A treasure trove of converts

[maiforpeace]

American Baptists with 'Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission' detained in Haiti for child trafficking

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, January 31st 2010, 8:07 AM

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A group of 10 American Baptists were being held in the Haitian capital Sunday after trying take 33 children out of Haiti.

The church group, most of them from Idaho, allegedly lacked the proper documents when they were arrested Friday night in a bus along with children from 2 months to 12 years old who had survived the catastrophic earthquake.

The group say they were setting up an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic.

"In this chaos the government is in right now we were just trying to do the right thing," the group's spokeswoman, Laura Silsby, told The Associated Press at the judicial police headquarters in the capital, where the Americans were being held pending a Monday hearing before a judge.

The Baptists' "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" was described as an effort to save abandoned, traumatized children.

Their plan was to scoop up 100 kids and take them by bus to a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic, that they were converting into an orphanage, Silsby told the AP.

Whether they realized it or not, these Americans — the first known to be taken into custody since the Jan. 12 quake — put themselves in the middle of a firestorm in Haiti, where government leaders have suspended adoptions amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to child trafficking.

Silsby said the group, including members from Texas and Kansas, only had the best of intentions and paid no money for the children, whom she said they obtained from well-known Haitian pastor Jean Sanbil of the Sharing Jesus Ministries.

Silsby, 40, of Boise, Idaho, was asked if she didn't consider it naive to cross the border without adoption papers at a time when Haitians are so concerned about child trafficking. "By no means are we any part of that. That's exactly what we are trying to combat," she said.

She said she hadn't been following news reports while in Haiti.

Social Affairs Minister Yves Cristallin told the AP that the Americans were suspected of taking part in an illegal adoption scheme.

Cristallin said the 33 children were lodged late Saturday at an SOS Children's Village outside of Port-au-Prince. SOS Children's Villages is a global nonprofit based in Austria.

Many children in Haitian orphanages aren't actually orphans but have been abandoned by family who cannot afford to care for them.

Advocates both here and abroad caution that with so many people unaccounted for, adoptions should not go forward until it can be determined that the children have no relatives who can raise them.

UNICEF and other NGOs have been registering children who may have been separated from their parents. Relief workers are locating children at camps housing the homeless around the capital and are placing them in temporary shelters while they try to locate their parents or a more permanent home.

The U.S. Embassy in Haiti sent consular officials, who met with the detained Americans and gave them bug spray and field rations, according to Sean Lankford of Meridian, Idaho, whose wife and 18-year-old daughter were being held.

"They have to go in front of a judge on Monday," Lankford told the AP.

"There are allegations of child trafficking and that really couldn't be farther from the truth," he added. The children "were going to get the medical attention they needed. They were going to get the clothes and the food and the love they need to be healthy and to start recovering from the tragedy that just happened."

Haiti has imposed new controls on adoptions since the earthquake, which left thousands of children parentless or separated from their families. The government now requires Prime Minister Max Bellerive to personally authorize the departure of any child as a way to prevent child trafficking.

Silsby said they had documents from the Dominican government, but did not seek any paperwork from the Haitian authorities before taking the children to the border.

She said the children were brought to the pastor by distant relatives, and that the only ones to be put up for adoption would be those without close family to care for them.

The 10 Americans include members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho and the East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Idaho friends and relatives have been in touch with them through text messages and phone calls, Lankford said.

The group had described its plans on a Web site where they also asked for tax-deductible contributions, saying they would "gather" 100 orphans and bus them to Cabarete before building a more permanent orphanage in the Dominican town of Magante.

"Given the urgent needs from this earthquake, God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now versus waiting until the permanent facility is built," the group wrote.

[klr]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8489738.stm

Haiti arrests US nationals over child 'abductions'

Haitian police have arrested 10 US nationals on suspicion of trying to illegally take 33 children abroad.

They say the Americans were held on the border with the Dominican Republic.

The group from Idaho-based charity New Life Children's Refuge told the BBC they wanted to take quake orphans to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.

But Haitian police said the Americans had no papers authorising them to take children out of the country. They have not yet been charged.

Haiti imposed new controls on adoptions to prevent child trafficking after the 12 January earthquake that killed up to 200,000 people.

'Abduction'

The Americans are being held at a police station next to the airport in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince.

They told the BBC that their arrest was a mistake and that they were going to take a group of earthquake orphans to an orphanage set up across the border.

They said they thought they had had a permission to travel to the Dominican Republic.

"This is an abduction, not an adoption," Haitian Social Affairs Minister Yves Christallin was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.

"What is important for us in Haiti is that a child needs to have an authorisation from this ministry to leave the country," Mr Christallin said.

He added that the children involved were aged two months to 12 years.

The earthquake destroyed a number of Haitian orphanages and crippled relevant government agencies.

Local officials have expressed fears that child traffickers will take advantage of the situation to smuggle children abroad.

The Americans are part of a Baptist Church in Idaho. Apparently, some of the children were not even orphans, and had demanded from the Americans that they be allowed to return to their families. :pissed:

[maiforpeace]

http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=8370

The entitlement the religious think they deserve is just jaw dropping. :pissed:

The embassy gave the Baptists that were arrested bug spray against mosquitos and food. Too bad they don't have a spray for the Haitians to ward off Baptists, Scientologists and all those other self-appointed saviors who instead are just making matters worse rather than better.

[klr]

I've reported this thread for merging.

[Kristie]

I've reported this thread for merging.

[maiforpeace]

And now christians are preying on each other...with the loss of the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot and the large catholic presence there, it's an opportunity for evangelical christian vultures to prey on innocent catholics (an oxymoron, I know) and add to their flock.

After Quake, Evangelicals Find Opportunity

Emily Schmall
AOL News
PETIONVILLE, Haiti (Jan. 31) -- In the book of Exodus, Moses is advised by Jethro, his father-in-law, that to lead the Israelites effectively, he must learn to delegate.

This is a difficult lesson for Gersan Valcin, an evangelical Christian pastor whose ambitions for Haiti have been stifled by the pressing needs left in the wake of the Jan. 12 earthquake.

On Sunday in this middle-class suburb of Port-au-Prince, Valcin, 51, cedes the pulpit of the Eglise de la Communante Evangelique d'Haiti to his congregation, to let members give testimony about how they escaped death. One student didn't go to the lab that day. A woman who watched her daughter's school collapse later found out the child was safe. A grandmother led her granddaughter to safety through an opening in a three-story building that fell to the ground.

"For a Christian, this is the best time to be alive," Valcin preaches. "Out of tragedy, there is opportunity."

Evangelists have poured into the stricken country at a time when Haiti's Catholic Church, which claims 70 percent of all Haitians as followers, is severely battered. The city's once-majestic Notre Dame cathedral is in ruins, and parishioners continue to mourn the loss of the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot.

Valcin and his wife Betty, 47, hope the tragedy of the earthquake will inspire more Haitians to join their fast-swelling flock, bolstered in recent weeks by churchgoers whose houses of prayer collapsed in the quake. Valcin's church and home were undamaged.

The relative stability of Petionville, where restaurants have reopened and homes remain standing, belies the massive destruction in downtown Port-au-Prince. While a piece of heavy equipment claws into the rubble of the Ministry of Health building, scraping for corpses, people snatch unhinged doors, file cabinets, scraps of wood and swivel chairs -- whatever they can add to their makeshift homes in the public plaza across the street.

Some who lost their homes in Port-au-Prince have relocated to Petionville, adding to the slums built alongside a dry ravine across from Valcin's church.

Valcin insists homegrown religious institutions like his are the best-positioned to help Haiti get back on its feet. Rather than appealing to the Haitian government or to international aid groups, which he says can handicap as much as help the struggling country, Valcin is leaning on his largely middle-class congregation to feed and provide shelter to hundreds of people.

"Churches are kind of the infrastructure for getting the message out and getting things done," says Tim Dale, a hydrogeologist from Austin, Texas, whose Grace Covenant Church helps finance Valcin's work in Haiti. But evangelism underlies the mission of mercy.

"We're here to show them there's a better way," adds Dale, who traveled to Haiti with two other church members from Texas to provide the Valcins with logistical support.

Local coffin factory owner Kees de Gier helps build a medical clinic for Valcin's church.
Every day the Valcins stack their van with 400 styrofoam boxes of traditional Dominican food. One of their church members, the secretary for the Dominican ambassador to Haiti, has secured the daily rations from a Dominican anti-hunger program, where 62 cooks serve up arroz con pollo and carne guisada con moro out of mobile kitchens in an industrial park near the airport.

A few days ago, one of Valcin's neighbors could not be admitted to an at-capacity emergency room, so Valcin decided his church needed a clinic. He recruited Kees de Gier, 53, a Dutch expatriate who owns a coffin factory and also attends Valcin's church. By Monday, Valcin says, the plywood-and-sheet metal clinic will be staffed by nurses and doctors, as well as members of the church who will be prepared to provide emergency and post-operative care.

Then there are the dozens of people packing and distributing food or watching children whose neighborhood schools remain closed.

"We don't have a lot of hope anything will change with all the money coming in from abroad. We know we'll have to do it ourselves," Valcin says.

Silote Adam, 42, converts huge bags of rice and beans, and casks of cooking oil rounded up by a coalition of evangelical churches into individual kits to be distributed around Petionville after Sunday service. Adam is among 200 or so people whose houses are intact but who sleep on the church grounds, fearful of aftershocks.

"The assistance in terms of food, water, medical and other necessities provided by faith-based organizations has significantly contributed to the overall relief effort," says David Searby, a public affairs officer with the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince.

Valcin, from the small town of Limbe near Cap-Haitien, left Haiti in 1979, vowing never to go back. He returned as a missionary in 1997, and in five years, established 72 evangelical churches in rural areas of the country.

Unlike his evangelical Christian predecessors dating back to the 1800s, Valcin does not blame Haiti's woes on the voodoo practices that pervade the country or on a lack of faith.

"They are not rejecting God. They just feel God is too far away," Valcin says.

[Twoflower]

I feel even worse for the Haitians now.

[The Dawktor]

Bloody typical

[JimC]

Smug, arrogant bastards, scavengers on misery.

I think they actually feed on other's pain...

[klr]

Update:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8499401.stm

US missionaries in Haiti charged with child abduction

Haiti has charged 10 US missionaries with child abduction and criminal conspiracy for allegedly trying to smuggle 33 children out of the country.

Haitian officials said their cases would now be sent to an investigating judge who would decide how to proceed.

If convicted they face lengthy jail terms, says the BBC's Paul Adams, in Haiti's quake-hit capital city.

When stopped on the border last Friday, they said they were taking the children to a Dominican Republic orphanage.

But it has emerged some of the youngsters had parents who were alive.

'Kidnappers'

After the hearing the 10 missionaries were taken back to the jail where they have been kept since Friday.

Amid chaotic scenes, the group was bundled into a van outside the court.

"I feel good," the group's leader Laura Silsby told reporters. "I trust in God."

The five men and five women, most of them from Idaho, were due to have a hearing earlier in the week, but that was postponed because of a lack of interpreters.

Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has labelled the Americans "kidnappers".

Justice Minister Paul Denis said they should be tried in Haiti despite the damage done to the country's judicial infrastructure and casualties among judges and court staff.

There have been suggestions the 10 could be tried in the US.

"It is Haitian law that has been violated it is up to the Haitian authorities to hear and judge the case," he told AFP news agency.

"I don't see any reason why they should be tried in the United States."

'Single village'

The children, who are from aged from two to 12, are now in the care of the Austrian-run SOS Children's Village in Port-au-Prince.

Twenty-one of the children are from a single village outside the capital and were handed over willingly by their parents, says the BBC's Paul Adams, in Port-au-Prince.

Residents in the village of Callebas told an Associated Press news agency reporter they had handed their children over through a local orphanage worker who said he was acting on the Americans' behalf.

The worker is said to have promised the families that the missionaries would educate their children in neighbouring Dominican Republic.

A number of parents in the badly-damaged village said they would find it difficult to provide for their children if they came back.

Ms Silsby has said her group had met a Haitian pastor by chance when they arrived last week, and that he had helped them gather the children. She also admitted that they did not have the proper paperwork.

"Our intent was to help only those children that needed us most, that had lost either both their mother and father, or had lost one of their parents and the other had abandoned them," she said from her jail cell on Wednesday.

[Trolldor]

"Out of tragedy, there is opportunity."

[redunderthebed]

I was listening to newsradio this afternoon and they interviewed a guy who legally adopted 3 children from Haiti. That had contact with these fruitcakes apparently they tried to take those 3 children that they had legally adopted out of Haiti themselves whilst the legal parents where organising the kids to go to the US. Also that they went to orphanage to orphanage to find children and got told to fuck off repeatedly which lead to harassment and the leader carrying on like a pork chop that she hadn't got her own way.

He said that they wanted these children for fund raising for the church and for publicity and that diplomatically he said "there intentions weren't the best".

They are scumbags and deserve a nice stretch in a Haitian jail. No bail either apparently they have a private jet waiting for them at the airport in port-au-prince ready to fly back to idaho.

[Chinaski]

They took 'em to Cabarete, apparently a known sex tourism capital, to a MOTEL. They were obviously aiming at trafficking.

These people need to die.