The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (4 page)

Though Silsby later claimed that she had never intended to put the children up for adoption, her plans for the orphanage included a beachfront cafe and seaside “villas for adopting parents to stay [in] while fulfilling requirement for [a] 60–90 day visit as well as [for] Christian volunteers/vacationing families,” amenities that underscored her understanding of local Dominican adoption residency requirements. The document also described the group’s goal to “equip each child” with the opportunity “for adoption into a loving Christian family” and help them find “new life in Christ.” It asked Christians to pray that God “continue to grant favor with the Dominican government in allowing us to bring as many orphans as we can into the DR.”

The promise of “new life”—meaning not just a new family but also a new faith—was an undercurrent in the broader crisis. To those who understood evangelical manners of speaking, the term “new life”—the inspiration for naming countless churches and ministries—seemed to cast adoption as one way of making new Christians. The promise of new life was often accompanied by statements implicitly disparaging aid that didn’t take Haitians’ spiritual well-being into account—help that saved only a body but not a soul. As Dan Cruver, head of evangelical adoption advocacy group Together for Adoption, attested at a Christian adoption
conference later that spring, after arguing that shipments of water bottles had only compounded Haiti’s worries by creating a mountain of trash, “Relief, as important as it is, is not the answer. What is the answer is the church.”

Overt evangelism was common in the many orphanages attempting to evacuate Haitian orphans. A Miami-based orphanage, His House, which coordinated adoptions for children airlifted from Haiti after the earthquake, described its mission as turning children into “Christ-like persons.” The Texas ministry For His Glory Adoption Outreach, meanwhile, considered Haiti to be a country “dedicated to Satan in a contractual form,” a reference to the apocryphal “pact with the devil” that Haiti’s independence fighters are said to have made in exchange for freedom from French rule. For His Glory aimed to fulfill the Bible’s Great Commission mandate, the charge that Christians evangelize the world, by placing orphans in Christian homes. Kim Harmon, president of For His Glory, personally adopted six of her eight children from the Port-au-Prince orphanage Maison des Enfants de Dieu, which her organization supports. “We want our children to be adopted by Christian families because we want them to be God’s servants,” Maison’s director Pastor Pierre Alexis told me. “I know [God] likes it when we are feeding them, but He likes better—He loves—when the children are growing as His servants.”

These evangelical motivations went largely unremarked in news media coverage of orphanages seeking to evacuate their wards. It was as if a consensus had been reached that Haiti—a seeming hellscape where children were fed mud cakes by their starving parents, or were sold into child slavery as
restaveks
*
in a country whose very name evoked voodoo, the underworld, and death—might need a level of evangelism that wouldn’t be tolerated in a more developed country. In some cases journalists were explicitly embedded with evangelical orphanage workers. That spring, with the help of Christian film producers from Discover the Journey, an advocacy-oriented documentary group that creates videos about subjects like child soldiers, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien made a TV documentary,
Rescued,
about an evangelical orphanage in Haiti called the Lighthouse. There, volunteers came, she wrote, “moved by a desire to leave behind their plastic lives, grasp meaning, and pursue God’s grace.” In a special preview for a group of evangelical adoption advocates, a Discover the
Journey staffer asked the audience to help spread the word about the film, offering in exchange her winking assurance that O’Brien will “come out a believer.”
*

Despite the public fervor to adopt “earthquake orphans,” the logistics of the adoptions themselves proved difficult. The quake had destroyed the Port-au-Prince building containing the vast majority of adoption paperwork for Haiti’s children and killed the judge who oversaw adoptions. But on January 18, just days before Silsby and her mission were to arrive in the Dominican Republic, the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security responded to these complications by announcing its “humanitarian parole” policy, which would ultimately expedite the emigration of more than 1,150 “orphaned children” who had been matched with US parents on temporary authorization papers. Adoption advocates, however, pushed for even more measures to open and speed up the process. Although the devastation had rendered the Haitian government incapable of tracking either institutionalized or newly “unaccompanied” children’s existing family connections, adoption advocates pressed to expand the humanitarian parole program to thousands of other children—to get children out of Haiti first and investigate whether those children had surviving families later, after they were safe in the United States, no matter that children of unclear origin taken to America are rarely returned. “The paperwork can wait,” summarized a headline in the
Times
of London, “everybody wins with adoption.”

Conversely, UNICEF, along with other aid groups like Save the Children and World Vision, called for an adoption moratorium until Haitian officials could determine which unaccompanied children were legitimate orphans, citing fears of child trafficking and misguided salvation missions. In response some adoption advocates charged that this goal made the perfect the enemy of the good; they accused UNICEF of leaving children
to suffer in the name of bureaucracy and “flexing their muscles” to harass Christian orphanages.

Such claims weren’t new to UNICEF, long a
bête noire
of the adoption community and frequently accused of being so anti-adoption that it would rather see children die in institutions than be adopted to the United States. UNICEF’s official stance is that international adoption is a good option for some children and preferable to orphanage care but that in-country options, such as reuniting children with their birth families or placing them with domestic adoptive parents, must be exhausted first. This hierarchy of options, known as “the principle of subsidiarity,” also guides the Hague Adoption Convention, an international compact drawn to prevent adoption trafficking and corruption. Nonetheless, UNICEF still garnered special disdain among the Christian adoption advocates who flocked to the country after the quake.

Dixie Bickel, director of God’s Littlest Angels orphanage in Fermate, outside Port-au-Prince, charged that “UNICEF appears to be the only organization that we’re aware of that is currently working in Haiti that isn’t working for the good of the children,” while Randy Bohlender, founder of the Christian adoption ministry the Zoe Foundation, called UNICEF’s subsidiarity principle “nation-pandering,” a statement implying that Haiti shouldn’t control what happened to its children.

Vision Forum Ministries, a far-right offshoot of a fundamentalist Texas homeschooling publisher that had assembled a Haitian rescue mission of its own, asserted that “Haiti’s Children [are being] Held Hostage by UNICEF’s Agenda.” The group went on to make the wild claim that UNICEF would soon move from preventing adoptions to sterilizing Haitians.

The accusations built to such a pitch that Susan Bissell, UNICEF chief of child protection, spent much of her time addressing them in postearthquake interviews. “UNICEF is very much in favor of international adoption with the right system in place at the right time for the right children,” Bissell repeated to me. “UNICEF isn’t saying this stuff. There are international conventions that lay this out, and we’re just compliant.”

But adoption organizations and right-wing Christian ministries weren’t the only source of 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-Dominican
border 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 years after the incident one of the Calebasse fathers remarked to the Associated Press that the parents had wanted to send their children off on the missionaries’ bus to get them away from the general chaos after the earthquake and that if any children had stayed behind, it was only because there wasn’t enough room.

The missionaries were escorted back to Port-au-Prince, where Silsby was questioned. Eventually all of the adults were jailed. Silsby immediately began a defense of ignorance, claiming their hearts had been in the right place and they hadn’t thought documentation for children would be required in the context of the emergency. “These people would never do something like this in their own country,” Chief of Haiti’s National Judicial Police Frantz Thermilus said of Silsby’s group. “We must make it clear they cannot do such things in ours.”

Haiti’s adoption system had been problematic even before the earthquake, however. A 2005 UNICEF report declared Haiti’s adoption program “untransparent.” Many children in Haiti, as in other developing nations, are placed in
crèches,
or orphanages, because of their families’ poverty alone, meaning that orphanages can serve both as homes for truly parentless orphans and as de facto boarding schools for children whose parents can’t afford to feed or care for them but who may continue to visit them and still consider them part of the family. In part because of the proliferation of crèches and also due to a lack of education or language and cultural barriers, some parents may inadvertently relinquish parental consent for their children without realizing the full implications—or, worse, may not relinquish it at all before their children are sent abroad. A group of three doctors and a social worker who went to Haiti shortly after the earthquake wrote in the
New England Journal of Medicine
that “Desperately poor families have often felt compelled to
place children in residential care facilities, only to return later and find that they have been given away for adoption.”

International adoption financially sustains many orphanages, as adoption agencies share with them a percentage of fees, which for Haiti often range from $10,000 to $25,000, paid by adoptive parents in the United States or Europe. Further, prospective adopters frequently pay monthly care stipends of several hundred dollars while a child is still in the orphanage. The money can become a powerful enticement to favor international adoptions over finding domestic adoptive parents for children or helping existing family reclaim them. Considering all of the middlemen involved—lawyers, civil servants, orphanage staff, facilitators, notaries, and more—some estimates value Haiti’s adoption business at $20 million per year, making it one of the more profitable industries in a country where approximately 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day.