By Clement Sabourin (AFP)

PORT-AU-PRINCE — They’ve been forced to swap school books for pis­tols, home­work for hold-ups and drug-dealing: with no par­ents, some of Haiti’s earth­quake orphans have turned to slum gangs as ersatz fam­ily in a hard-scrabble bid to survive.

Square meals and the com­forts of home are part of the past for thou­sands of young­sters who lost their moth­ers, fathers and other rel­a­tives in the Jan­u­ary 12 earth­quake that dev­as­tated Port-au-Prince and trau­ma­tized the country.

And for some orphans in the capital’s des­per­ately poor shan­ty­towns, rov­ing gangs are fill­ing the void.

In the noto­ri­ous Cite Soleil, or Sun City, a clutch of young­sters trail behind a scruffy gang leader named “Toutou Soleil 19″ and mem­bers of his band, dart­ing around makeshift huts and clothes­lines strung across filthy alley­ways in the capital’s biggest slum.

Toutou, a 31-year-old who still car­ries knives but says he gave up his guns in a 2006 amnesty, stops and points across a sewer to a crude sheet-metal cabin on a mound of trash at the seafront.

“There are eight or nine orphans who have been sleep­ing here since the quake,” Toutou told AFP, eager to show off the deplorable con­di­tions on his home turf where he says “no one has come to help”.

Out­side the hut’s door, the chil­dren crouch around a radio held by Jef, a 14-year-old boy with angelic eyes and a check­ered shirt. Toutou hands him a can of con­densed milk, which he quickly shares with the others.

“There are a lot of kids like them, they are all through­out Cite Soleil,” said Toutou. Though he couldn’t give a fig­ure, he said they were “many” and rat­tled off their most urgent needs — “a soup kitchen, a mobile clinic and water”.

In the absence of any non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions or local offi­cials in this slum of at least 300,000 res­i­dents, the gangs hold de facto author­ity. So after the cat­a­stro­phe, the new orphans turned to the gang lords.

“They come to us because they have no one else. We try to help, but there is noth­ing here,” said Toutou, a wool cap pulled down on his head.

Jef said his par­ents were killed when their house col­lapsed in the earth­quake, which claimed 250,000 to 300,000 lives in all. He now car­ries out “hold-ups” and bur­glar­izes homes at night to survive.

– ‘We live here like we’re in prison’ –

“We do that with other chil­dren,” he admit­ted, say­ing he stopped going to school after the quake. “I would like to go, but I don’t have the money,” he said, low­er­ing his eyes.

“At any rate, all the schools in Cite Soleil have col­lapsed,” added Jimis, 25, a rap­per and mem­ber of Toutou’s gang.

Ads for rum and auto­matic rifles and porno­graphic pho­tos cover the walls of the orphans’ cabin, where they sleep in old boxes placed over a floor of rubble.

Through­out Toutou’s tour of the slum, chil­dren come up to salute their “godfather”.

Many of these young­sters have been caught com­mit­ting offenses since los­ing their par­ents. “Some of them sell drugs, a lot of them have pis­tols the gangs give them,” said one social worker with years of expe­ri­ence in the shantytown.

The United Nations recently started inves­ti­gat­ing the plight of these slum orphans, but a UN worker in charge of the project who asked not to be named said “at this stage, we have no information”.

Iron­i­cally, it’s the Cite’s gang lead­ers and crim­i­nals who now find them­selves in the role of sav­ior and spokes­men, plead­ing for aid.

“We need help so that these chil­dren don’t become like us, so that they don’t become a dan­ger to soci­ety,” said a con­vict named Ea who said he escaped from Port-au-Prince prison dur­ing the earth­quake, as did some 4,500 prisoners.

A bas­tion of vio­lent gangs, Cite Soleil was vir­tu­ally in a state of war from 2004 to 2007. An inter­ven­tion by UN troops and a dis­ar­ma­ment pro­gram have calmed mat­ters some­what, and a cur­few remains in place.

At a hos­pi­tal run by the inter­na­tional aid group Medecins Sans Fron­tieres (Doc­tors With­out Bor­ders), there has been a recent spike in the num­ber of gun­shot vic­tims “but not enough to worry about… yet,” said the facility’s direc­tor Karel Janssens.

Gang lead­ers, how­ever, are unhappy. “If aid does not arrive, we will pre­pare a revolt,” said one named Patrick.

Toutou echoed the call.

“We will fight until the end — until we receive some sup­port, until we receive jus­tice,” he said. “We live here like we’re in prison.”

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