Haiti has vast numbers of child slaves, raising the question of whether the world's only successful national slave rebellion 200 years ago actually was a victory.

BY CAROL J. WILLIAMS
Los Angeles Times Service

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Madeleine Vilma describes the beating that drove her to the streets as if she deserved it.

''I made them mad at me,'' the skinny 15-year-old recalls of the two women who had paid a pittance for her six years ago, then put her to work as a maid. ``I broke the heel off my shoe, so they beat me with their sandals.''

Their anger not fully vented, the women she called Auntie and Maman then singed her chest and arms with jolts from a frayed electrical cord, Madeleine recounts, nervously rocking and shifting her legs, storklike, at the memory.

''They wanted to mark me so that I would remember,'' she said.

Dispatched to the slums of the Haitian capital when she was 9 by parents unable to feed her, Madeleine had been delivered by a trader into a life of unpaid domestic servitude in exchange for food and shelter. Like an estimated 300,000 other children in this poorest of Western countries, she had no alternative except homelessness and hunger.

Foreign relief workers and Roman Catholic charities lately have been encouraging Haiti's child slaves to come out of the shadows to seek help -- and to expose a century-old practice that has subjected them to shocking abuse. Their growing numbers have prompted questions about whether the world's only successful national slave rebellion 200 years ago was actually a victory.

BICENTENNIAL NEAR

As Haiti nears the Jan. 1 bicentennial of its independence from French colonial rule, the plight of child slaves is threatening to overshadow official celebrations. It's also a measure of this ravaged country's progress in the two centuries since the slave rebellion.

''How can we be celebrating the bicentennial when this is still going on?'' asked the Rev. Pierre St. Vistal, sweeping his hand to take in the barefoot, scarred and ragged children huddled around the doorway of his overwhelmed mission. ``How can we as Haitians celebrate anything when our kids are on the streets, dying of hunger? This isn't a time for celebration but for being ashamed.''

MOST MISTREATED

St. Vistal's mission offers hot meals and a crude wood-planked loft for sleeping under its tin roof for 45 of the most mistreated girls from the surrounding shantytown of Cité de Dieu, or City of God. Six hundred others, still toiling in nearby hovels, come in for food and lessons when their patrons allow it. The Catholic priest says that sometimes he is confronted with machetes when he visits the keepers' homes to urge them to let the children take advantage of schooling paid for by foreign charities.

Its name notwithstanding, there is no hint of divinity in Cité de Dieu, through which flows a filthy river carrying the city's wastes and rainwater out to sea. Narrow mud paths strewn with rocks and refuse left behind by the rainy season's inundations make passage perilous on foot and impossible by car.

LITTERED STREETS

Rivulets of wastewater and sewage flow from beneath the single-room shacks of tin and plywood. Salvaged tires, peddlers' baskets, wood stoves and broken appliances litter the unmarked streets and alleys separating the hovels.

The children, called restaveks -- from the French rester avec, to stay with -- are not servants of the wealthy but of those just slightly less poor than the parents who sent them here.

As Haiti slips further into extreme poverty each year, the wave of children -- some as young as 4 -- flocking to the cities has become a deluge, forcing most to settle for whatever offer of shelter is on hand. Children who are not brokered go door to door looking for a place to stay.

NO RESTRICTIONS

''Most of these patrons want someone they can have do anything they need done without the conditions that come with employing an adult domestic,'' St. Vistal said. 'With kids, there are no limits. They have no rights and can be made to do anything. They're not just slaves to the parents but to the patrons' children as well.''

Restaveks first appeared in the capital in the 1920s and '30s, when wealthy families, as ''an act of solidarity'' with the rural poor, offered shelter and education in exchange for domestic labor, explained Wenes Jeanty, director of the Maurice Sixto program, named for a playwright who first exposed the plight of the restaveks in the 1960s. But as the gap between rich and poor widened drastically in recent decades, ragged children coming from the countryside became so numerous that they were forced to work for anyone able to make the daily pot of beans and rice go one mouth further.

''Some of these kids have never felt affection,'' said Alabre Michelet, a caregiver at Petionville's Timkatec boys' shelter, one of the more comfortable refuges with its solid roof and tiled floor.

``Here they learn to be a family to each other. We'd like to do this for all of the street kids, but we have far too few resources.''