See 8 Americans detained in Haiti freed on bail, 2 others to remain as but one of no doubt what will become an avalanche of coverage.

Laura Silsby and  Charisa Coulter remain in custody, they:

will remain in Haiti because the judge wants to determine why they traveled to Haiti on an earlier trip before the January 12 earthquake, attorney Avion Fleurent said.

Although the Americans are released on bail, there was no bond required. They are being released on their word.

It was not immediately clear when they would leave the country.

Assumedly, they can leave as soon as their passports are returned.

This does not mean the charges are dropped, but obviously once the 8 are out of the country, the odds of them being brought to Justice in the Haitian system, what there is of it at the moment, are pretty much laughable.

There is no question the others understood what they were doing.

By the time the Haitian police officer thwarted their earlier export attempt and removed the 40 children from the bus and dispersed them it had been explained to them in no uncertain terms that they could not legally remove the children from the country.

The others were present for the marketing pitch to the parents and guardians of some of the kids in the second(?) trip with the 33 kids. Clearly they understood that far from the “orphans” they continually insisted they were removing, many of these kids had parents or extended family.

They sat on the bus with the kids, listening to some of the kids begging to be allowed to return to their families.

Simply put, they knew, they were ALL involved.

Parsing apart Silsby and Coulter from the rest of them is a pointless exercise. Sislby may be faintly more vile, but not one of these 10, nor the at least 3 other members of the team who were in the Dominican Republic at the time of the attempted border crossing have anything resembling ‘clean hands’ in this regard.

Today, Haiti failed to protect the interests of the (at minimum) 73 children these child scavengers attempted to traffick across international borders, for purposes of international adoptions.

Simultaneously, it sent the message that it is in many ways, simply too overwhelmed to even attempt to ensure there will be consequences to many involved in such acts, opening the doors to other forms of cash for kids trafficking already in the preliminary stages.

The interests of Haiti’s kids, and Justice itself were not served.

Far from any kind of a  ‘solution’, today’s actions were a short sighted monumental mistake.

As I said in my previous post, The 73 Haitian kids deserve genuine justice, not a premature release of the scavengers:

For now, all any of us can do is write, and wait, and watch, and hope that these 73 kids receive at least some measure of justice for what was done to them. If these 10 scavengers are released tomorrow or soon thereafter without so much as a in-depth investigation it will speak more to Haiti’s own desperate need to focus on what matters most, the survival of its people, than of guilt or innocence.

If they are prematurely released, that too, will make ripples and have consequences, both in the meta scale to human rights, and on the micro scale of adoption-land. If they do manage to get away with what they tried to pull without consequences landing upon them, these 73 kids may merely be an early wave of what will later tally to an untold many.

Haiti wanted as much of this off it’s plate as possible, put quite simply, they’re busy trying to hold a country together with (metaphorically speaking) some duct tape and a bit of string:

The decision about whether to grant bail to the Americans was apparently delayed earlier this week by quake-induced electricity problems at the courthouse.

Electricity had also been out at the courthouse for a period of the day on Wednesday, and Judge Bernard Saint-Vil said he had been waiting all day Wednesday for a brief from the prosecution before making a decision about bail. He received the brief Wednesday afternoon.

There are still MANY unanswered questions pertaining to this “mission” trip. What pre-existing relationships might exist in the Dominican Republic between these attempted child traffickers, their churches, and other international child traffickers?

Now, due to most of the principals being able to waltz out of the country, the odds of ever getting at the full  truth of what actually happened here are slim to none.

Forty of the kids nearly trafficked by Sislby and her team remain almost unknown, simply kids who were on the missionaries’ bus headed for the Dominican Republic border, when a police officer stopped the bus, emptied the kids back out into the streets and took the team off in search of the required paperwork.

Tonight who gives a shit about them? Or what these people did to them?

They are silent, unknown, and completely lost to the glare of the cameras so busily attempting to get the 8 to talk about their (cough) heroic ordeal (cough) and impending reunions with their American families.

As I’ve said repeatedly, the focus is instead always on the perpetrators, hardly ever on their victims. The victims are, after all kids and whatever bits of family they might have left, kids who speak another language, with dark skin, and their stories are not the stories America wants to see cluttering up it’s cable and satellite channels.

Their stories say something bad about ‘that nice fellow who lives down the block who goes to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night who just has such a heart for the orphans’.

Their stories say that ‘fellow down the block’, or that ‘nice church lady’ can do terrible things to children, all ‘justified’ but sticking the word ‘god’ on it.

Over the next few days, as these child scavengers clog our airwaves, let’s do try to remember who has no voice, no microphone, no camera, and in some cases, no food, no family, and no roof over their heads.

They are the real victims here, not some assholes who sat in a cell without air conditioning for a little over two weeks.

For the children of Haiti, tonight, there is no Justice at all.

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

Let’s pull all the way out to the wide focus for a moment by way of a starting place. All of the writing and detail work I have been writing over the past month about the situation in Haiti is due to the fact that this is a Bastard blog, written in Bastard voice about adoption issues.

But such must ALWAYS be understood to be far down the rungs of priorities in terms of the ongoing human suffering and needs of the people of Haiti in the wake of the earthquake. This is an unfolding crisis still fully in progress (ever more so in the race to immunize people living in the ‘camps’ and as the impending rainy season and hurricane seasons loom.)

I write about these details because that’s what this blog is about. That is the field I choose to tackle in terms of terms of my own work.

Human needs and human rights come first. Once again, I felt it was important to reiterate lest anyone miss that key point, because that is also what my blog is about, even if at times it takes a somewhat seemingly indirect path to explain such.

The primary and immediate focus does not belong on the ten scavengers, it belongs on the search for food and shelter that is daily unfolding for the people of Haiti. It belongs on what the Haitian people are enduring and yes, that does include what Haitian children are suffering now in the aftermath from hunger to human trafficking attempts.

That said, pushing the case of these “New Life scavengers” aside, or releasing them prematurely only opens the floodgates to additional child trafficking, the likes of which we’re already seeing sure signs of.

While the timing is an added burden upon Haiti, the Americans’ attempt to remove children without authorization needs to be given the full gravity the charges deserve. There are 73 kids who were affected by their two attempts to remove them from their home country. As 40 of those kids were simply dispersed back out into the streets by the police officer who thwarted the earlier attempt, questioning them, or any guardians they might have would be a difficult task at this point.

While we may never know many of their names, they deserve justice. Genuine justice, not to merely have charges swept aside and their attempted extra-legal exporters released prior to a full investigation.

Their stories are part of the broader humanitarian crisis in Haiti.

But for the earthquake, the American missionaries with their “get ’em while we can!” gold-rush mentality would not have loaded up (at least) two busloads of (these) kids and headed for the Dominican Republic border.

To focus upon the crisis does demand we also focus upon the human rights violations and outright lies that the Americans told their guardians to procure the kids. They were enabled by the catastrophe, and attempted to utilize it to their advantage.

A full investigation would require information gathering in at least three countries at this point, the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti itself. But even from what little we can see of the missionaries own materials of actions through the media, we can easily contrast their marketing attempts to remove the 33 children from their parents and guardians with promises of schooling and swimming pools as well as parental visits or ability to reclaim the kids with their mission plan written back in America prior to the trip.

The full color quarter page “brochures” they distributed in Haiti speak of a non-existent “refuge” in the Dominican Republic, while the mission plan speaks clearly of a rented former hotel and of adoption.  Or to be more specific, adoption as a potential for “EACH” child they managed to collect (emphasis added is my own):

We will strive to also equip each child with a solid education and vocational skills as well as opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.

(See my earlier post dissecting the missionaries’ “mission plan” also note that Carla Thompson’s husband’s name, “Eric Thompson” is encoded into the document itself.)

If “intent” is the critical legal question, their own materials make it plain enough, their intent was to outright lie to parents and guardians in an effort to collect children, children who were being gathered explicitly for purposes of adoption.

Focus not on the perpetrators, but on the victims of their deceptions.

Focus not on the 10 American team members in Haiti (or their three additional American team members in the Dominican Republic), but instead on how as part of the broader crisis (at least) 73 children were almost taken to the Dominican Republic for purposes of inter-country adoption resale, and how those who did this to them have suffered few consequences for their scavenging the disaster zone for children to redistribute, most likely at a nifty price, other than having to sit in a cell under the glare of the international media for days on end.

These kids, and whatever families they have left have been victims of a crime.

The question is then not whether the parents and guardians consented to giving the American scavengers their children, but on whether they were intentionally deceived into expressing a willingness to relinquish their children.

The Prime Minister has spoken in no uncertain terms about how he views the story of the American scavengers to be a “distraction“,  a focusing upon 10 Americans when you have over a million Haitians in dire need.

As I wrote in my initial piece after the quake:

People still trapped in the rubble, hunger, death, and complete social collapse.

What’s the story here in America?

Adoption.

In my second piece I reiterated:

Let’s be perfectly clear here, Inter-country Adoption is not humanitarian assistance.

Taking children from Haiti is not altruism, it is child export, and utilizing the collapse in infrastructure to personal advantage .

Here in the US adoption has become THE story.

Certain Americans, completely unable to get their heads around scale and scope of human suffering, (recent estimates put the population of the region around Port-au-Prince at between 2.5 and 3 million people) have instead decided to focus on institutional interests or all the way down to a vested self interest, their personal demand for what they disingenuously deem “their” child.

Speaking as an adult adoptee myself, I find it absolutely disgusting that there are those who feel “adoption” is somehow vital to focus upon, as opposed to the massive scale of human suffering and needs in Haiti right this very moment.

But as so much of the current American government and media, is likewise disproportionately representative of those who have adopted, particularly internationally, prospective adopters find in judges and elected officials a welcome mat to their demands.

and

But adoption is not what matters here.

It shouldn’t be the story. It shouldn’t be where resources and personnel are focused, and it’s damn shameful that that’s what’s happening.

Chock it up to a lack of empathy, or a complete inability to get their heads around scale, but what genuinely matters here is getting lost, buried under the rubble, and lack of attention span.

There are people, right now, in desperate need of help.

Both of these two pieces were written BEFORE the 10 American missionary scavengers became the story.

‘Prediction’ is simple when you’ve seen the pattern so many times before.  In the wake of disaster and loss of identification papers, those who would move children as mere product can be relied upon to make their appearance like clockwork.  We’re talking about children that at least one ‘orphanage’ was marketing at $10,500 each, pre-quake.

They hold economic value to some, even in the rubble and remains, so it was merely a matter of time before the scavengers came in to pull out what they could, all towards filling domestic demand in what are politely referred to as “receiving countries”.

Everything that I write beyond that is a sad detailing of where resources and attention are in so many ways misspent.

But this is a Bastard blog, and so here, I write about these issues. The Haitian crisis has been nothing if not a massive turning point in American adoption-land and American adoption related  foreign policy. So it is important to step back and look at the damage being done. I will detail more of the big picture as it relates to adoption-land in a separate post.

For now, all any of us can do is write, and  wait, and watch, and hope that these 73 kids receive at least some measure of justice for what was done to them.  If these 10 scavengers are released tomorrow or soon thereafter without so much as a in-depth investigation it will speak more to Haiti’s own desperate need to focus on what matters most, the survival of its people, than of guilt or innocence.

If they are prematurely released, that too, will make ripples and have consequences, both in the meta scale to human rights, and on the micro scale of adoption-land. If they do manage to get away with what they tried to pull without consequences landing upon them, these 73 kids may merely be an early wave of what will later tally to an untold many.

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

And just when you thought this mess couldn’t get much more convoluted? Along comes  Jorge Puello.

El Salvador Investigates Adviser to Detained Americans in Haiti

The police in El Salvador have begun an investigation into whether a man suspected of leading a trafficking ring involving Central American and Caribbean women and girls is also a legal adviser to the Americans charged with trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without permission.

Yeah, I’m pretty much fresh out of words.

Mr. Puello has been acting as a spokesman and legal adviser for the detainees in the Dominican Republic.

The head of the Salvadoran border police, Commissioner Jorge Callejas, said in a telephone interview that he was investigating accusations that a man with a Dominican passport that identified him as Jorge Anibal Torres Puello led a human trafficking ring that recruited Dominican women and under-age Nicaraguan girls by offering them jobs and then putting them to work as prostitutes in El Salvador.

Just go read the full article.

Puello claims it’s a case of mistaken identity.

But what if the concerns are proven true,  I mean what are the odds?  Alleged American human traffickers hiring on an alleged Dominican Republic human trafficker to be their spokesperson and legal adviser?

The mind simply boggles.

I suppose we can at least say with certainty that the 10 arrestees have definitely brought on someone with previous experience in trying to deflect international claims of human trafficking.

Puello has that specialized kind of ‘real world experience’ in such that simply isn’t taught  in law schools.

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

I wanted to put up at least a brief post tonight about the other baptist missionaries who were also part of the child extraction effort, but not arrested as they were in the Dominican Republic working out the details of where to put the kids once they arrived on that side of the border.

There has been very little reporting on the fact that the team working on the child procurement mission was larger than the ten who were arrested.

See the following from this piece, Detained Americans questioned by Haitian judge, back on February 3rd (emphasis added is my own) that points out (at least) three more church members were also part of the effort:

Eastside members arrested include Pastor Paul Thompson, 43, his son Silas Thompson, 19, and Steve McMullen, 56. Church members Matt and Lora Crider and John Requa were also involved with the project, but remained in the Dominican Republic and were not arrested.

Baptists still jailed while nations debate their fate: Adoption advocates question New Life’s plan (Dated Feb 2.)  contains a few further details from the Crider’s daughter Kalee:

The accusations are hard for Twin Falls church members such as Kalee Crider to stomach.

“It’s just crazy,” said Crider, 24, describing her pastor, Paul Thompson, as a “huge advocate for adoption.”

Her parents, Matt and Lora Crider, were among the group, but left the U.S. a week later than most of the Baptists and are still in the Dominican Republic. Eastside member John Requa is also in the neighboring country and was not detained.

Kalee Crider has only heard occasionally from her parents, but said for the moment they’re staying in close contact with the U.S. Consulate, determining their next steps.

The Eastside Baptist Church website mentions members of the Crider family as well as John Requa had done short term mission trips through the church previously. See the Mission/Ministry Trips page.

If this retelling of their alleged trips is to be believed, the church had a history of sending missionaries into “closed” (to christian missionary activity) countries and violating local laws for mission trip purposes.

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

CNN has new details up tonight. Anderson Cooper AC360 also included a video segment discussing a new witness’s perspective on the actions of Silsby and the 9 other American missionary child scavengers’s actions,

Americans jailed in Haiti tried taking other kids, officer says

The group of American Baptist missionaries in Haiti who are facing kidnapping charges for trying to take 33 children out of the country last week made an earlier attempt at taking dozens of other children, according to a Haitian police officer.

The officer, who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals, said he stopped the 10 missionaries, including group leader Laura Silsby, on January 26 as they allegedly tried to transport 40 children on a bus from Haiti to the Dominican Republic.

The officer says he stopped the group and ordered the children to get off the bus. He then directed Silsby to the Dominican embassy.

In the Anderson Cooper segment there was discussion of the officer having made it clear to the group that what they were doing was illegal and that they lacked proper paperwork. This, three days BEFORE they were arrested trying to take the 33 kids.

If this is an accurate retelling of the officer’s account, none of the 10 can possibly claim they were unaware appropriate paperwork was required. How many other attempts were made, and were any actually successful?

To continue to gather kids, this time from a different part of the city than their previous thwarted attempt, pretty much says it all.

They apparently knew, they continued on, and when caught, they played dumb.

***

I’ll work towards digging out more details in the morning.

So today provides yet another profile of yet another Baptist evangelical scavenger, Mike Roberts, the North Texas CEO of “Source Direct.”

The Dallas Morning News has done an article on yet another scavenger on a “mission from god”  to do the kind of work in Haiti that can decide who lives and who dies, and to set up an adoption pipeline cash and supplies-for-kids scheme. Naturally, the piece is more of a glowing profile than an expose on Roberts attempt at child tafficking.

Yup, yet another attempt to build a system of  Haitian “orphans” sourced directly to a congregation.

See In Haiti, North Texas CEO tries to make order out of chaos. The full article is quite the read. But the adoption pipelining stands out.

He and his wife plan to return in about four weeks to begin the process of adopting a Haitian orphan – a touchy subject after 10 Americans were charged with kidnapping for trying to take 33 children out of the country without documentation.

Roberts visited three orphanages while in Haiti and used his jet to fly in supplies – soap, shampoo and diapers.

As stated earlier in the article that would be his $7 million private jet.

The day he left, he also stopped by to give money to the directors. “We want to develop a relationship so we can adopt your children as well as support you,” Roberts told Osvaldo P. Fernandez, director of the Rose-Mina De Diegue Orphanage. “We also want to give you some cash.”

Roberts unzipped a money belt and fished out a handful of money.

With apologies to the Pet Shop Boys, this is nothing more than You’ve got the kids, I’ve got the cash, let’s make some adoptions.

There’s no veneer on it, no finesse, just outright “let’s build a relationship here, you provide the kids, I’ll put cash and goods in your hands.”

Nor is Roberts merely sealing the deal for one of his own, he’s looking to build an adoption pipeline between these Haitian “orphanages” and his congregation, Park Cities Baptist Church back in Texas.

At first this commodities trading apparently didn’t go over so well (at least with a reporter there to cover such).

Fernandez’s eyes flashed in anger. In Spanish, his words tumbled one over another.

“You can’t pay me off for one of my children,” he said. “I’m not selling babies here. My kids don’t want money, they want affection.”

But soon enough, the “orphanage” director came around:

Over the next few minutes, translators smoothed over the misunderstanding. Fernandez accepted the money and his eyes softened as he watched Roberts play with a group of orphans.

“I can see he has affection for the children,” he said. “I can see he needs the love of a child.”

Which is, as seems to be so often in these cases,  putting the desires of the wealthy American would-be-adopters in front of the genuine survival needs of of the kids themselves.

The adopter is portrayed as needing “the love of a child.”

As opposed to the child, who needs clean drinkable water,  food, shelter, clothing, to be protected from child trafficking, have their human rights protected, and not be exported out of their own country at the whim of a wealthy purchaser.

Once the director took the cash, the details of the pipeline were hammered out quickly enough (emphasis added is my own).

Roberts said he hopes his congregation at Park Cities Baptist Church will connect with Haitian orphanages, send supplies and set up a system where members can adopt children.

Naturally, he can’t pass up the opportunity to kick in a catty remark about his competition for children in Haiti, NGOs such as Unicef that advocate the kids remain in their own country and are being brought to places of safety out of the reach of scavenging disaster opportunists like Roberts:

“You look at the lives of these children and their surroundings, and you just know we can do better,” Roberts said. “I’m not talking materialism. We can bring these kids up in a family unit rather than allowing them to be brought up in a platoon.”

Roberts views any policy or moratorium standing between him and his quest for “product” i.e. kids as “absurd” dismissing any previous history Haiti has had with child trafficking.

Haiti recently placed a moratorium on adoptions out of fear that some children and parents may have been separated during the chaotic aftermath of the quake. Roberts dismissed the policy as “absurd.”

“Are we going to sit back and allow thousands of babies to go without milk while all of our governments decide what is the best way to handle this situation?” he wrote his wife. “Try telling that to a starving baby.

Obviously, he’s merely yet another Texan evangelical fly-in who wants what he wants. Any pre-existing context or history Haiti has had with children being bought and sold means nothing to him. Such is simply dismissed, as he pulls out the usual “but think of the children” routine.

Maybe before opening his mouth and his wallet, he could take a moment to learn even the basics about what words like “Haitian Orphanage” have meant and continue to mean.

The New York Times published sort of a Reader’s Digest version of what many of us have been saying for years yesterday, Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages Raises Fears.

His answer then, to  get questions of whether or not the kids are exportable settled quickly is to set up a photo catalog of ‘inventory’ i.e. kids not already (so often falsely) labeled “orphans.” Once again, emphasis is mine:

Why can’t we just publish a list with names and photos for any child that has not been documented as an orphan?

“This would allow any surviving family members to locate their missing child and we could return them once they are in a position to care for the child.

Sooooo, export the kids first, place them with American Christian would-be-adopter families, and them offer promises to return the kid should their parents or other relatives be able to provably identify them AND meet conditions deemed able “to care for the child.”

As I said at the beginning of all this, just after the quake, possession is 9/10 of what passes for law in these cases. Once the kids are here does anyone for one minute think they’ll be returned? Again, just ask the mothers of Guatemalan children who were brought to the United States how that getting their kids back has worked for them.

Roberts resorts to that time tested and well worn means by which to shut down any opposition or blow past any objections or rational arguments against his course of action: “You have to do what I want, what you’re doing now is KILLING CHILDREN.”

I know that they are attempting to protect these children by playing it safe but in reality they are killing them.

This is child buying, nothing more.

Despicable, yet also perfectly ordinary.

What with no less than former President Clinton (himself a Southern Baptist) working to cut a deal for as many of the set of  Baptist missionary scavengers sitting in jail at the moment as possible, clearly, missionary child exports are high priority in American foreign policy.

After all, who is going to make the consequences of such child trafficking actually come to fall on Mike Roberts, his family, his church, and the other American families in the congregation who stand to purchase children by way of this deal?

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

Obviously, there are a great number of things I could say about the ten American missionary child scavengers sitting in a Haitian Jail at the moment.

But what I have to say is not the point.

It’s their own words that are at issue here.

Already,  just in the short time since their arrests, conflicting stories and conflicting quotes have come from members of this attempt to unlawfully remove children from Haiti. I could spend many hours pulling different quotations. Instead I’m going to cut to the heart of  what genuinely matters: family members are making provably incorrect claims that the group was merely moving kids across the border as part of some attempt at some form of what they (mis) characterize as essentially humanitarian relief work, denying any adoption purpose behind their actions. Take this from the BBC as but one example:

Sean Lankford of Meridian, Idaho, whose wife and daughter are among those held, told the Associated Press: “The plan was never to go adopt all these kids. The plan was to create this orphanage where kids could live.”

Their own “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission” document (local copy here) makes it clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that exporting children for purposes of inter-county adoption lay at the very core of what they went to Haiti to do. Emphasis in the below is my own.

Future Buildings and Plans for NLCR in Magante

• Nueva Vida Refugio de Ninos: Provide a loving Christian home‐like environment for up to 200 children, both boys and girls, initially focused on ages 0 ‐ 10 years old, later expanding to include teens up to age 16.
• Nueva Vida Escuela Cristiana: Provide a solid education for children in the refuge as well as in the local community if have sufficient space/resources. Plan to begin with PreSchool/Kindergarten up to 6th grade, teaching English/Spanish, Reading, Math, Science, History, Geography, Health, Music/Art, as well as Christian values/truths. Plan to add higher grades and courses on vocational skills when needed.
• Nueva Vida en Christo Capilla: On site Chapel for the children from the refuge and the community
• Sick Bay/Medical care: for incoming children that are in need minor medical care
• Greenhouse/Livestock: Provide for nutritional needs of the children by growing fruits and vegetables and raising cows/chickens for milk and eggs
• Seaside Villas at Playa Magante*: Villas for adopting parents to stay while fulfilling requirement for 60‐90 day visit as well as Christian volunteers/vacationing families.
• Provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation which works with adoption agencies in the U.S. to help facilitate adoptions and provide grants to subsidize the cost of adoption for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.
• Seaside Café at Playa Magante*: small beachfront restaurant serving the community and adopting parents

Why a 60-90 day ‘visit’?

Not because wannabe adopters thought it might be nice to spend some time getting to know the country the child will be exported from.

Nope, the vaporware (eventually hoped for) “Villas” and facilities, right down to an on site restaurant, were being designed to form a bubble of sorts for international adopters to be able to fulfill the Dominican Republic’s adoption residency requirements:

Once a child has been assigned the adopting couple must come to the Dominican Republic to live with the child, under the supervision of CONANI, for a period of at least 30 or 60 days.

If cohabitation with the child is successful, CONANI will issue, within sixty days from the termination of the cohabitation period, a certificate stating the applicants have been found to be fit to adopt the child.

Similar bubble type arrangements develop in many international export countries near the airports, often in hotels, be that in China, or India, or Guatemala City’s “baby hotels:” the Marriott,  the Radisson, or the Camino Real back in the heyday of the Guatemalan exports. Such facilities enable wanna be adopters to fulfill their in-country residency requirements while maintaining a semblance of their western lifestyles.

That the “New Life Children’s Refuge” was rooted in ideas of setting itself up as an adoption export hub in the Dominican Republic is all right there, in black and white.

We will strive to also equip each child with a solid education and vocational skills as well as opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.

That’s not ‘some’ kids, or ‘a few’ kids, that’s “EACH CHILD.”

Not just any adoption export center, a very explicitly Evangelical and proselytizing adoption-based facility, preparing kids for export. Again, quoting the BBC article (emphasis added by me):

The charity, which Ms Silsby incorporated in Idaho in November last year, says it is “dedicated to rescuing, loving and caring for orphaned, abandoned and impoverished Haitian and Dominican children, demonstrating God’s love and helping each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ”.

Which is to say, ensuring the kids themselves underwent a ‘christ centered’ “healing” process with the aim of ensuring the kids themselves “find… a new life in Christ.”

Hoping that a number of them could be exported to wannabe adopters deemed spiritually suitable as well.

I’ve noted some number of reporters mentioning the idea of the kids being brought back to “an orphanage” in the Dominican Republic.

Let’s get some basic facts straight. Laura Silsby, CEO of personalshopper.com,  apparent creator of this little child “shopping expedition” into Haiti, and current arrestee in Haiti was not taking them to some pre-existing facility with a full time staff, let alone a staff prepared to help kids through the trauma they had just endured. What we’re talking about is a rented hotel:

…an interim solution in nearby Cabarete, where we will be leasing a 45 room hotel and converting it into an orphanage until the building of the NLCR is complete. This interim location will enable us to provide a loving environment for up to 150 children, from infants to 12 years old.

Then one of the most shocking details of the plan hides tucked down in the next paragraph which I will quote in full:

Team Needed: NLCR is praying and seeking people who have a heart for God and a desire to share God’s love with these precious children, helping them heal and find new life in Christ. Please prayerfully consider a 2 week or longer mission trip to help NLCR provide rotating staffing for the care of the children over the next 6 months.

Yup, you read that right, basically putting out the call for missionaries, Joe and Jane average who want to help the kids “find a new life in christ,” to head down to the Dominican Republic for a stint as short as perhaps a mere two weeks. I.E. Missionary tourism at its best.

They hoped to find enough volunteers in two week rotations to fill out the next 6 months until they could move into the next phase of possibly building their little pipe dream.

So what if volunteer missionaries didn’t show up? What if the funding didn’t come through?

Well, then you’ve a got a pile of Haitian kids stuffed into a hotel with the rent coming due.

This is exactly the kind of unlicensed, unstaffed, missionary “orphanage” nonsense Haiti was saddled with long before the quake.

So who were these child scavengers on their little “mission” playing ‘capture the child’ in Port-au-Prince?

• Laura Silsby, 40, of Boise, Idaho; owns Personal Shopper Inc, an online shopping assistance company
• Charisa Coulter, 23, of Kuna, Idaho
• Corinna Lankford and Nicole Lankford, 18, of Middleton, Idaho
• Carla Thompson, 53, of Meridian, Idaho; missions co-ordinator at the Central Valley Baptist Church
• Silas Thompson, 19, of Twin Falls, Idaho
• Paul Thompson, 43, of Twin Falls, Idaho
• Drew Culberth, 34, of Topeka, Kansas; a part-time youth pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, who was given time off to go on the trip because of his firefighting experience and emergency medical training
• Steve McMullen, 56, of Twin Falls, Idaho
• Jim Allen, 47, of Amarillo, Texas

I strongly urge readers and reporters to carefully assess the statements that have been made and are still being made by the New Life Scavengers in light of their own words, their plan, if you will.

Finding the contradictions is a simple matter, once you put on the secret decoder ring they themselves have so thoughtfully provided.

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

Once again, I’m going to pick up my partner Mike’s writing about the Friday evening arrests of 10 missionaries for their attempted removal of kids from Haiti to the Dominican Republic.

The text below the line is Mike’s latest post from his personal blog.

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In my earlier post I suggested that the overwhelming demands to move children out of Haiti for adoption elsewhere were in a way a twisted expression of American consumerism. I wrote, “It…. matches the consumerist mindset, in which by simply acquiring the right things – even your very own “orphan” – your situation, and that of the world, will improve.”

I didn’t quite expect that in little more than 24 hours, events, driven by a founder of a company that sells consumer products online, would serve to drive home that point and others I was trying to make. It’s the mythology of international adoption that is driving American prospective adopters, politicians and Christian organizations to organize the exporting of Haitian children to the United States, amid calls for legislation to simplify adoptions for prospective adopters by creating a dedicated office for it at the State Department.

Central to those calls was the demand for rapid visa approvals from the State Department. Seldom heard from this crowd was any mention that the Haitians, assisted by aid organizations, might have some interest in monitoring, or even restricting completely, the flow of unaccompanied children out of their country, making the issue of the State Department’s speed rather moot.

Most American churchgoing suburbanites are unable to drop everything, get on a plane and run off to Haiti and see if they can, for themselves, run their own version of what some of us are calling “Rendell’s Raid,” in which the governor of Pennsylvania flew to Haiti, twisted the arms of various politicians, put pressure on what was left of the Haitian government, and finally, packed more than 50 of Haiti’s children on a U.S. military plane. But inevitably, someone with some means and willing accomplices, if not connections, would actually make such an attempt – this time, ending with ten Americans being arrested by Haitian police. At this writing it’s very likely that they’re sitting in jail cells in Port-au-Prince.

It’s clear from all the documentation available online that one of the primary people involved with all this is Laura Silsby, the founder and CEO of PersonalShopper.com, an online gift shopping service based in Boise. Through a bit of digging online, mainly on Facebook, its obvious that there are numerous connections between Silsby and the others arrested, including Paul Thompson, the pastor of Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho.

It’s on Thompson’s church website where the “smoking gun” can be found, a document completed on January 19 which outlines the entire plan, for a so-called “rescue mission” to Haiti, to scoop up 100 children, some unspecified portion of them directly off the streets of Port-au-Prince, and to transport them to a temporary headquarters in a newly-rented hotel in Santo Domingo. But the whole document reads like a bit of a pipe dream; it has that feel of a lot of evangelical writing, where the expectations of the writer aren’t quite connected to the physical realities of the planet.

Silsby lists herself in this document as the “Executive Director and Founder” of “New Life Children Refuge,” a brand-new nonprofit organization which filed its incorporation papers with the state of Idaho just two months ago. Interesting, that the incorporation papers read “Personal Shopper” at the top of every page, suggesting they were sent from a fax machine at the PersonalShopper.com office. There isn’t any evidence of this “Refuge” having even so much a website or a telephone number, much less any substantial tangible resources, but that didn’t stop Silsby.

From their “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission” plan (local copy here):

The Plan:

Rescue Orphans from Port au Prince, Haiti

• Friday/Saturday, Jan 22nd : NLCR team fly to the DR
• Sun Jan 23rd: Drive bus from Santo Domingo into Port au Prince, Haiti and gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then return to the DR
• Mon Jan 24th: Bus arrives in Cabarete, DR at New Life Children Refuge

The obvious problems with this “plan” are numerous, from even just these few lines. The trip from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince, as can be easily learned through a brief online search, is over six hours by scheduled bus under normal conditions. Were they serious about making a daytrip out of this run, it would have been little more than a snatch-and-grab of whatever kids they could have found on the streets over a few hours.

For whatever reason, they didn’t finally attempt to return to the Dominican Republic until January 29, almost a week later than they planned.  Regardless, this plan made their intent very clear: they thought they could just show up in Port-au-Prince unannounced, pick up some kids from some unspecified place that they couldn’t identify beforehand, and drive them back across the border.

As if this complete cluelessness about the conditions under which they could legitimately pick up and transport Haitian kids wasn’t enough, their facilities in Santo Domingo didn’t exist. They were going to rent a hotel for the Haitian children to land in, until they could implement the rest of their “plan” of building their own facility.

• Interim New Life Children Refuge Location: NLCR is in the process of buying land and building an orphanage, school and church in Magante on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. Given the urgent needs from this earthquake, God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now vs. waiting until the permanent facility is built. He has provided an interim solution in nearby Cabarete, where we will be leasing a 45 room hotel and converting it into an orphanage until the building of the NLCR is complete. This interim location will enable us to provide a loving environment for up to 150 children, from infants to 12 years old.

It’s not clear where the expectation that building a new orphanage for 150 children in the Dominican Republic would be something that a bunch of suburbanites from Idaho without extensive experience with such a project, and considerable resources, could pull off even over the course of many years. There’s no evidence that anyone involved with this little operation was in any way already familiar with Haiti or the Dominican Republic, except perhaps from some short-term visit as a missionary tourist. Often, when browsing people’s profiles on Facebook, their previous experience and interests are obvious, and when someone is actually familiar with things like international adoption, relief work, or long-term missions – which is clearly what’s intended in this description – it shows. But not here.

Nobody in this crowd seems to have any international experience at all to speak of. When, for example, you look at their Facebook profiles, like that of Laura Silsby, you’ll see things like the fact that they’re a “fan” of Sarah Palin, or a “fan” of the Manhattan Declaration, the anti-gay, anti-abortion, statement issued by a bunch of prominent evangelical personalities including convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson. Others are “fans” of things like the local anti-abortion groups, or maybe, the Southern Baptist disaster response organization. Anything that might indicate an in-depth knowledge of the task and that part of the world that would be necessary to accomplish that sort of mission? It’s just not there.

There’s another peculiar aspect to this “plan” document. In the “Prayer Requests” section, which often summarizes the things that the writer either doesn’t know or hopes won’t go wrong, are these entries:

Prayer Requests

• For discernment of God’s will and direction throughout this trip and for Him to prepare the way before us
• For God to continue to grant favor with the Dominican Government in allowing us to bring as many orphans as we can into the DR
• For God to guide us to the children He wants us to bring to NLCR and for their physical, emotional and spiritual healing

The second of these reflects the same kind of myopia often seen among adopters, and currently, American politicians, extending to the State Department, when dealing with international adoption. Emphasis is always placed on the receiving end, while any concerns on the part of the family or country of origin of these children is completely disregarded or viewed as false or illegitimate. Here, Silsby only cares that the Dominican Republic grant permission for them to bring in the children they’ve already collected. Even after all the recent press coverage that’s been given to the problem of child trafficking in Haiti, and the work by the Haitian government and NGOs to require full documentation of the status of each child departing the country, Silsby seems to think that that concern does not apply to her.

This became clear after her arrest, where she repeated her claim that approval from the Dominican Republic was all that was required:

But Laura Sillsby from the Idaho group told Reuters from a jail cell at Haiti’s Judicial Police headquarters, “We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there.”

“We have a Baptist minister here (in Port-au-Prince) whose orphanage totally collapsed and he asked us to take the children to the orphanage in the Dominican Republic,” Sillsby added.

“I was going to come back here to do the paperwork,” Sillsby said. “They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong.”

As I wrote previously, when examining the world of international adoption, there’s this element of oscillation between the global and the personal. If you grow up into a privileged, successful, entrepreneurial suburbanite in a country where people you respect are going around saying things like, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” perhaps when you find yourself in a “crappy little country” you might think you can do whatever you want without being suspected of something heinous like child trafficking. Silsby and her entourage seem to have found out otherwise, the hard way.

Also telling in this section is the part expecting “God” to “guide” them “to the children he wants us to bring” to their vaporware orphanage. Prayer requests are often very telling in this way; clearly, they didn’t know what they were doing, down to the basics of understanding that the only children that they might be able to take out of the country, already in the approval process for adoption, would have been identified long before they arrived in Haiti! When I say Silsby was planning a “shopping trip to Port-au-Prince,” clearly, as with other kinds of shopping, she didn’t quite know what she would be getting until she saw the merchandise.

How can someone expect to go to Haiti, do these things, and not understand that they would clearly be suspected of trafficking children?

That kind of expectation – that child acquisition and international transport by Americans can never be questioned or challenged – on the part of people like Laura Silsby is exactly what I was working to explain in my last post, where I wrote:

Television provides an illusion of participation, that by simply watching a moving image the viewer feels that they’re somehow involved in events in a far away place. But because merely being a television viewer is unsatisfying in such times, many feel moved to act in some way. The things that an average American can do with respect to such huge tragedies are few; often the only answer is to send money. The popularization of international adoption, even when the practice is overwhelmingly corrupt and may violate human rights, seems to me to fill exactly this void; the impulse to get one’s hands on the children of an earthquake-ravaged country is created by these media portrayals of external calamity interacting with the cultural predisposition that it’s the American national mission to save the rest of the planet.

This self-defined role of planetary savior, that through adoption almost anyone can indulge in, a romantic and ostensibly altruistic myth, is exactly that: role-playing. It exists independent of the actual children and people of Haiti and their realistic needs. It’s the extension of the American exceptionalist myth, expressed through its military and foreign policy of planetary enforcer and order-keeper (regardless of actual results on the ground after billions of dollars are spent), made accessible to any citizen who’s willing to meet the most basic requirements, and who can afford the fees. It also matches the consumerist mindset, in which by simply acquiring the right things – even your very own “orphan” – your situation, and that of the world, will improve.

The solution for the children of Haiti, created by those who see the world through these lenses, is simplistic, crude and appeals to the acquisitional American who thinks they can buy or trade for anything and by doing so will do no harm, to the point that we now see suggestions like this one: “What if….we could find a plane that had just dropped a load of humanitarian aid and load it up with orphans?” There’s no hiding that the writer of that sentence, a professional promoter of adoption in the Christian context, thinks it’s a fair trade: he drops off aid, he extracts “orphans” to satisfy the enormous demand he’s been helping to create in his subculture for adoptable children. If the “orphans” don’t actually exist, they would have to be manufactured, through the endless redefinition of the term, “orphan,” which today seldom means what people think it means.

When I say that evangelicals (and not exclusively evangelicals) regularly seek to strip-mine less fortunate countries of their children, I’m not using that terminology for its shock value. People like Laura Silsby are seeking to establish an industry of extracting Haitian children for adoption by Americans. The third page of their so-called “rescue mission” lays out a long-term plan – hopefully permanently derailed – to create a fully vertically-integrated industrial operation in Santo Domingo to obtain and prepare Haitian children for export, into international adoption.

Future Buildings and Plans for NLCR in Magante

• Nueva Vida Refugio de Ninos: Provide a loving Christian home‐like environment for up to 200 children, both boys and girls, initially focused on ages 0 ‐ 10 years old, later expanding to include teens up to age 16.
• Nueva Vida Escuela Cristiana: Provide a solid education for children in the refuge as well as in the local community if have sufficient space/resources. Plan to begin with PreSchool/Kindergarten up to 6th grade, teaching English/Spanish, Reading, Math, Science, History, Geography, Health, Music/Art, as well as Christian values/truths. Plan to add higher grades and courses on vocational skills when needed.
• Nueva Vida en Christo Capilla: On site Chapel for the children from the refuge and the community
• Sick Bay/Medical care: for incoming children that are in need minor medical care
• Greenhouse/Livestock: Provide for nutritional needs of the children by growing fruits and vegetables and raising cows/chickens for milk and eggs
• Seaside Villas at Playa Magante*: Villas for adopting parents to stay while fulfilling requirement for 60‐90 day visit as well as Christian volunteers/vacationing families.
• Provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation which works with adoption agencies in the U.S. to help facilitate adoptions and provide grants to subsidize the cost of adoption for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.
• Seaside Café at Playa Magante*: small beachfront restaurant serving the community and adopting parents

Looked at from the point of view of an entrepreneur, what are these things? First, establish a warehouse for the merchandise, and processing facilities to make the merchandise suitable for the customer. Second, expedite the process of governmental approval which customers must obtain, making them as comfortable as possible while they fulfill the government’s mandate of a 60-90 day stay. Third, provide financing for the customers. Fourth, provide food and refreshment to the customers, which along with the lodging provides a “bubble” in which customers need not interact with the locals.

But as a business plan, there’s nothing to it, if the people putting it forward can’t seem to grasp the basic illegality of its initial premise. The children of Haiti are not theirs to process and export, to satisfy the endless demand for adoptable children without history, a demand their mythology creates.

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

Bastardette has created a new blog corraling many of the Haiti and child export writings from both her blog and a variety of other writers together in one place:

End Child Exportation and Trafficking in Haiti

She introduced it on the Daily Bastardette yesterday thusly:

I have launched a new blog site: End Child Exportation and Trafficking in Haiti. It is not affiliated with Bastard Nation.

The unethical and often illegal removal of children from Haiti and subsequent identity erasure under the guise of “humanitarian aid” to serve small special interests is unprecedented in US child welfare history and policy. It is directly related to adoption secrety and control of information. The bastard and adoptee voice is being heard , but not loud enough.

which was then followed by the description from the site itself”

Stop Child Exportation and Trafficking is a collection of my blogs on Haiti published originally on my main blog, The Daily Bastardette. It is also a resource page for media, researchers, and the public interested looking for material and opinion on the ethics and legality of fast track adoption, babylifting, “humanitarian aid,”identity, historical and cultural erasure, and corrupt practices in international adoption, especially in the current Haitian earthquake crisis. It includes links to blogs, news articles, reports, and Haitian sources that are not available on The Daily Bastardette. We will publish occasional guest writers.

Readers will want to bookmark the new site as a clearinghouse of information and blog posts on the subject.

I have added the link to my righthand sidebar under “blogroll” as well.

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.

This is a post written by my partner, Mike Doughney for his personal blog. It’s a big picture overview with some theoretical components.

His about page written back in October 2007  is pretty much a mandatory backgrounder to understand what underlies the perspective he (and ultimately we, the two of us) bring to our adoption related work.

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I made some observations on my “About” page, some years ago, about the relationship between the practice of adoption and the way in which many Americans view the rest of the world. In recent days, that relationship has become quite obvious in the media coverage that has followed the earthquake in Haiti, and the subsequent actions by organizations, politicians, and prospective adopters in this country.

Unlike the self-described “bastards” I know, love, and work with, my personal interest in these matters is a little different, as I have no direct personal involvement with adoption beyond the fact that I live with a “bastard.” For me the subject connects with my interests in understanding how people handle information. Having had a tiny hand in popularizing the Internet years ago, how has the ‘net, and the concurrent growth of 24-hour television news, improved, or warped, how people view the world around them? Of course, one of the primary interests of “Bastards” – obtaining unaltered birth certificates that disclose historical facts of their origins – is likewise tightly connected with this issue of how people handle, or mishandle, or can’t handle, information, or construct elaborate structures of misinformation. Recent events are more about the global than the personal, but still these realms overlap, or oscillate from second to second, from the international to the individual.

I summed it up in a recent one-liner: “A city of millions of people leveled, and what’s on ABC tonight? ‘Is the baby I ordered still on its way?'” I was referring to a multi-night series of stories on Nightline, a program that’s been completely worthless ever since Ted Koppel retired. Days later, the habit continues, as with the Baltimore Sun website pictured. It’s all adopters, all the time. From the looks of it you’d think there have regularly been thousands of adoptions out of Haiti every year, and this vital flow was in danger of being interrupted.

Facts are, that’s not the case. There it is, on the U.S. State Department’s website: “The Total Adoptions from HAITI from 1998 to 2009 is: 2712.”  Twelve years, averaging two hundred twenty six every year. That is all.

Throw “haiti adoption” into Google News right now, how many hits do you get? “About 6,102.” That’s not counting the ads for international adoption and adoption agencies that will also show up on the search results. “Adopt from China, Russia, Haiti, Guatemala, and more!”

It doesn’t help that elected officials here in the U.S. don’t seem to have more important things to do with their time, and hop on the adoption bandwagon while it’s in the media spotlight. Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, his Federal judge wife, and U.S. representative Jason Altmire fly to Haiti on a chartered plane to transport over fifty children from an orphanage run by two Pittsburgh suburbanites. It doesn’t matter that the Haitian government hadn’t signed off on letting 26 of those children out of the country. Two American women pitch a hissy fit, Rendell and Altmire work the White House to pressure what’s left of the Haitian government, and the next thing you know all 54 children are on a U.S. military plane.

When those children got to Pittsburgh – transported on the pretense that they were “already in the pipeline for adoption” – the truth comes out: seven of them hadn’t even been matched with adoptive parents. They ended up in a faith-based residential treatment center that had only 24 hours to prepare for their arrival.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of needy kids here in America, and in Pennsylvania. Eventually, that fact merits a small mention, here in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

But social service providers – and the Rendell administration – have a message for the families willing to open their homes and hearts: Don’t forget the 3,000 Pennsylvania children waiting for permanent homes.

“While the plight of the Haitian orphans has attracted much attention, it is important to recognize the many other children for whom we are always working to find a supportive family and safe home environment,” said Harriet Dichter, acting secretary of the state Department of Public Welfare.

Child advocate Cathleen Palm said that when she heard about the rush to adopt the Haitian children, she wished there was a way to assemble all the needy Pennsylvania children in a stadium and have the governor rescue them.

“We want to make sure people aren’t losing sight of the fact that kids are in crisis in Pennsylvania, too,” said Palm.

Why is it, when Pittsburgh has its own share of needy children, many in foster care, that all this attention – and the involvement of state and federal politicians – has been focused on Haitian children, attention that has as its goal, moving large numbers of them out of their country?

Perhaps a small hint of what might actually be going on here comes from this comment I saw go by on Facebook: “I saw the little boy that Cooper Anderson helped pull from the rubble and he looked good, but you could tell he is still shell-shocked. That’s the one I would take home with me for a while…”

Television provides an illusion of participation, that by simply watching a moving image the viewer feels that they’re somehow involved in events in a far away place. But because merely being a television viewer is unsatisfying in such times, many feel moved to act in some way. The things that an average American can do with respect to such huge tragedies are few; often the only answer is to send money. The popularization of international adoption, even when the practice is overwhelmingly corrupt and may violate human rights, seems to me to fill exactly this void; the impulse to get one’s hands on the children of an earthquake-ravaged country is created by these media portrayals of external calamity interacting with the cultural predisposition that it’s the American national mission to save the rest of the planet.

This self-defined role of planetary savior, that through adoption almost anyone can indulge in, a romantic and ostensibly altruistic myth, is exactly that: role-playing. It exists independent of the actual children and people of Haiti and their realistic needs. It’s the extension of the American exceptionalist myth, expressed through  its military and foreign policy of planetary enforcer and order-keeper (regardless of actual results on the ground after billions of dollars are spent), made accessible to any citizen who’s willing to meet the most basic requirements, and who can afford the fees. It also matches the consumerist mindset, in which by simply acquiring the right things – even your very own “orphan” – your situation, and that of the world, will improve.

The solution for the children of Haiti, created by those who see the world through these lenses, is simplistic, crude and appeals to the acquisitional American who thinks they can buy or trade for anything and by doing so will do no harm, to the point that we now see suggestions like this one: “What if….we could find a plane that had just dropped a load of humanitarian aid and load it up with orphans?” There’s no hiding that the writer of that sentence, a professional promoter of adoption in the Christian context, thinks it’s a fair trade: he drops off  aid, he extracts “orphans” to satisfy the enormous demand he’s been helping to create in his subculture for adoptable children. If the “orphans” don’t actually exist, they would have to be manufactured, through the endless redefinition of the term, “orphan,” which today seldom means what people think it means.

Here again the hiding of information, and the contrast between “orphans” acquired outside the United States, and the reality of children in genuine need who might be available for domestic adoption, becomes clear. The imperative to hide information about the actual origins of children put up for adoption is one of the reasons international adoption exists. With the barriers of distance, international boundaries, and language, the entire history of what happened to these children may disappear, or be made inaccessible. The same goes for their biological parentage.

Couple that need for information hiding to a catastrophic natural disaster, and the resulting chaos and actual elimination of records, the entire history of where these children came from may be destroyed.

Contrast how that history can be hidden or destroyed in this international situation, with the prospect of domestic adoption out of foster care, where past history cannot be eliminated with such ease. This is, I think, why the governor of Pennsylvania isn’t spending the same amount of time and energy doing something for his state’s own needy kids. The facts about those kids’ lives can’t be wiped out with a plane ride, it lives on in files and records and the memories of people who might be neighbors, instead of being physically separated by thousands of miles.

After more than two weeks have passed since the earthquake, two camps have clearly emerged. One is driven by American foreign policy and all its concomitant myths and baggage as I’ve described them. Faced with a bonanza of the newly-opened opportunity to strip-mine Haiti of its children, American politicians are now calling for the State Department to set up a separate office to make sure that absolutely nothing stands in the way between American prospective adopters and Haitian children. Gordon Duguid, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, is quoted as saying, “we will send no child out of Haiti who does not have cleared, vetted and accepted parents waiting for him or her in the U.S.”  Interesting redefinition there of what a “parent” is, equivalent to “adopter,” a redefinition that’s not necessarily shared by the rest of the world. As is to be expected, there’s no mention of how the U.S. will confirm that children arriving in the U.S. from Haiti will be shown to be genuine “orphans” without any parents or family remaining in Haiti, or even relatives here.

All that matters to the State Department is satisfying the needs of prospective adopters, and all the intermediary organizations that stand to benefit by facilitating such a mass migration.

The other camp, of course, is that of UNICEF and other aid agencies that have placed a priority on the reunification of children with their families.

Meanwhile, the government of Haiti has reportedly halted the departure of so-called “orphans” from the country, for among other reasons, concerns that children might be removed from the country while they still have relatives there who could care for them.

As can be expected, the whining of a relatively tiny number of prospective adopters may now be occupying a disproportionate amount of the time of many American politicians. One example of many is this story from Terre Haute, Indiana, where a prospective adoptive family is “on an emotional roller coaster ride.” As usual, such prospective adopters, by whatever means, believe that the child they visited in some far-off country is already theirs, it’s just a matter of finishing the paperwork. Never mentioned is the possibility that the so-called “orphan” they expect to arrive any day now may not, in fact, be an orphan. Inevitably, increased scrutiny of the cases of children about to depart Haiti, on the part of government and aid organizations, will leave some American prospective adopters empty-handed.

It is in these situations where the fallout from the promotion of the mythology of romantic, altruistic, child-saving international adoption by Americans, will at least be a bit more evident. Children in poor, disaster-ravaged nations are reduced to a mere natural resource, who could easily fill that role if they could only be stacked shoulder-to-shoulder in aircraft headed back toward the United States. Their transport here serves to appease those who never question that myth and who often see their actions as heroic. It’s up to those on the ground without such an agenda to challenge that myth, to put forward the idea that adoption is not a solution to poverty, and to work toward the reunification of families separated by disaster.

For more reading:

Baby Love Child

The Daily Bastardette

Haiti Statement by Adoptees of Color Roundtable

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Update: This quote was in the “sidebar” of this blog from February through September of 2008. It’s still relevant when considering the efforts of UNICEF in Haiti today.

If justice comes (and I have serious doubts that it will), it will come from the International community and NOT the United States.

– MichiganGirl, February 5, 2008

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Return to the Table of Contents of my Haiti series.