Journalists with Heart   

Gerald Herbert, a photographer for the New York Daily News, met the 12-year-old boy while in Haiti at a demonstration for exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Singing exuberantly and clutching his hand, the youth tried to convince Herbert that he too should join in on the chants.

Over the next few weeks, as Herbert photographed events leading up to Aristide's return, the boy appeared again and again. "He started showing up in the morning [at my hotel], like reporting to work," says Herbert, who was assigned to Port-au-Prince last fall.

Though the boy, Sadrac Jean, was fatherless and destitute, he didn't beg. He just seemed to want to learn, how to operate a camera, how to use a police scanner, Herbert says.

Before leaving Haiti in mid-October, Herbert saw to it that Sadrac's enthusiasm for learning would be rewarded. The photographer took up a collection among fellow journalists to send the boy to a private school.

That $450 collection spawned an even larger one. In the months since Herbert's return from Haiti, he has collected $3,500 to send 35 other Haitian children to private schools.

"Obviously I've hit a nerve," Herbert says, "because the response rate is so high."

In letters and phone calls to journalists who covered the Haitian conflict, Herbert makes his pitch: $100, the price of dinner and a theater ticket in New York City, will cover books, fees and uniforms for one child for one year.

He explains in his plea that many children in Haiti do not go to school, but spend their days begging for food and money. The public schools are too few to accommodate all the children, and private school fees are out of the reach of most families. Seventy-five percent of Haiti's population of 6.5 million lives in "abject poverty," according to the CIA's "World Factbook."

One State Department official says that although six years of education is compulsory in Haiti, only 45 percent of primary school-aged children attend classes. Attendance then drops to 15 percent for secondary school children, according to the official.

Herbert, 30, says he worried initially that friends and colleagues would find him overzealous in his sympathy for Haitian children, that "all these hard-nosed New Yorkers might be snickering, 'Here he is, Crusader Rabbit.' "

But the response from reporters at his own newspaper and at the Miami Herald, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Washington Times has been overwhelmingly positive.

"It sounded like an idea I wish I had had," says Michael Hedges, a Washington Times reporter who wrote dispatches from Haiti last fall, and who has since collected $300 at his paper for Herbert's fund, the Haitian Youth Education Fund.

"Just because we're journalists doesn't mean we can't have a heart," says Washington Post photographer Carol Guzy, who contributed to Sadrac's schooling. She has been covering Haiti since 1986, and last month won a Pulitzer for her work there.

"I've kind of tapped this unspoken need," Herbert says. He says he has been told in countless calls with journalists who had been to Haiti that their sleep was haunted by images of the desperate children there.

Herbert's fund is an unusual undertaking for journalists, who pride themselves on objectivity and detachment. But Reginald Stuart, president of the Society of Professional Journalists and assistant news editor of the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, says it's "easy for him to understand how the situation obviously gripped [reporters assigned to cover it], and how they were moved to do more than just go in and report."

He adds that he doesn't believe journalists crossed any ethical boundaries by "digging into their own pockets" to help needy children.

Herbert's ultimate hope is that donors to the fund will develop a pen-pal relationship with the children they sponsor and contribute money annually until they finish school.

A trip to Haiti in late March convinced Herbert that children who truly need the money are getting it. He visited the homes of six or seven of the primary school children being aided. Their homes, he says, were little more than shacks, with no plumbing or electricity.

The March trip also convinced Herbert of the need for future monitoring trips. He learned that Sadrac had been missing from school.

Herbert believes the boy's mother was hoping to use the school money to pay for other needs. He says he told Sadrac that school would be his ticket out of the slums and had to become his priority.

"I said," Herbert recalls, " 'If you don't care about yourself, how can I care?' "