The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (3 page)

Before the earthquake adoptions from Haiti to the United States were relatively few, averaging between two and three hundred per year, but suddenly adopting Haitian children took on energy, prestige, and a sense of spiritual calling. Journalists reverentially sat with would-be adoptive parents or their supporters; one reported from the pews of a Tennessee church as the congregation passed photos of “our girls”—children in a Haitian orphanage who they had sponsored and now sought to get out of the country. Evangelical bloggers wrote about their conviction that “my child is waiting for me.” Advocates traded statistics they had heard: if just a small percentage of American Christians would adopt a child, there would be no more orphans in Haiti. When emergency adoptions brought children to the United States, they gave thanks: “God is Good.”

Adoption agencies reported an onslaught of applications to adopt from Haiti. Bethany Christian Services, the largest US adoption agency, announced they had received more applications for Haitian adoptions in January 2010 than they had in all of 2009, and adoption agencies across the United States received nearly twenty thousand inquiries for Haiti. Pop culture celebrities caught the fever too, with Queen Latifah telling the
Today Show
, “I wanna just go down there and get some of those babies. If you got a hook up, please get me a couple of Haitian kids. It’s time. I’m ready.”

It was hard not to come away with the impression that Americans were becoming the central figures in Haiti’s drama, that Haiti’s catastrophe was a foil against which US charity and quest for purpose could shine. Soon after the earthquake, in a crush at the Haitian airport, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien described a heroic scene: “Tall, broad-shouldered American servicemen are walking around with tiny Haitian kids,” she said, “and they are feeding them cold, clean water.” Elsewhere in the airport a group of wealthy tech firm employees arrived with a private plane and an ambiguous determination to help, and they returned with a group of Americans carrying twenty-two Haitian babies and small children. The group boarded with no passport check, and the techies ascended into the air, high on a new sense of “meaning,” O’Brien gushed.

When the plane landed in Fort Lauderdale, CNN rushed a live feed truck to meet it. O’Brien narrated as children disembarked and their new adoptive parents stood by in a hangar, then rushed onto the tarmac, “screaming with arms outstretched.” Some children were scared; one yelled “Mommy.” It’s “an incredible human moment,” reported O’Brien.

MEANWHILE,
Haitian adults were being told to wait. The streets outside the US Embassy compound in Port-au-Prince were clogged with hundreds of prospective US adoptive parents, orphanage directors and their wards, as well as “loose children,” reported notes from a January 21 teleconference held by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). “Only adoption cases are being handled,” a teleconference participant noted, and Haitians visiting the embassy for other reasons, such as preexisting visa and immigration applications, were turned away.

In the waters outside Haiti a fleet of US Coast Guard vessels moved into place, not just as part of a rescue mission but also in accordance with “Operation Vigilant Sentry,” an anti-immigration military and US Department of Homeland Security strategy developed in 2003, to ensure that Haitian citizens didn’t try to flee the destroyed capital by boat. Overhead an Air Force transport plane broadcast a statement in Creole from Haitian Ambassador to the United States Raymond Joseph, warning would-be refugees to stay away. “If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case,” Joseph’s recorded message repeated. “They will intercept you right on the water, and send you back home where you came from.” From an Air Force base in Florida, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano added, “Please
do not have us divert our necessary rescue and relief efforts that are going into Haiti by trying to leave at this point.”

“The message ‘Don’t come here, don’t come here,’ was being blared to adults,” said Karen Dubinsky, a professor of global development studies at Queen’s University in Canada and author of
Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas
, “at the same time that this counter narrative is building about how we’ll take the children.”

In the United States some of the scores of adoption agencies with ties to Haitian orphanages, evangelical Christians newly mobilized around adoption, and sympathetic politicians led the charge for expedited adoptions of the country’s alleged pre-earthquake population of four hundred thousand or more orphans. This figure was widely reported, despite a clarification from UNICEF—the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the UN’s humanitarian arms—that likely there had been only fifty thousand orphans, in the widely understood sense of the word. Others had lost only one parent or lived with extended family. Identifying which children fit which category was a matter of painstaking investigation nearly impossible in the aftermath of the disaster. Nevertheless, adoption advocates soon embellished the already bloated numbers, stating that as many as one million children in Haiti—a full ninth of the country’s total population—were now orphaned.

Long-standing religious relief organizations joined with upstart Haiti orphan missions to call for a reenactment of the 1960s anti-Communist “Operation Pedro (or Peter) Pan” that had spirited more than fourteen thousand children out of Castro’s Cuba and into mostly Catholic homes in the United States.
*
The revival Catholic groups proposed for Haiti, “Operation Pierre Pan,” was enveloped in the language of emergency, with impassioned calls to “get the children out,” as if they were boarding the last plane off the island. It was language that recalled another mission, the 1975 “Operation Babylift” evacuation of thirty-three hundred Vietnamese children to North America and Europe just before the Fall of Saigon. Evangelical activists suggested that any aid planes delivering supplies to Haiti should return to the United States “load[ed] up with orphans.”

But rather than saving children from Communism or an impending military attack, this time the urgency seemed to center on saving children from Haiti itself. “Haiti cannot feed its children,” one US orphanage director, Harold Nungester of H.I.S. Home for Children, argued in the
Wall Street Journal.
“The best way to service them is to get them out.”

Again and again Haitian children were characterized as prisoners in a backward nation, their ambiguous orphanhood overshadowed by their status as victims. Few asked where these children came from, if they had surviving family and friends in Haiti who were looking for them, or if they wanted to leave their country. As it would turn out, many were not actually orphans.

On some adoptive parent forums, noted the website Racialicious, which covers racial politics in the United States, commenters fretted about what would happen to children in a country where “survival of the fittest” had replaced the rule of order. The racial dynamics of the prevailing attitude toward the Haitian orphans were stark in their implication that Haiti, a nation birthed by a slave rebellion, had become a sort of animal kingdom from which children must be rescued, lest, Racialicious interpreted, “they won’t even grow up to be human beings.”

“Those children in five or ten years, what are they going to become?” Pastor Pierre Alexis, director of another Port-au-Prince orphanage, Maison des Enfants de Dieu, asked me. Haiti’s children are the future and the country’s resource, he continued, “But everyone knows when you have a resource and you don’t use it in a proper way, it becomes a problem.” The best option for them, he said, is to get them adopted. “There is no other plan for the children.” As if in response, Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, asked the
Wall Street Journal,
“How can we rebuild a nation if the only chance that parents have to give their children a future is to part with them?”

In the US the Adoptees of Color Roundtable, an organization of adult adoptees, released a statement in late January characterizing the adoption rush in Haiti as a colonialist and racist movement that disregarded Haitian family structures in favor of Western parents’ sense of entitlement to developing nations’ children. “For more than fifty years, ‘orphaned children’ have been shipped from areas of war, natural disasters, and poverty to supposedly better lives in Europe and North America,” the Roundtable statement read. “We seek to challenge those who abuse the phrase ‘Every child deserves a family’ to rethink how this phrase is used to justify the removal of children from Haiti.” It was a statement that got at the heart of the conflicts surrounding international child
adoption—conflicts that rarely surface in popular American discourse, in which adoption is generally understood as a “win-win” scenario: saintly parents creating their family from the wreckage of another, giving love and a home to a child that has neither. Another critic derided what he termed “the Moment,” the fairytale photo-ops dominating cable news when adoptees first land on US soil, “as if they’ve arrived at the Promised Land.” This narrative of adoption as child rescue usually drowns out the more critical interpretation—that adoption is an industry driven largely by money and Western demand, justified by a misguided savior complex that blinds Americans to orphans’ existing family ties and assumes that tickets to America for a handful of children are an appropriate fix for an entire culture living in poverty. But in Haiti in early 2010, in the midst of this murky old fight, the critics’ side of the story became suddenly, startlingly clear as a sped-up version of the same vigilante child-rescue efforts that have taken place in dozens of other countries unfolded on the public stage. For a brief, unique moment people watching from around the world understood what the other side meant.

IN THE THICK
of the debate over where Haiti’s children should go, on January 29 came news that ten American Baptists from a fledgling Idaho orphan ministry, New Life Children’s Refuge, were caught at the border of the Dominican Republic attempting to transport thirty-three children, ranging from infancy to twelve years old, out of Haiti without permission or documentation. The group was arrested on suspicion of trafficking and kidnapping, and they were eventually charged with kidnapping and criminal conspiracy, leading to a bonanza of headline stories about American Christians “kidnapping for Jesus.”

Self-declared missionary Laura Silsby, a struggling, forty-year-old entrepreneur from Idaho with a troubled financial past, led the group. She had been CEO of a failed personal shopping business and at the time of her arrest was on the wrong end of at least fourteen claims for unpaid wages. Silsby had been brought up as the daughter of a missionary minister in the Wesleyan Holiness Church, which prohibits dancing, television, and alcohol and expects women to wear long dresses and not cut their hair. She was a sharp student who graduated high school at fifteen and then earned a business administration degree from Washington State University.

By late 2009, however, Silsby was a divorced mother of three, entangled in a custody battle with her ex-husband and facing the fallout of her
failed business. With her financial and personal life in collapse, she took several trips to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and started making plans to build an orphanage in the DR for Haitian children. She founded the New Life Children’s Refuge in November 2009, and then, just one month before the earthquake, Silsby and her children abruptly moved out of their house in Meridian, Idaho, to a rental home as the bank prepared to foreclose.

Silsby belonged to Meridian’s 890-member Central Valley Baptist Church, a congregation in the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination wherein many churches in recent decades have promoted short-term mission trips among their flocks. Christians from these churches have traveled overseas in unprecedented numbers, paying thousands of dollars on “voluntourism” vacations to developing nations.
*
There they constructed buildings or wells or spent time at orphanages, playing with children and bringing back a taste for Ethiopian coffee at their church’s postservice fellowship hour. Voluntourism frequently amounts to a deprofessionalization of missionary work, a shift from career missionaries who learn the language, culture, and laws of the country to amateurs combining sightseeing and charity. The same sort of volunteer-centered agenda that is often present in short-term missions seems to have been a central component of the Silsby affair.

Shortly after the earthquake Paul Thompson, an acquaintance of Silsby’s and the pastor of a neighboring Southern Baptist church, Eastside Baptist in Twin Falls, Idaho, sent an urgent e-mail to friends asking for fellow missionaries to join him and Silsby on a two- or three-week trip to Haiti. A group of ten missionaries assembled, mostly from the two
churches, and they collected emergency donations in plastic tubs to carry with them to the Dominican Republic.

Silsby approached the earthquake with an entrepreneur’s optimism. She already had plans to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, so to her the earthquake seemed a sign to begin work early. “God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now vs. waiting until the permanent facility is built,” declared a planning document for New Life Children’s Refuge that was posted on the Eastside Baptist website. On her arrival in the Dominican Republic on January 22, Silsby leased a forty-five-room hotel from the Dominican Catholic diocese—presumably paid for with donation money—and launched New Life’s first project, the “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission.” The itinerary for the mission outlined a straightforward plan: “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.” The planning document explained that ultimately the venture would “provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation,” another as-yet-undeveloped arm of the operation that would work with US adoption agencies and provide grants “for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.”