Summer camp or boarding school
Ten members of an American Baptist Church are to appear in a Haitian court this morning after being accused of running an illegal adoption scheme. The group from Idaho said that they were carrying out a rescue mission and had accompanied more than 30 children as part of a plan to take at least 100 orphans out of Port-au-Prince to an orphanage that they run in the neighbouring Dominican Republic…She said that the group had documents from the Dominican Governmen but did not seek any paperwork from the Haitian authorities…
Why not? Did they try? Was it impossible in the circumstances? The article doesn’t say. At any rate clearly documents from another government do not amount to permission to take children out of their own country. If I decide to grab a child and take her to Ulan Bator, it’s not good enough for me to say I have documents from the government of Mongolia. Mongolia isn’t in a position to give me permission to abduct a child from a country that is not Mongolia.
The children, aged from a few months to 12, seemed to have little idea where they were being taken when The Times met them, with some saying that they had parents in Haiti. George Willeit, of SOS Children’s Village, a care centre on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince where the children are now staying, told The Times: “What we know is that some of these children still have their parents. There was an older girl, aged 8 or 9, and she was crying and saying, ‘I’m not an orphan. I still have my parents’. This girl was thinking that she was going to a summer camp or boarding school. She didn’t know what was happening to her.”
No good. Bad. Help and rescue are all very well, but not in a hole-and-corner way. Not least, they have to make triply or quadruply sure to create ample records of what they’re doing so that the children can be found if relatives are looking for them. Even Idaho Baptists don’t get to take short cuts.
Jesus, when I read about these people this morning I screamed out loud. How stupid can people be? My guess is, no they did not try to get documents from the Haitian government or from any Haitian. It reminded me of Jesus and Mo and their badly spelled speech. The Idaho Baptists must have determined that having baby jesu giving them ideas was much better than developing their minds or thinking their actions through to the likely consequences.
Very bad behavior. They need to get in trouble. But I bet they won’t. For reasons we can too well predict.
The cry of ‘I’m not an orphan’ would be Pythonic in other circumstances, but here it proves that a bunch of Americans decided to convert a punch of very confused and frightened black kids to their religion; by force, essentially.
But as they’re white American Christians, the wingnuts will demand that aid be withdrawn and bombs dropped if they are so much as slapped on the wrist.
Sorry to pernickety about an article with which I agree in full: but there’s no such country as Outer Mongolia. The country is Mongolia; Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the PRC.
Oops! Der. I knew I was groping in the feeble memory at the time, but didn’t look it up. Mea culpa.
I noticed on RTE 1 six o’ clock news last evening that a woman belonging to the evangelical group had her head completely bowed down when she was being interviewed. Her head, I thought, was not in that position because she was in deep prayerful concentration — no it was because she had, I reckon, anyway, a guilty conscience and could not either look the camera or the interviewer in thev eye.
This is almost certainly a result of Pat Robertson’s now-infamous line about Haiti’s deal with the “devil”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more stories of White American Christians swooping down to Haiti to snatch more children out of a hellbound country.
Oh, yikes, I never thought of that. Ugggh.
A lot of comments on a lot of blogs have used the term ‘vultures’ to describe the dodgy charities who seem to see the Haitian disaster as an opportunity to show-boat. Like these guys, to whom it did not even occur that the Haitians could expect to be consulted about the disposal of their children. Speaks of a certain disdain, doesn’t it?
Get a photo-op at the buffet of misery, tell your friends and neighbours about how you were there.
But I am proud that on B&W that analogy has not been made. Because vultures are useful, intelligent, sociable and likeable creatures when you get to know them.
Yeah, the religious were always good at stealing so – called orphan children and selling them off to rich families.