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PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, July 3: By any measure, Bobby Duval has more than paid his dues as a social activist. Nearing 50, he might be forgiven for kicking back and enjoying life.
He has been imprisoned, starved and tortured in Haiti's notorious Fort Dimanche prison. He saw hundreds of fellow activists die during a stint there opposing the dictatorship of the Duvalier family. Many were beaten to death in front of him.
He's a former soccer star, affluent, American-educated and speaks French and English. A son of Creole elites, he might be just as at home shopping in Paris, or coaching at one of his old haunts in Boston or Montreal.
Yet here he is on a hot Saturday morning, on a dusty playing field, surrounded by hundreds of poor children, teaching them skills their families cannot afford, raising hopes they're not supposed to have.
"There's no big deal, really," he says. "I just decided that this is my country and I was going to do my best to make a change here. That's all."
That's not all to the 300 or so children who attend Athletics of Haiti, a novel program that offers sports, food and education to children from the vast slums of Port-au-Prince. Against odds every bit as formidable as the struggle for democracy here, Duval has kept the program running for five years of turmoil in Haiti.
Since 1996, he has run Athletics on a 15-acre compound near the capital city's international airport and not far from Cité Soleil, one of Haiti's most notorious urban slums. The children in the program are given medical checkups, tutoring and, of course, plenty of coaching. They're given healthy meals each week, and their parents are counseled on education and other matters.
The immediate aim is to provide an escape for the athletic talent that might be hidden in the country's vast shantytowns. Soccer is the national sport in Haiti, but the country's deep poverty and class differences are formidable barriers for even the most talented among the poor.
The best soccer clubs and schools are private and tend to cater to the small middle class and elites. Basketball also is taking off here -- kids can be found playing on many streets -- and Duval is expanding efforts to build courts for boys and girls. Before he can turn his attention to athletic skills, he must deal with nutrition.
"Right now, I need food -- I need to increase the quality of the kids' food," Duval said. "You can see [the children are] very small.
"They've already accumulated calorific deficiencies. I need to offer balanced meals. I only give some carbohydrates and some meat now, some protein. But we need to have iron, vegetables and stuff.
"That takes money, and that takes organization."
The scion of a prominent Haitian automotive family and a former soccer star who led Montreal's Loyola University to a championship in the early 1970s, Duval returned to his country after graduation and became a leading opponent of the Duvalier dictatorship. At one point, he served a 17-month sentence in Fort Dimanche but emerged even more invigorated and authored a book on the prison.
By 1996, though, Duval found himself tiring of the seemingly endless debate over the nature of Haitian democracy and wanted to devote himself to something more "concrete." Using his family connections, he persuaded the owners of the compound to let him open a sports camp.
The idea would be not only to help the poor, but also to bridge the chasm between the impoverished and the tiny upper classes. This would be done by having children play together, and play well, on competing teams.
Children having supportive parents is the only requirement. Each child is given a physical examination, tutoring and educational support, a luxury in a country in which only half the population makes it past the fifth grade.
Despite some support from the United States, the vast majority of the equipment, energy and money that pays for the organization's $15,000 monthly budget comes from friends and businesses within Haiti.
The only drawback is that the club must be somewhat selective, taking only as many children as it can afford on a largely first-come, first-serve basis. Otherwise, it could not handle the demand -- half of the country's population is younger than 20 and many of them live in the vast slums ringing Port-au-Prince.
"We wouldn't have enough space. You'd probably see 1 million kids here overnight," said Felix Biguesnel, 29, who has worked at the sports organization since its inception. "We have to be restrictive."
The organization has sponsored two teenagers who traveled to Paris for tryouts on soccer clubs. Biguesnel said Haiti's formidable class divisions make it difficult for even the most talented youngsters to get the training they need.
That's not evident to many of the youngest, who speak in awe of the sports organization's seeming riches once they're inside the grounds. There are clean basketball courts, lots of soccer balls and even a bin full of used cleats.
Wearing a tattered yellow City of Boca Raton T-shirt and a nervous grin, Pierre Samson, 10, is listening to a coach explain how to dribble a soccer ball.
It's his first day inside the compound, which he has observed at times traveling from the Delmas section of Port-au-Prince. A friend has brought him today, and Pierre is in the process of getting a medical exam and his first meal there, a lunchtime treat of rice and juice.
"I want to be a sports star when I grow up, or maybe a [bus] driver," he said, naming two of the more lucrative professions visible to many Haitian youngsters. "It's a bit strange here, but I like it so far."
Despite his connections and reputation -- in addition to his political activism, Duval was a star on Haiti's popular Violette soccer team -- he has been attacked from all sides during the past four years. The poor parents of the children he serves have been suspicious of a mulatto elite giving local children food, medicine and education. The middle-class owners of private schools and sports clubs resent having to play against his teams because of the competition, Duval said, and even his reform-minded rich friends wonder why he's spending so much money on poor kids.
"Any day I can be thrown out," Duval said. "I went to the owners and asked if I can use this land. They said yes, go ahead. But they want to maintain the option to sell at any time. There's a lot of money being spent here, but these are the basic things I need to operate.
"What I hope is that the owners will have a change of heart one day, that they will come and say, man, it's kind of crazy, but let him do his thing."
He sees this as a logical extension of his work as a political activist, when the struggle was for self-determination. Older now, and the father of a teenage son, he's more interested in what he calls "the concrete, not the abstract."
"For 20 years, being an advocate of human rights ... I wanted to do something that I could [put] my hands on, really," Duval said.
"When you're an advocate, it does have an effect. Had we not done what we did ... to advance the social movement, I probably couldn't have the political space now, this real space, to do what I'm doing today."
(Orlando Sun Sentinel)