Caregiving

"In the organized camp of Corail, set on a barren gravel plain to the north of Port-au-Prince, two sheets of cloth and a tarp are all that separate Ridlan Duvalier and her 4-month-old baby from the elements.
Duvalier's camp — where 6,500 people live in long lines of white tents — is considered one of the better ones.

Duvalier is alone in the tent with her baby. Her boyfriend died in the earthquake. Her parents refused to take her in because she was pregnant, and she ended up with a friend at the golf course camp. They moved together to this camp. But just before she gave birth, her friend asked her to leave. So the camp managers gave Duvalier her own place. The tent is barren. A few clothes are tossed in the corner. There are two buckets of water and a washbasin. Duvalier and her baby sleep on some blankets that she has laid on top of a piece of plywood.

There's no food given out at the camp. With a newborn, Duvalier says, there's no way she can go into Port-au-Prince to seek work. So she relies on the kindness of her neighbors to eat. "This is very common," the pastor says about Duvalier's situation. He says many single mothers end up having several boyfriends. He doesn't call it prostitution, but he says the boyfriends help the mothers survive financially."

"Finding good child care and being able to engage easily in important interactions with your child care provider are critical to any mother's ability to work outside the home. 'Suppose you're living in the rural Midwest and you don't speak English very well. Can you imagine leaving your child with a child care provider if you couldn't communicate well with that person?' said Angela Wiley, a University of Illinois associate professor of applied family studies. 'The immigrant moms we interviewed for this study faced just this dilemma,' she said.

Immigrant Latino mothers in rural areas need child care that meets a certain cultural comfort level, is affordable for them, and is available during shift work, she said. Why the urgent interest in rural Latino families' child care needs? In non-metropolitan areas of Illinois, the Latino population grew by 71 percent between 1990 and 2000, and it has continued to grow.

These statistics caught the eye of administrators at the U of I's Child Care Resource Center in 2008, and they began to study the needs of rural Latino mothers. For these Latinos, basic employability and access to higher-paying jobs are affected by two key challenges: learning English and accessing child care that families feel comfortable with and can afford, she said. A reluctance to seek child care outside the family circle hampers the ability of both parents to find steady work. Although nearly 95 percent of the families would be eligible for child-care subsidies because of their income, only 10 percent of the families report using them, she said."