Henrique Dauphin, a 12-year-old Haitian boy whose home was set ablaze last year by gangs, has not been to school in nearly a year.
He sleeps under a leaky tarp at a makeshift shelter with nine people and uses a plastic water bottle to play soccer all day.
Henrique is one of 680,000 Haitian children forced to flee their communities in the face of escalating violence.
That number of Haitian children displaced because of attacks from armed groups has almost doubled over the past year, according to a report from UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s fund. This time last year, 365,000 children were displaced.
And the picture for homeless children is likely to grow even bleaker.
With their numbers growing and the encampments where they live in increasingly dire conditions, the main international organization feeding them and their families announced that it would slash food rations in half.
As food prices increase and gang violence spreads, experts warn that Haiti’s crisis is worsening on multiple fronts, leaving hundreds of thousands of children at risk.
“I would like to be able to go to school. I would like to be able to learn something,” Henrique said in a telephone interview arranged by Mercy Corps, a nonprofit that distributed hygiene kits at the encampment where he lives in the Turgeau neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the capital.
“But things are not good here.”
Henrique said he had stopped going to school last November because his mother was unemployed and could not afford to pay tuition.
Nearly 70 percent of the schools in the Port-au-Prince region are fully or partially closed, UNICEF said. Nationwide, 1,606 schools are closed, either because of gang violence or because they were taken over by families whose neighborhoods were attacked.
At least one in four Haitian children is not enrolled in classes, according to the U.N. agency. Nearly 300,000 children under age 5 are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition. Many children are being recruited by gangs or sexually assaulted, the agency said.
“The aggregation of data tells a story that is of the highest concern,” said Roberto Benes, UNICEF’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “It’s an alert: The situation is really spiraling.”
A fund the agency set up to help Haitian children has raised about $17 million. The goal: $272 million.
The United Nations’ World Food Program, one of the main providers of hot meals to Haiti’s displacement camps, announced last week that funding shortfalls had forced it to suspend hot meals for newly displaced families and slash food rations in half.
The World Food Program declined to comment further.
The U.N. estimates that 1.3 million Haitians are living out of their homes in the wake of an explosion of gang violence. Some are living with relatives but many are sheltering in schools, government buildings and other places that lack basic services, like bathrooms and running water.
In the first six months of this year, the number of encampments doubled to 246, UNICEF said.
Over the past three years, people have had to abandon their homes when gangs attacked their neighborhoods. The gangs have since banded together to take over major highways, kidnap hundreds of people and delay long-overdue presidential elections.
The long-simmering gang crisis worsened after the 2021 assassination of the last elected president, and then surged early last year.
The U.N. Security Council recently voted to create a “Gang Suppression Force” in Haiti of up to 5,500 troops and officers from around the world. A smaller force in place for more than year has failed to quell the violence.
Gerald Delva, 37, said the encampment at Lycée Marie Jeanne, a school where he was living for two years, grew so precarious and overcrowded since The New York Times met him there last year that this week he left Port-au-Prince to join his family in the countryside. To fund the trip, his mother sold her pig.
Dodging gangs on foot and on motorbike, he said, it took two and a half days to complete a journey that by car would normally take two and a half hours.
Mr. Delva said he had lost his carpentry workshop in 2022 when he fled his old neighborhood, Carrefour Feuilles, with just the clothes on his back.
He is a father of four, including a newborn. One of his children is supposed to be in kindergarten and the other in first grade, but last year he registered them twice, and both times the schools were forced to close. He lost the tuition fees he paid.
“The kids have seen so many bad things, I believe they are traumatized,” Mr. Delva said. “We have seen things we had never seen before in our lives.”
To keep their minds off the hardship, he lets them watch cartoons on his cellphone. Now, he said, one of them is glued to the phone.
It was nearly noon, and he said his family had yet to eat.
“I just want a change for my kids,” he said.
André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.
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