Orphanage blaze kills 15 children including babies and toddlers after ‘candle fire’ swept through building
A BLAZE at an orphanage run by a US religious group in Haiti has killed 15 children, officials said on Friday.
Two children were burned to death and 13 died from smoke inhalation in the fire that swept through the Pennsylvania-based Church of Bible Understanding's orphanage in Kenscoff.
The cause of the blaze at the facility, just south of the capital Port-au-Prince, is not clear.
One of the children at the orphanage said they had been using candles because there was a power cut and an emergency generator was not working.
Childcare worker Rose-Marie Louis, who works at the orphanage, said around half of those who died were babies or toddlers.
She said the rest of the victims were roughly 10 or 11 years old.
Arielle Jeanty Villedrouin, director of the Institute for Social Welfare, said the Church of Bible Understanding did not have a license to operate the institution, which housed around 60 children.
She said: "We are going to place them in a transit center while we do research on their family and see if we can reunite them with their parents.”
There is renewed controversy over the hundreds of unlicensed orphanages in the poorest nation in the Americas.
Just 35 of 754 institutions are officially authorised, with another 100 in the process of getting a license.
The government has closed around 160 institutions over the last five years, Villedrouin said, and has barred more from opening.
Four in five of the around 30,000 children in Haiti's orphanages have living parents, according to the government, with children placed in care because parents feel they cannot afford to look after them.
Local judge Raymonde Jean Antoine told AFP news agency the orphanage had not been authorised to operate since 2013.
"All we see are children living like animals," she said, adding that there were no fire extinguishers in the building.
A woman who answered the Church of Bible Understanding's telephone number in Port-au-Prince, asked for comment, said: "We will make it known when it is appropriate."
There was no response to a voicemail seeking comment at the number listed for the Orphanage of the Church of Bible Understanding at its office in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The group says on its website it opened its first orphanage in Haiti nearly 40 years ago, with a primary goal "to spread the Gospel to any and all who will receive it."
"I call on the relevant authorities to take urgent measures to decipher the cause of this drama," President Jovenel Moise wrote in a tweet, expressing his "profound sadness."
Nearly 60% of Haiti's 11.2 million inhabitants survive on less than $2.40 a day, according to the World Bank.
Poverty, disability and a lack of access to basic healthcare, education and social services mean many Haitian parents send their children to orphanages or wealthier relatives or acquaintances.
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Those taken in by relatives are often used as servants or isolated from children in the household and seldom sent to school, critics say.
Children living in hundreds of orphanages suffer sexual and physical abuse and some are trafficked into orphanages for profit to attract donations, the London-based charity Lumos wrote in a report three years ago.
Donors, mostly from the United States and faith-based organisations, give $70 million a year to one-third of Haiti’s orphanages, it said.
