as they play. Yes, school attendance can suffer in the month of October, since people face the pressure of picking the ripe coffee beans before the rains and drying them out as best as they can, using any available road or concrete open space. Without coffee, many of the immigrant children would be either stuck in Haiti or living in a more difficult environment, such as the heavily chemical dependant agriculture projects in Constansa.
