A new Bachelor’s thesis sheds light on a silent affliction that is eating away at many Haitian households, often without anyone daring to speak about it openly. Edner Saincombe defended, on Friday, February 2, 2024, at the Faculty of Human Sciences (FASCH), a Bachelor’s thesis in Social Work titled "An Attempt to Understand the Relationships Between Alcoholism and Family Dislocation Through the Intervention of the Association for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Other Chemical Dependencies (APAAC) with Families in the Commune of Pétion-Ville (2021-2022)." Before a jury composed of Joseph Jean Claude Jean Louis, President, Jérôme Paul Eddy Lacoste, Thesis Director, and Hancy Pierre, Critical Reader, he received a score of 79 out of 100, with honors.
According to Edner Saincombe, alcohol, far from being a mere social gesture as it is often presented at weddings, baptisms, or funerals, all too often turns into a real family poison. To demonstrate this, he did not want to rely solely on theories. He went directly to meet nine individuals affected by this problem in Pétion-Ville and Delmas: three men dependent on alcohol, two relatives who became what are called co-dependent, as well as social workers, a psychologist, and a lawyer from APAAC, an organization that has been fighting against alcoholism in Haiti since 1986.
To arrive at these results, the student favored a qualitative method, based on a carefully chosen sample rather than on large impersonal figures. He explains that he selected each participant according to their direct relationship with alcohol, whether they were a consumer, a relative, or a professional in the field. This approach, conducted interview after interview, allows for capturing nuances that a simple survey could never have revealed. To analyze these testimonies, the student relies on the theory of systems by biologist Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, which precisely considers the family as a system where each member inevitably influences the others.
The collected testimonies are striking in their candor and pain. The first dependent interviewed, a twenty-three-year-old father, has been consuming since the age of thirteen, having been forced out of his mother’s house at a young age due to this behavior. He confides that drugs were once his only form of savings, before wanting today, finally, to learn to save for real. The second, a fifty-one-year-old carpenter, fell into alcohol after his separation from his wife, unable to mourn the broken marriage. As for the third, a twenty-five-year-old man, he inherited this habit from his own grandparents, who were already consumers, and now wants to break this cycle to avoid passing the same affliction on to his future children.
But this thesis does not stop at the dependents themselves. It also gives a voice to those who suffer the consequences without ever having touched a drop of alcohol. A thirteen-year-old girl recounts the sleepless nights of her mother, the morning disputes, and even stone-throwing, when her older brother came home drunk early in the morning. Another witness recounts that his grandmother, already suffering from heart problems, regularly received late-night calls announcing that her grandson would not be coming home to sleep, too drunk to return. According to the student, these accounts confirm what the theory of systems has long taught: in a family, the affliction of one member always ends up affecting all the others, in one way or another.
On the economic front, the results are equally telling. Several dependents interviewed acknowledge having squandered the little money they earned on buying alcoholic beverages, to the point of never being able to save or adequately meet their basic needs. One dependent even admits that under the influence of drugs, he spent without any fear, simply to impress his drinking companions. This financial spiral, Edner Saincombe emphasizes, not only weakens the consumer but the entire family, which often has to compensate for this loss of income.
Confronted with this reality, APAAC tries to provide an answer, but the thesis reveals that this aid remains largely insufficient. The association has no accommodation center for sick individuals coming from the provinces and lacks any branches outside the capital. As a result, residents of provincial towns simply have no access to this type of support, left to fend for themselves in the face of their addiction. Worse still, in some areas of the capital itself, such as Martissant, insecurity has ultimately made it impossible to continue awareness campaigns, which once bore fruit among the youth.
However, it would be unfair to reduce APAAC to its only limits. The thesis reminds us that in 2021 and 2022, the institution still carried out nearly one hundred sixty awareness interventions, reaching over eight thousand young girls and boys, sometimes as young as seven, in schools, churches, and community organizations. This fieldwork, however insufficient in the face of the magnitude of the problem, concretely changes the game for the students who benefit from it. Many of them, once informed of the real dangers of alcohol and drugs, choose to abandon or delay their consumption or even become messengers themselves among their peers.
The legal aspect of this work deserves particular attention, as it reveals a concerning legal void. According to the lawyer interviewed by the student, Haitian law does not recognize alcoholism as a ground for divorce. Married individuals wishing to separate from an alcoholic spouse must invoke other reasons, such as severe and public insults, a notion that the law itself leaves vague and difficult to prove. For couples simply cohabiting, separation proves easier from a legal standpoint, but it often leaves the woman with no claim to the assets accumulated over the years, even after ten or twenty years of living together.
Edner Saincombe thus arrives at a nuanced and particularly instructive conclusion. It is not only alcoholism that destroys families, he explains, but sometimes family dislocation itself, a painful separation or poorly experienced solitude, that drives certain individuals toward alcohol. Both phenomena mutually feed on each other in a cycle that urgently needs to be broken, for the good of both consumers and their loved ones.
Armed with these observations, the student makes several concrete recommendations. He advocates for better public awareness of the role of social workers and psychologists, still largely unknown to the Haitian public. He also calls on institutions like APAAC to expand their services to all ten departments of the country, so that residents of the provinces are no longer left behind. He further suggests that the state implement free or subsidized care, as the currently offered paid support remains out of reach for many impoverished families. Finally, he invites teachers themselves to better educate themselves about the harms of drugs, to be able to effectively guide their students in turn.
An affliction that is allowed to flow freely, without any dam set against it, always ends up flooding the same house again. This is precisely what Edner Saincombe’s work demonstrates in its own way: without serious support, without education, and without real institutional backing, alcoholism will continue on its usual path, one that leads directly to the suffering of Haitian families.
Ultimately, this thesis far exceeds the framework of a mere academic exercise. It gives a human face to a problem too often reduced to cold statistics, and reminds an essential truth that Haitian families sometimes learn the hard way: behind every glass consumed too many times lies, all too often, an entire family that pays the price. Through this rigorous and sensitive work, Edner Saincombe contributes valuable insights to the understanding of a plague still too widely silenced in Haitian society.
