The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption Read Online Free PDF Page B

attacks on UNICEF. Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat who has made adoption her signature issue, threw down the gauntlet when she argued to expand the State Department’s humanitarian parole program to other Haitian children. “Either UNICEF is going to change or have a very difficult time getting support from the U.S. Congress,” she said. “Americans take this call very seriously.”
    WHEN THEIR BUS ARRIVED in Haiti on January 25, Laura Silsby and her team began knocking on doors around the devastated neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, leaving flyers in one city slum, Citron, which was damaged by the earthquake, and one mountain village, Calebasse, which wasn’t. Their flyer solicited “children who have lost their mother and father in the earthquake or have no one to love or care for them” and proclaimed that Silsby and her group “love God, and He has given us tremendous love for the children of Haiti.” It also claimed that the group had permission from the Haitian government to take one hundred children to the Dominican Republic.
    In Calebasse Silsby and her team enlisted a young English-speaking man in the village to assemble the town’s five hundred residents on a soccer field so the missionaries could hand out their flyer, which showed the Dominican hotel and its swimming pool, and described the fields and school the children would have access to at the orphanage that they planned to build. One Calebasse mother, Maggie Moise, later told a Guardian reporter that a member of the group had assured her she would have access to her children. So she signed the paper that the missionaries presented, reasoning that Haiti would be a difficult place to live in for some time. Other parents in Calebasse later said that they hadn’t realized they were relinquishing their children to a group who might put them up for international adoption, presenting New York Times reporters with school photos and awards for their children as testament that they never intended to let them go permanently.
    In earthquake-ravaged Citron a Haitian pastor from Atlanta, Jean Sainvil of the Haiti Sharing Jesus Ministries, helped Silsby gather children, some of whom thought they were going on a holiday. Some parents seemed to believe it was an educational program or a temporary relief effort to keep the children safe in the Dominican Republic. One father told the Wall Street Journal that he had given his five-year-old son to Silsby because “the chance to educate a child is a chance for an entire family to prosper,” an indication that he, like many in the developing world, did not understand the concept of Western adoption—that their children would not return. Another father, Regilus Chesnel, told the Associated Press that Pastor Sainvil had warned parents that epidemic disease was on its way and that the children could fall victim.
    On January 28 twenty children got onto Silsby’s bus in Calebasse along with another thirteen in Citron, their names written on pink tape stuck to their clothes. The group was stopped the next day at the Haitian-Dominicanborder and questioned about the undocumented kids on the bus. The children were taken into custody by the relief group SOS Children’s Villages International. One baby was hospitalized for dehydration, and others were hungry after a long drive and a night spent sleeping on the street. As it would turn out, the children were not orphans; according to SOS Children’s Villages, all thirty-three had at least one living parent. One girl declared to the SOS workers, “I am not an orphan.” Later all but one of the children were successfully reunited with their families, who had reacted to the situation varyingly. One mother had become catatonic when she was told she had accidentally sent her four children to be adopted. Conversely, those who had wanted their children cared for in the Dominican Republic didn’t know how they could afford to feed them now that they were returned. Two