Deported Haitians Face Homelessness, Hunger : Third World: Dominican Republic expels thousands who worked on plantations. And Haiti cannot afford to house them.

Forsaken by their adopted country and forgotten by a homeland in turmoil, thousands of Haitians expelled by the Dominican Republic are waging a daily struggle with hopelessness, homelessness and hunger.

“Here, there is no life, no work,” said Yolen Pie, 50, as he sat with his wife, Olivia, two daughters and four grandchildren in a patch of weeds at the abandoned Bon Repos Hospital, which has been converted into a refugee center.

In sweltering late-morning heat, one daughter was washing a bony infant son in a rusty bucket. The adults’ clothes were drab rags, and some of the children were naked.

Pie is thin and withered. His back is badly bent from a lifetime of cutting sugar cane on state-run plantations in the neighboring Dominican Republic. The work is so hard and the pay so low that few Dominicans will do it, so the plantations have imported labor from Haiti, the hemisphere’s poorest country, for more than a century.

In recent years, human rights groups have denounced slave-like conditions at the plantations. The Dominican government, stung by the criticism, began mass deportations in July.

About 10,000 Haitians and people of Haitian descent were rounded up and marched across the border that divides the Caribbean island of Hispaniola between the two countries. Another 40,000 fled on their own.

Parents were separated from children in the roundups and many people were not given a chance to gather up their belongings, according to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, based in New York.

Some of those deported, including Pie’s wife, Olivia Perez, 47, had spent their entire lives in the Dominican Republic and speak only Spanish, not the French and Creole of Haiti. “I was born there, and I’m dying to return. What am I going to do here?”

The Dominican Republic contends that many deportees were illegal immigrants. Officials say they have a legitimate right to get rid of unwanted immigrants and deny expelling Dominican citizens.

Haiti’s financially strapped government had little to offer the refugees beyond the deserted Bon Repos facility about 15 miles northeast of Port-au-Prince, the capital. Its cinder-block huts afford shelter and a relief effort relying on private international aid supplies some food and basic medical care.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was president of Haiti when the deportations began, pledged to help relocate the refugees. But Aristide was ousted Sept. 30 by an army coup and a provisional government is too preoccupied with politics to give the refugees much thought.

“Everybody was hoping he (Aristide) would find some place for the people,” Olivia Perez said. “But now, who knows?”

About 2,400 refugees are at Bon Repos, down from a high of 4,500 at the end of September, said the center’s director, Mereille Sam. The coup actually provided a breather, she said, because a temporary paralysis of transport kept new refugees from reaching the center.