Haiti – in their darkest hour, there is opportunity…to make money.
Following to coverage of the detained American ‘missionaries’ who attempted to take a bus load of Haitian ‘orphans’ across the Dominican Republic boarder, I had a strange feeling of de ja vu.
The Guardian reports:
On Thursday, a mother in a remote village outside Haiti’s main earthquake zone told reporters how she allowed her twin sons to be taken by the missionaries because they promised to provide a life of hope and opportunity for her children.
Maggie Moise, who has eight children, said she was contacted by a local man who works in an orphanage in the village of Calebasse, an hour and a half’s drive from the centre of Port-au-Prince, and was told that “some white people” wanted to help her family.
“They said they wanted to go with our children and told us ‘don’t worry, everything will be fine’,” she said.
The Baptists said they had planned to take abandoned children orphaned in the earthquake and raise them at a new orphanage in the Dominican Republic. But according to locals, none of the children taken from Calebasse were orphans nor even particularly desperate. Few houses in the village have suffered any damage in the quake.
Which sounded startlingly familiar to last May’s episode of This American Life, about the story of an American couple, the Nybergs, and their adopted Samoan kid.
Samoan families accuse Utah-based adoption agency Focus on Children of tricking them into giving up their children for permanent adoptions. Similar tactics were described in interviews with six Samoan families, all but one members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Recruiters exploited their religious faith and dreams for their children, they said, selling adoption as a “program” that would send youngsters to live with an American Mormon family and get a good education before returning home at 18.
Other promises: Money, regular letters and photos from the adoptive families, the families claim.
It’s sickening to think this sort of thing could be going on in a country which has suffered so much already.
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