So today provides yet another profile of yet another Baptist evangelical scavenger, Mike Roberts, the North Texas CEO of “Source Direct.”
The Dallas Morning News has done an article on yet another scavenger on a “mission from god” to do the kind of work in Haiti that can decide who lives and who dies, and to set up an adoption pipeline cash and supplies-for-kids scheme. Naturally, the piece is more of a glowing profile than an expose on Roberts attempt at child tafficking.
Yup, yet another attempt to build a system of Haitian “orphans” sourced directly to a congregation.
He and his wife plan to return in about four weeks to begin the process of adopting a Haitian orphan – a touchy subject after 10 Americans were charged with kidnapping for trying to take 33 children out of the country without documentation.
Roberts visited three orphanages while in Haiti and used his jet to fly in supplies – soap, shampoo and diapers.
As stated earlier in the article that would be his $7 million private jet.
The day he left, he also stopped by to give money to the directors. “We want to develop a relationship so we can adopt your children as well as support you,” Roberts told Osvaldo P. Fernandez, director of the Rose-Mina De Diegue Orphanage. “We also want to give you some cash.”
Roberts unzipped a money belt and fished out a handful of money.
With apologies to the Pet Shop Boys, this is nothing more than You’ve got the kids, I’ve got the cash, let’s make some adoptions.
There’s no veneer on it, no finesse, just outright “let’s build a relationship here, you provide the kids, I’ll put cash and goods in your hands.”
Nor is Roberts merely sealing the deal for one of his own, he’s looking to build an adoption pipeline between these Haitian “orphanages” and his congregation, Park Cities Baptist Church back in Texas.
At first this commodities trading apparently didn’t go over so well (at least with a reporter there to cover such).
Fernandez’s eyes flashed in anger. In Spanish, his words tumbled one over another.
“You can’t pay me off for one of my children,” he said. “I’m not selling babies here. My kids don’t want money, they want affection.”
But soon enough, the “orphanage” director came around:
Over the next few minutes, translators smoothed over the misunderstanding. Fernandez accepted the money and his eyes softened as he watched Roberts play with a group of orphans.
“I can see he has affection for the children,” he said. “I can see he needs the love of a child.”
Which is, as seems to be so often in these cases, putting the desires of the wealthy American would-be-adopters in front of the genuine survival needs of of the kids themselves.
The adopter is portrayed as needing “the love of a child.”
As opposed to the child, who needs clean drinkable water, food, shelter, clothing, to be protected from child trafficking, have their human rights protected, and not be exported out of their own country at the whim of a wealthy purchaser.
Once the director took the cash, the details of the pipeline were hammered out quickly enough (emphasis added is my own).
Roberts said he hopes his congregation at Park Cities Baptist Church will connect with Haitian orphanages, send supplies and set up a system where members can adopt children.
Naturally, he can’t pass up the opportunity to kick in a catty remark about his competition for children in Haiti, NGOs such as Unicef that advocate the kids remain in their own country and are being brought to places of safety out of the reach of scavenging disaster opportunists like Roberts:
“You look at the lives of these children and their surroundings, and you just know we can do better,” Roberts said. “I’m not talking materialism. We can bring these kids up in a family unit rather than allowing them to be brought up in a platoon.”
Roberts views any policy or moratorium standing between him and his quest for “product” i.e. kids as “absurd” dismissing any previous history Haiti has had with child trafficking.
Haiti recently placed a moratorium on adoptions out of fear that some children and parents may have been separated during the chaotic aftermath of the quake. Roberts dismissed the policy as “absurd.”
“Are we going to sit back and allow thousands of babies to go without milk while all of our governments decide what is the best way to handle this situation?” he wrote his wife. “Try telling that to a starving baby.
Obviously, he’s merely yet another Texan evangelical fly-in who wants what he wants. Any pre-existing context or history Haiti has had with children being bought and sold means nothing to him. Such is simply dismissed, as he pulls out the usual “but think of the children” routine.
Maybe before opening his mouth and his wallet, he could take a moment to learn even the basics about what words like “Haitian Orphanage” have meant and continue to mean.
His answer then, to get questions of whether or not the kids are exportable settled quickly is to set up a photo catalog of ‘inventory’ i.e. kids not already (so often falsely) labeled “orphans.” Once again, emphasis is mine:
Why can’t we just publish a list with names and photos for any child that has not been documented as an orphan?
“This would allow any surviving family members to locate their missing child and we could return them once they are in a position to care for the child.
Sooooo, export the kids first, place them with American Christian would-be-adopter families, and them offer promises to return the kid should their parents or other relatives be able to provably identify them AND meet conditions deemed able “to care for the child.”
Roberts resorts to that time tested and well worn means by which to shut down any opposition or blow past any objections or rational arguments against his course of action: “You have to do what I want, what you’re doing now is KILLING CHILDREN.”
I know that they are attempting to protect these children by playing it safe but in reality they are killing them.
After all, who is going to make the consequences of such child trafficking actually come to fall on Mike Roberts, his family, his church, and the other American families in the congregation who stand to purchase children by way of this deal?
Obviously, there are a great number of things I could say about the ten American missionary child scavengers sitting in a Haitian Jail at the moment.
But what I have to say is not the point.
It’s their own words that are at issue here.
Already, just in the short time since their arrests, conflicting stories and conflicting quotes have come from members of this attempt to unlawfully remove children from Haiti. I could spend many hours pulling different quotations. Instead I’m going to cut to the heart of what genuinely matters: family members are making provably incorrect claims that the group was merely moving kids across the border as part of some attempt at some form of what they (mis) characterize as essentially humanitarian relief work, denying any adoption purpose behind their actions. Take this from the BBC as but one example:
Sean Lankford of Meridian, Idaho, whose wife and daughter are among those held, told the Associated Press: “The plan was never to go adopt all these kids. The plan was to create this orphanage where kids could live.”
Their own “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission” document (local copy here) makes it clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that exporting children for purposes of inter-county adoption lay at the very core of what they went to Haiti to do. Emphasis in the below is my own.
Future Buildings and Plans for NLCR in Magante
Nueva Vida Refugio de Ninos: Provide a loving Christian home‐like environment for up to 200 children, both boys and girls, initially focused on ages 0 ‐ 10 years old, later expanding to include teens up to age 16.
Nueva Vida Escuela Cristiana: Provide a solid education for children in the refuge as well as in the local community if have sufficient space/resources. Plan to begin with PreSchool/Kindergarten up to 6th grade, teaching English/Spanish, Reading, Math, Science, History, Geography, Health, Music/Art, as well as Christian values/truths. Plan to add higher grades and courses on vocational skills when needed.
Nueva Vida en Christo Capilla: On site Chapel for the children from the refuge and the community
Sick Bay/Medical care: for incoming children that are in need minor medical care
Greenhouse/Livestock: Provide for nutritional needs of the children by growing fruits and vegetables and raising cows/chickens for milk and eggs
Seaside Villas at Playa Magante*: Villas for adopting parents to stay while fulfilling requirement for 60‐90 day visit as well as Christian volunteers/vacationing families.
Provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation which works with adoption agencies in the U.S. to help facilitate adoptions and provide grants to subsidize the cost of adoption for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.
Seaside Café at Playa Magante*: small beachfront restaurant serving the community and adopting parents
Why a 60-90 day ‘visit’?
Not because wannabe adopters thought it might be nice to spend some time getting to know the country the child will be exported from.
Nope, the vaporware (eventually hoped for) “Villas” and facilities, right down to an on site restaurant, were being designed to form a bubble of sorts for international adopters to be able to fulfill the Dominican Republic’s adoption residency requirements:
Once a child has been assigned the adopting couple must come to the Dominican Republic to live with the child, under the supervision of CONANI, for a period of at least 30 or 60 days.
If cohabitation with the child is successful, CONANI will issue, within sixty days from the termination of the cohabitation period, a certificate stating the applicants have been found to be fit to adopt the child.
Similar bubble type arrangements develop in many international export countries near the airports, often in hotels, be that in China, or India, or Guatemala City’s “baby hotels:” the Marriott, the Radisson, or the Camino Real back in the heyday of the Guatemalan exports. Such facilities enable wanna be adopters to fulfill their in-country residency requirements while maintaining a semblance of their western lifestyles.
That the “New Life Children’s Refuge” was rooted in ideas of setting itself up as an adoption export hub in the Dominican Republic is all right there, in black and white.
We will strive to also equip each child with a solid education and vocational skills as well as opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.
That’s not ’some’ kids, or ‘a few’ kids, that’s “EACH CHILD.”
Not just any adoption export center, a very explicitly Evangelical and proselytizing adoption-based facility, preparing kids for export. Again, quoting the BBC article (emphasis added by me):
The charity, which Ms Silsby incorporated in Idaho in November last year, says it is “dedicated to rescuing, loving and caring for orphaned, abandoned and impoverished Haitian and Dominican children, demonstrating God’s love and helping each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ”.
Which is to say, ensuring the kids themselves underwent a ‘christ centered’ “healing” process with the aim of ensuring the kids themselves “find… a new life in Christ.”
Hoping that a number of them could be exported to wannabe adopters deemed spiritually suitable as well.
I’ve noted some number of reporters mentioning the idea of the kids being brought back to “an orphanage” in the Dominican Republic.
…an interim solution in nearby Cabarete, where we will be leasing a 45 room hotel and converting it into an orphanage until the building of the NLCR is complete. This interim location will enable us to provide a loving environment for up to 150 children, from infants to 12 years old.
Then one of the most shocking details of the plan hides tucked down in the next paragraph which I will quote in full:
Team Needed: NLCR is praying and seeking people who have a heart for God and a desire to share God’s love with these precious children, helping them heal and find new life in Christ. Please prayerfully consider a 2 week or longer mission trip to help NLCR provide rotating staffing for the care of the children over the next 6 months.
Yup, you read that right, basically putting out the call for missionaries, Joe and Jane average who want to help the kids “find a new life in christ,” to head down to the Dominican Republic for a stint as short as perhaps a mere two weeks. I.E. Missionary tourism at its best.
They hoped to find enough volunteers in two week rotations to fill out the next 6 months until they could move into the next phase of possibly building their little pipe dream.
So what if volunteer missionaries didn’t show up? What if the funding didn’t come through?
Well, then you’ve a got a pile of Haitian kids stuffed into a hotel with the rent coming due.
Laura Silsby, 40, of Boise, Idaho; owns Personal Shopper Inc, an online shopping assistance company
Charisa Coulter, 23, of Kuna, Idaho
Corinna Lankford and Nicole Lankford, 18, of Middleton, Idaho
Carla Thompson, 53, of Meridian, Idaho; missions co-ordinator at the Central Valley Baptist Church
Silas Thompson, 19, of Twin Falls, Idaho
Paul Thompson, 43, of Twin Falls, Idaho
Drew Culberth, 34, of Topeka, Kansas; a part-time youth pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, who was given time off to go on the trip because of his firefighting experience and emergency medical training
Steve McMullen, 56, of Twin Falls, Idaho
Jim Allen, 47, of Amarillo, Texas
I strongly urge readers and reporters to carefully assess the statements that have been made and are still being made by the New Life Scavengers in light of their own words, their plan, if you will.
Finding the contradictions is a simple matter, once you put on the secret decoder ring they themselves have so thoughtfully provided.
Once again, I’m going to pick up my partner Mike’s writing about the Friday evening arrests of 10 missionaries for their attempted removal of kids from Haiti to the Dominican Republic.
American citizens pose for a photo at police headquarters in the international airport of Port-au-Prince, Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010. Associated Press photo/Ramon Espinosa.
In my earlier post I suggested that the overwhelming demands to move children out of Haiti for adoption elsewhere were in a way a twisted expression of American consumerism. I wrote, “It…. matches the consumerist mindset, in which by simply acquiring the right things – even your very own “orphan” – your situation, and that of the world, will improve.”
I didn’t quite expect that in little more than 24 hours, events, driven by a founder of a company that sells consumer products online, would serve to drive home that point and others I was trying to make. It’s the mythology of international adoption that is driving American prospective adopters, politicians and Christian organizations to organize the exporting of Haitian children to the United States, amid calls for legislation to simplify adoptions for prospective adopters by creating a dedicated office for it at the State Department.
Central to those calls was the demand for rapid visa approvals from the State Department. Seldom heard from this crowd was any mention that the Haitians, assisted by aid organizations, might have some interest in monitoring, or even restricting completely, the flow of unaccompanied children out of their country, making the issue of the State Department’s speed rather moot.
Most American churchgoing suburbanites are unable to drop everything, get on a plane and run off to Haiti and see if they can, for themselves, run their own version of what some of us are calling “Rendell’s Raid,” in which the governor of Pennsylvania flew to Haiti, twisted the arms of various politicians, put pressure on what was left of the Haitian government, and finally, packed more than 50 of Haiti’s children on a U.S. military plane. But inevitably, someone with some means and willing accomplices, if not connections, would actually make such an attempt – this time, ending with ten Americans being arrested by Haitian police. At this writing it’s very likely that they’re sitting in jail cells in Port-au-Prince.
It’s clear from all the documentation available online that one of the primary people involved with all this is Laura Silsby, the founder and CEO of PersonalShopper.com, an online gift shopping service based in Boise. Through a bit of digging online, mainly on Facebook, its obvious that there are numerous connections between Silsby and the others arrested, including Paul Thompson, the pastor of Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho.
It’s on Thompson’s church website where the “smoking gun” can be found, a document completed on January 19 which outlines the entire plan, for a so-called “rescue mission” to Haiti, to scoop up 100 children, some unspecified portion of them directly off the streets of Port-au-Prince, and to transport them to a temporary headquarters in a newly-rented hotel in Santo Domingo. But the whole document reads like a bit of a pipe dream; it has that feel of a lot of evangelical writing, where the expectations of the writer aren’t quite connected to the physical realities of the planet.
Silsby lists herself in this document as the “Executive Director and Founder” of “New Life Children Refuge,” a brand-new nonprofit organization which filed its incorporation papers with the state of Idaho just two months ago. Interesting, that the incorporation papers read “Personal Shopper” at the top of every page, suggesting they were sent from a fax machine at the PersonalShopper.com office. There isn’t any evidence of this “Refuge” having even so much a website or a telephone number, much less any substantial tangible resources, but that didn’t stop Silsby.
Friday/Saturday, Jan 22nd : NLCR team fly to the DR
Sun Jan 23rd: 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
Mon Jan 24th: Bus arrives in Cabarete, DR at New Life Children Refuge
The obvious problems with this “plan” are numerous, from even just these few lines. The trip from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince, as can be easily learned through a brief online search, is over six hours by scheduled bus under normal conditions. Were they serious about making a daytrip out of this run, it would have been little more than a snatch-and-grab of whatever kids they could have found on the streets over a few hours.
For whatever reason, they didn’t finally attempt to return to the Dominican Republic until January 29, almost a week later than they planned. Regardless, this plan made their intent very clear: they thought they could just show up in Port-au-Prince unannounced, pick up some kids from some unspecified place that they couldn’t identify beforehand, and drive them back across the border.
As if this complete cluelessness about the conditions under which they could legitimately pick up and transport Haitian kids wasn’t enough, their facilities in Santo Domingo didn’t exist. They were going to rent a hotel for the Haitian children to land in, until they could implement the rest of their “plan” of building their own facility.
Interim New Life Children Refuge Location: NLCR is in the process of buying land and building an orphanage, school and church in Magante on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. Given the urgent needs from this earthquake, God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now vs. waiting until the permanent facility is built. He has provided an interim solution in nearby Cabarete, where we will be leasing a 45 room hotel and converting it into an orphanage until the building of the NLCR is complete. This interim location will enable us to provide a loving environment for up to 150 children, from infants to 12 years old.
It’s not clear where the expectation that building a new orphanage for 150 children in the Dominican Republic would be something that a bunch of suburbanites from Idaho without extensive experience with such a project, and considerable resources, could pull off even over the course of many years. There’s no evidence that anyone involved with this little operation was in any way already familiar with Haiti or the Dominican Republic, except perhaps from some short-term visit as a missionary tourist. Often, when browsing people’s profiles on Facebook, their previous experience and interests are obvious, and when someone is actually familiar with things like international adoption, relief work, or long-term missions – which is clearly what’s intended in this description – it shows. But not here.
Nobody in this crowd seems to have any international experience at all to speak of. When, for example, you look at their Facebook profiles, like that of Laura Silsby, you’ll see things like the fact that they’re a “fan” of Sarah Palin, or a “fan” of the Manhattan Declaration, the anti-gay, anti-abortion, statement issued by a bunch of prominent evangelical personalities including convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson. Others are “fans” of things like the local anti-abortion groups, or maybe, the Southern Baptist disaster response organization. Anything that might indicate an in-depth knowledge of the task and that part of the world that would be necessary to accomplish that sort of mission? It’s just not there.
There’s another peculiar aspect to this “plan” document. In the “Prayer Requests” section, which often summarizes the things that the writer either doesn’t know or hopes won’t go wrong, are these entries:
Prayer Requests
For discernment of God’s will and direction throughout this trip and for Him to prepare the way before us
For God to continue to grant favor with the Dominican Government in allowing us to bring as many orphans as we can into the DR
For God to guide us to the children He wants us to bring to NLCR and for their physical, emotional and spiritual healing
The second of these reflects the same kind of myopia often seen among adopters, and currently, American politicians, extending to the State Department, when dealing with international adoption. Emphasis is always placed on the receiving end, while any concerns on the part of the family or country of origin of these children is completely disregarded or viewed as false or illegitimate. Here, Silsby only cares that the Dominican Republic grant permission for them to bring in the children they’ve already collected. Even after all the recent press coverage that’s been given to the problem of child trafficking in Haiti, and the work by the Haitian government and NGOs to require full documentation of the status of each child departing the country, Silsby seems to think that that concern does not apply to her.
But Laura Sillsby from the Idaho group told Reuters from a jail cell at Haiti’s Judicial Police headquarters, “We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there.”
“We have a Baptist minister here (in Port-au-Prince) whose orphanage totally collapsed and he asked us to take the children to the orphanage in the Dominican Republic,” Sillsby added.
“I was going to come back here to do the paperwork,” Sillsby said. “They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong.”
As I wrote previously, when examining the world of international adoption, there’s this element of oscillation between the global and the personal. If you grow up into a privileged, successful, entrepreneurial suburbanite in a country where people you respect are going around saying things like, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” perhaps when you find yourself in a “crappy little country” you might think you can do whatever you want without being suspected of something heinous like child trafficking. Silsby and her entourage seem to have found out otherwise, the hard way.
Also telling in this section is the part expecting “God” to “guide” them “to the children he wants us to bring” to their vaporware orphanage. Prayer requests are often very telling in this way; clearly, they didn’t know what they were doing, down to the basics of understanding that the only children that they might be able to take out of the country, already in the approval process for adoption, would have been identified long before they arrived in Haiti! When I say Silsby was planning a “shopping trip to Port-au-Prince,” clearly, as with other kinds of shopping, she didn’t quite know what she would be getting until she saw the merchandise.
How can someone expect to go to Haiti, do these things, and not understand that they would clearly be suspected of trafficking children?
That kind of expectation – that child acquisition and international transport by Americans can never be questioned or challenged – on the part of people like Laura Silsby is exactly what I was working to explain in my last post, where I wrote:
Television provides an illusion of participation, that by simply watching a moving image the viewer feels that they’re somehow involved in events in a far away place. But because merely being a television viewer is unsatisfying in such times, many feel moved to act in some way. The things that an average American can do with respect to such huge tragedies are few; often the only answer is to send money. The popularization of international adoption, even when the practice is overwhelmingly corrupt and may violate human rights, seems to me to fill exactly this void; the impulse to get one’s hands on the children of an earthquake-ravaged country is created by these media portrayals of external calamity interacting with the cultural predisposition that it’s the American national mission to save the rest of the planet.
This self-defined role of planetary savior, that through adoption almost anyone can indulge in, a romantic and ostensibly altruistic myth, is exactly that: role-playing. It exists independent of the actual children and people of Haiti and their realistic needs. It’s the extension of the American exceptionalist myth, expressed through its military and foreign policy of planetary enforcer and order-keeper (regardless of actual results on the ground after billions of dollars are spent), made accessible to any citizen who’s willing to meet the most basic requirements, and who can afford the fees. It also matches the consumerist mindset, in which by simply acquiring the right things – even your very own “orphan” – your situation, and that of the world, will improve.
The solution for the children of Haiti, created by those who see the world through these lenses, is simplistic, crude and appeals to the acquisitional American who thinks they can buy or trade for anything and by doing so will do no harm, to the point that we now see suggestions like this one: “What if….we could find a plane that had just dropped a load of humanitarian aid and load it up with orphans?” There’s no hiding that the writer of that sentence, a professional promoter of adoption in the Christian context, thinks it’s a fair trade: he drops off aid, he extracts “orphans” to satisfy the enormous demand he’s been helping to create in his subculture for adoptable children. If the “orphans” don’t actually exist, they would have to be manufactured, through the endless redefinition of the term, “orphan,” which today seldom means what people think it means.
When I say that evangelicals (and not exclusively evangelicals) regularly seek to strip-mine less fortunate countries of their children, I’m not using that terminology for its shock value. People like Laura Silsby are seeking to establish an industry of extracting Haitian children for adoption by Americans. The third page of their so-called “rescue mission” lays out a long-term plan – hopefully permanently derailed – to create a fully vertically-integrated industrial operation in Santo Domingo to obtain and prepare Haitian children for export, into international adoption.
Future Buildings and Plans for NLCR in Magante
Nueva Vida Refugio de Ninos: Provide a loving Christian home‐like environment for up to 200 children, both boys and girls, initially focused on ages 0 ‐ 10 years old, later expanding to include teens up to age 16.
Nueva Vida Escuela Cristiana: Provide a solid education for children in the refuge as well as in the local community if have sufficient space/resources. Plan to begin with PreSchool/Kindergarten up to 6th grade, teaching English/Spanish, Reading, Math, Science, History, Geography, Health, Music/Art, as well as Christian values/truths. Plan to add higher grades and courses on vocational skills when needed.
Nueva Vida en Christo Capilla: On site Chapel for the children from the refuge and the community
Sick Bay/Medical care: for incoming children that are in need minor medical care
Greenhouse/Livestock: Provide for nutritional needs of the children by growing fruits and vegetables and raising cows/chickens for milk and eggs
Seaside Villas at Playa Magante*: Villas for adopting parents to stay while fulfilling requirement for 60‐90 day visit as well as Christian volunteers/vacationing families.
Provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation which works with adoption agencies in the U.S. to help facilitate adoptions and provide grants to subsidize the cost of adoption for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.
Seaside Café at Playa Magante*: small beachfront restaurant serving the community and adopting parents
Looked at from the point of view of an entrepreneur, what are these things? First, establish a warehouse for the merchandise, and processing facilities to make the merchandise suitable for the customer. Second, expedite the process of governmental approval which customers must obtain, making them as comfortable as possible while they fulfill the government’s mandate of a 60-90 day stay. Third, provide financing for the customers. Fourth, provide food and refreshment to the customers, which along with the lodging provides a “bubble” in which customers need not interact with the locals.
But as a business plan, there’s nothing to it, if the people putting it forward can’t seem to grasp the basic illegality of its initial premise. The children of Haiti are not theirs to process and export, to satisfy the endless demand for adoptable children without history, a demand their mythology creates.
Bastardette has created a new blog corraling many of the Haiti and child export writings from both her blog and a variety of other writers together in one place:
The unethical and often illegal removal of children from Haiti and subsequent identity erasure under the guise of “humanitarian aid” to serve small special interests is unprecedented in US child welfare history and policy. It is directly related to adoption secrety and control of information. The bastard and adoptee voice is being heard , but not loud enough.
which was then followed by the description from the site itself”
Stop Child Exportation and Trafficking is a collection of my blogs on Haiti published originally on my main blog, The Daily Bastardette. It is also a resource page for media, researchers, and the public interested looking for material and opinion on the ethics and legality of fast track adoption, babylifting, “humanitarian aid,”identity, historical and cultural erasure, and corrupt practices in international adoption, especially in the current Haitian earthquake crisis. It includes links to blogs, news articles, reports, and Haitian sources that are not available on The Daily Bastardette. We will publish occasional guest writers.
Readers will want to bookmark the new site as a clearinghouse of information and blog posts on the subject.
I have added the link to my righthand sidebar under “blogroll” as well.
His about page written back in October 2007 is pretty much a mandatory backgrounder to understand what underlies the perspective he (and ultimately we, the two of us) bring to our adoption related work.
I made some observations on my “About” page, some years ago, about the relationship between the practice of adoption and the way in which many Americans view the rest of the world. In recent days, that relationship has become quite obvious in the media coverage that has followed the earthquake in Haiti, and the subsequent actions by organizations, politicians, and prospective adopters in this country.
Unlike the self-described “bastards” I know, love, and work with, my personal interest in these matters is a little different, as I have no direct personal involvement with adoption beyond the fact that I live with a “bastard.” For me the subject connects with my interests in understanding how people handle information. Having had a tiny hand in popularizing the Internet years ago, how has the ‘net, and the concurrent growth of 24-hour television news, improved, or warped, how people view the world around them? Of course, one of the primary interests of “Bastards” – obtaining unaltered birth certificates that disclose historical facts of their origins – is likewise tightly connected with this issue of how people handle, or mishandle, or can’t handle, information, or construct elaborate structures of misinformation. Recent events are more about the global than the personal, but still these realms overlap, or oscillate from second to second, from the international to the individual.
I summed it up in a recent one-liner: “A city of millions of people leveled, and what’s on ABC tonight? ‘Is the baby I ordered still on its way?’” I was referring to a multi-night series of stories on Nightline, a program that’s been completely worthless ever since Ted Koppel retired. Days later, the habit continues, as with the Baltimore Sun website pictured. It’s all adopters, all the time. From the looks of it you’d think there have regularly been thousands of adoptions out of Haiti every year, and this vital flow was in danger of being interrupted.
Facts are, that’s not the case. There it is, on the U.S. State Department’s website: “The Total Adoptions from HAITI from 1998 to 2009 is: 2712.” Twelve years, averaging two hundred twenty six every year. That is all.
Throw “haiti adoption” into Google News right now, how many hits do you get? “About 6,102.” That’s not counting the ads for international adoption and adoption agencies that will also show up on the search results. “Adopt from China, Russia, Haiti, Guatemala, and more!”
It doesn’t help that elected officials here in the U.S. don’t seem to have more important things to do with their time, and hop on the adoption bandwagon while it’s in the media spotlight. Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, his Federal judge wife, and U.S. representative Jason Altmire fly to Haiti on a chartered plane to transport over fifty children from an orphanage run by two Pittsburgh suburbanites. It doesn’t matter that the Haitian government hadn’t signed off on letting 26 of those children out of the country. Two American women pitch a hissy fit, Rendell and Altmire work the White House to pressure what’s left of the Haitian government, and the next thing you know all 54 children are on a U.S. military plane.
When those children got to Pittsburgh – transported on the pretense that they were “already in the pipeline for adoption” – the truth comes out: seven of them hadn’t even been matched with adoptive parents. They ended up in a faith-based residential treatment center that had only 24 hours to prepare for their arrival.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of needy kids here in America, and in Pennsylvania. Eventually, that fact merits a small mention, here in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
But social service providers – and the Rendell administration – have a message for the families willing to open their homes and hearts: Don’t forget the 3,000 Pennsylvania children waiting for permanent homes.
“While the plight of the Haitian orphans has attracted much attention, it is important to recognize the many other children for whom we are always working to find a supportive family and safe home environment,” said Harriet Dichter, acting secretary of the state Department of Public Welfare.
Child advocate Cathleen Palm said that when she heard about the rush to adopt the Haitian children, she wished there was a way to assemble all the needy Pennsylvania children in a stadium and have the governor rescue them.
“We want to make sure people aren’t losing sight of the fact that kids are in crisis in Pennsylvania, too,” said Palm.
Why is it, when Pittsburgh has its own share of needy children, many in foster care, that all this attention – and the involvement of state and federal politicians – has been focused on Haitian children, attention that has as its goal, moving large numbers of them out of their country?
Perhaps a small hint of what might actually be going on here comes from this comment I saw go by on Facebook: ”I saw the little boy that Cooper Anderson helped pull from the rubble and he looked good, but you could tell he is still shell-shocked. That’s the one I would take home with me for a while…”
Television provides an illusion of participation, that by simply watching a moving image the viewer feels that they’re somehow involved in events in a far away place. But because merely being a television viewer is unsatisfying in such times, many feel moved to act in some way. The things that an average American can do with respect to such huge tragedies are few; often the only answer is to send money. The popularization of international adoption, even when the practice is overwhelmingly corrupt and may violate human rights, seems to me to fill exactly this void; the impulse to get one’s hands on the children of an earthquake-ravaged country is created by these media portrayals of external calamity interacting with the cultural predisposition that it’s the American national mission to save the rest of the planet.
This self-defined role of planetary savior, that through adoption almost anyone can indulge in, a romantic and ostensibly altruistic myth, is exactly that: role-playing. It exists independent of the actual children and people of Haiti and their realistic needs. It’s the extension of the American exceptionalist myth, expressed through its military and foreign policy of planetary enforcer and order-keeper (regardless of actual results on the ground after billions of dollars are spent), made accessible to any citizen who’s willing to meet the most basic requirements, and who can afford the fees. It also matches the consumerist mindset, in which by simply acquiring the right things – even your very own “orphan” – your situation, and that of the world, will improve.
The solution for the children of Haiti, created by those who see the world through these lenses, is simplistic, crude and appeals to the acquisitional American who thinks they can buy or trade for anything and by doing so will do no harm, to the point that we now see suggestions like this one: “What if….we could find a plane that had just dropped a load of humanitarian aid and load it up with orphans?” There’s no hiding that the writer of that sentence, a professional promoter of adoption in the Christian context, thinks it’s a fair trade: he drops off aid, he extracts “orphans” to satisfy the enormous demand he’s been helping to create in his subculture for adoptable children. If the “orphans” don’t actually exist, they would have to be manufactured, through the endless redefinition of the term, “orphan,” which today seldom means what people think it means.
Here again the hiding of information, and the contrast between “orphans” acquired outside the United States, and the reality of children in genuine need who might be available for domestic adoption, becomes clear. The imperative to hide information about the actual origins of children put up for adoption is one of the reasons international adoption exists. With the barriers of distance, international boundaries, and language, the entire history of what happened to these children may disappear, or be made inaccessible. The same goes for their biological parentage.
Couple that need for information hiding to a catastrophic natural disaster, and the resulting chaos and actual elimination of records, the entire history of where these children came from may be destroyed.
Contrast how that history can be hidden or destroyed in this international situation, with the prospect of domestic adoption out of foster care, where past history cannot be eliminated with such ease. This is, I think, why the governor of Pennsylvania isn’t spending the same amount of time and energy doing something for his state’s own needy kids. The facts about those kids’ lives can’t be wiped out with a plane ride, it lives on in files and records and the memories of people who might be neighbors, instead of being physically separated by thousands of miles.
After more than two weeks have passed since the earthquake, two camps have clearly emerged. One is driven by American foreign policy and all its concomitant myths and baggage as I’ve described them. Faced with a bonanza of the newly-opened opportunity to strip-mine Haiti of its children, American politicians are now calling for the State Department to set up a separate office to make sure that absolutely nothing stands in the way between American prospective adopters and Haitian children. Gordon Duguid, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, is quoted as saying, “we will send no child out of Haiti who does not have cleared, vetted and accepted parents waiting for him or her in the U.S.” Interesting redefinition there of what a “parent” is, equivalent to “adopter,” a redefinition that’s not necessarily shared by the rest of the world. As is to be expected, there’s no mention of how the U.S. will confirm that children arriving in the U.S. from Haiti will be shown to be genuine “orphans” without any parents or family remaining in Haiti, or even relatives here.
All that matters to the State Department is satisfying the needs of prospective adopters, and all the intermediary organizations that stand to benefit by facilitating such a mass migration.
As can be expected, the whining of a relatively tiny number of prospective adopters may now be occupying a disproportionate amount of the time of many American politicians. One example of many is this story from Terre Haute, Indiana, where a prospective adoptive family is “on an emotional roller coaster ride.” As usual, such prospective adopters, by whatever means, believe that the child they visited in some far-off country is already theirs, it’s just a matter of finishing the paperwork. Never mentioned is the possibility that the so-called “orphan” they expect to arrive any day now may not, in fact, be an orphan. Inevitably, increased scrutiny of the cases of children about to depart Haiti, on the part of government and aid organizations, will leave some American prospective adopters empty-handed.
It is in these situations where the fallout from the promotion of the mythology of romantic, altruistic, child-saving international adoption by Americans, will at least be a bit more evident. Children in poor, disaster-ravaged nations are reduced to a mere natural resource, who could easily fill that role if they could only be stacked shoulder-to-shoulder in aircraft headed back toward the United States. Their transport here serves to appease those who never question that myth and who often see their actions as heroic. It’s up to those on the ground without such an agenda to challenge that myth, to put forward the idea that adoption is not a solution to poverty, and to work toward the reunification of families separated by disaster.
Update: This quote was in the “sidebar” of this blog from February through September of 2008. It’s still relevant when considering the efforts of UNICEF in Haiti today.
If justice comes (and I have serious doubts that it will), it will come from the International community and NOT the United States.
Finally gave in to the “dark side” (and the requests) and have set up a BLC twitter stream. (Note the new “follow me” button in the left hand column.)
I’ll be using it to announce new BLC posts and provide links to articles, webpages, and other blog posts of note. Some will likely be well written and worthy of serious contemplation. Other times I may post the purely lunatic, worthy of absolute contempt.
There is always more material to read and pass along than there is time to blog about it, so I’ll be adding a few select bits and pieces without much commentary. Bear in mind that merely because I post something, that often does NOT mean I agree with it or in any way endorse what it is saying.
I’m hoping it will serve as a resource, or “for further reading” compliment to the Baby Love Child blog.
Just bear in mind, twitter is the antithesis of analysis.
As the Haitian child exports are receiving a great deal of attention at the moment I’d like to welcome new readers and recommend a visit to my about page and my WTF page. They answer many basic questions and lay out my comments policy.
I am an adult adoptee, writing from an explicitly Bastard perspective on these matters.
Acting on persistent fears that homeless and orphaned children will be victimized by human traffickers, the Haitian government in Port-au-Prince has put the brakes on the large-scale migration of orphans destined for adoptive families in the U.S.
Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told The Miami Herald his government had considerable fears that children may be scooped up in the streets of Port-au-Prince by nongovernmental organizations. The government also has concerns that children may be trafficked into prostitution or slavery.
Bellerive said his country would not release children for adoption without his personal approval, and ordered nongovernmental organizations working in Port-au-Prince to stop collecting children found on the street.
It appears the Prime Minister signed off on three authorizations of kids for export, but other kids have been removed as quickly as possible before circumstances on the ground could change and thewindow of opportunity for those demanding children shuts.
“I, personally, Jean-Max Bellerive, the prime minister of the Republic of Haiti, signed three specific authorizations of adoption lists that were in the adoption process with people who are known for their services with children who are clearly identified as orphans,” Bellerive told The Herald.
As Bellerive’s order began to take effect, adoption workers, alerted by U.S. Embassy officials, scrambled over the weekend to move as many prospective adoptive children to the U.S. as possible.
“Orphanage” directors made a mad dash to get kids on planes:
LAST FLIGHTS?
A U.S. military cargo plane flew about 50 Haitian orphans to Sanford, near Orlando, at 1:30 a.m. Monday after leaders of the His Home for Children orphanage in Port-au-Prince were told such flights would likely be suspended later that day, said Chris Nungester, the orphanage director.
“We were advised to get the children out of their beds, get them dressed and load them into trucks to get them to the airport, so they could immediately be placed on the next available flight,” Nungester said. The U.S. Embassy, she said, had told her such flights were coming “to a screeching halt.”
Another large Port-au-Prince orphanage, His Glory Adoption Outreach, flew 79 orphans to Florida last week, but was forced to leave another 27 children behind, as Haitian social service workers were concerned that they had not completed their adoption paperwork.
The first ministry/”orphanage” mentioned here, His Home for Children, is perfectly up front about the fact that some of the kids at the facility have living relatives, claiming that the kids were “abandoned” (see the “Facilities” page,)
While some of the children are orphans, many have been abandoned to the home by a single parent who is unable to provide for them due to extreme poverty
In my series pertaining to the Haitian adoptions, I have repeatedly underscored the cultural and legal differences between Haitian and American style ‘adoptions’ and how informed consent under these circumstances is sketchy at best. Also, here on my blog, I’ve mentioned again and again how “orphanages” utilize “temporary care” as a means to pry loose kids who are immediately made available for adoption, simply due to having been labeled or mislabled “abandoned.”
The creche, Maison des Enfants de Dieu, is home to approximately 125-130 children that have been abandoned either by loss of parents or by birth parents that cannot care for them.
“Mission work in Haiti faces enemy onslaught as this is a country that is yearly dedicated to Satan in a contractual form. There are voodoo practices and worship of the dark.”
While some may find that statement rather stunning, it is sadly a more common attitude within the evangelical and “missions” subculture than many would care to think. Pat Robertson’s comments along these lines were merely a reflection of a commonly held belief across numbers of people within his subculture.
An historic explaination of the role of Voudou symbolism, language, and drumming is beyond the scope of this post, suffice it to say, all played a role in Haiti’s revolution, a fact that was not lost on slave owners in the United States and elsewhere.
The deliberate suppression of Voudou thus became important politically and culturally as a means of maintaining control. After centuries of “demonizing” indigenous African religious practices brought to the west, few should be surprised when people in for example, Texas begin using such as a basis for “saving” children from countries and culture they are religiously unwilling to coexist with.
The flight of For His Glory’s kids out of Haiti must be understood within this missionary context - they are not merely removing children from Haiti and placing them with American would-be-adopters, they view their adoption ministry work as removing children from a “Satanic” and “dark” land.
Ever the fans of “nuture” over “nature,” core to the evangelical mindset is that people can change if placed in the “right” context with the “right” influences.
Importing these children, who at least before the quake had living relatives, from Haiti to the United States, then is viewed as both great commission work, and “saving” the kids from life within a “Satanically” controlled and dedicated country.
As a Christian international adoption ministry, FHG seeks to place orphaned children in Christian homes and fulfill the Great Commission by offering the good news of the Gospel to those individuals with whom we come in contact.
For HIS Glory is unique in that our goal is to fulfill the Great Commission, reaching out to a physically and spiritually starving nation and giving God all glory as He works in and through us.
For HIS Glory is dedicated to offering the good news of the Gospel to birth parents of voluntarily orphaned children and those living in the surrounding areas, providing education and discipleship and preparing them for eternity.
Gotta love that phrasing, “voluntarily orphaned.” Apparently placing a child at (or losing a child to) the FHG “orphanage” is enough to become “orphaned.”
Clearly with definitions of “orphan” being flung around like this, the word can mean whatever missionaries want it to.
FHG accepts adoptive families that agree with the basic Biblical truths for salvation presented in this Statement of Faith, although they may differ on other points.
Above and beyond most of the other so called “orphanages” (or mission projects) Maison des Enfants de Dieu has been used as a central visual ’justification’ throughout the last week or so for those advocating child exports.
Perhaps because it is a religious institution, perhaps because it is so central to and emblematic of what evangelicals are doing in Haiti, it has been featured repeatedly in media reports, both secular, christian, and LDS/Mormon (as some of the kids ended up in Utah.)
Throughout the last week numbers of kids both at the “orphanage” and in transit continued to fluctuate report to report, webpage to webpage.
The 79 who had received humanitarian parole status came into the United States on a flight Saturday, January 23.
Here is a typical example of coverage from earlier in the week from Faux news:
January 17, 2009 6:24 PM We just received word this evening from Frankise that the orphanage has 30 UN soldiers issuing medical care to our sick babies! Praise the Lord! We have also received aid today from the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien did a number of stories, some more propagandistic than others, about the “For His Glory” kids.
American would-be-adopters twitters and blogs went crazy, demanding the U.S. remove kids from the “orphanages” to the States after pieces of footage like this ran, in which the “orphanage” director alleges men with guns came to the “orphanage” twice, supposedly leaving each time without taking anything.
Would-be-adopters became convinced kids would be “looted” away from their clutches. Phones on Capitol Hill rang.
Soon enough, O’Brien’s own story over time morphed into “orphanages” being “robbed”. Capitol Hill got yet another another earful as would-be-adopter hysteria ramped up further by late last week. The “orphanage” itself added to such by posting this on their website:
Others are beginning to rob them of what supplies they do have.
Not long thereafter we began seeing pieces such as this featuring ‘justifications’ without overt and direct calls to remove the kids from the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (or JCICS), an industry trade group/adoption industry lobby.
Both the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) and the Joint Council have made desperate attempts to appear “reasonable” and “cautious” even as their member agencies clamor for and engage in the child exports.
False distinctions between agencies and their industry representatives in Washington are insincere at best.
I have been unable to find the report below on the CNN webpage but it’s from the 12pm hour on Thursday January 21 on CNN.
The “For His Glory” kids were being kept in the back of trucks at the Maison des Enfants de Dieu. Some were already dehydrated and sick. The kids were placed on buses in the 90+ degree heat and driven towards the U.S. Embassy before getting caught in traffic and eventually turned back. (Over the course of the week several trips were made.)
According to O’Brien’s account from the 21, the kids were vomiting on the bus and dehydrated even before they set out. She does not go into great detail, but makes brief mention of the anger of medical professionals working with the kids, describing them as “furious” that the kids had been moved in their conditions.
This is the video clip of that segment, my partner, Mike and I have uploaded.
It is vital to understand what these people did to these kids, and what those here in America put these kids through.
After living in the compound, the children were eventually dressed in clean clothes and taken towards their flight to the United States.
As the kids were being removed from the Maison des Enfants de Dieu, they were each marked with a magic marker on the arm “FHG” (For “For His Glory”.)
Naturally, this is only what CNN cared to show. More details of the rest of the send off can be found described here, in the Deseret News, a newspaper owned by the Mormon Church.
Each child who left Saturday had “FHG” written in Sharpie marker on the underside of his or her arm. The acronym stands for For His Glory, the nonprofit outreach program that supports the orphanage. Greg Constantino is the organization’s secretary and treasurer. He worked the phones from Salt Lake City.
Only kids with those letters on their arms were allowed on the bus going to the airport. And Kurt Tanner, a member of the Washington County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team, made sure of that. He checked each arm and rewrote on those whose letters had faded.
As each child stepped onto the bus, Rick Yeomans, chief chaplain for California-based Emergency Ministry Services, anointed each child’s head with oil from the Holy Land. He also led relief workers in a hand-holding prayer, asking God to bless this new chapter in the children’s lives. At the same time, a dozen nannies from the orphanage were rhythmically singing and dancing to send off the children.
We also learn of the “orphanage” attempts to ensure the kids would arrive stateside in clean clothes:
Nannies at the orphanage made sure the children who left Saturday traveled in clean clothing. Clothes have been strewn across the orphanage to dry all week. Each time it appeared the kids would be leaving, the nannies hand-washed their clothes in metal tubs.
“We are organized and ready to travel,” Tawnya Constantino said before getting the green light to head to the airport. “We’re just waiting for flight confirmation.”
Meantime, some 200 children played, cried and laughed in the Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage as several dozen nannies tended to their needs the best they could.
Several women mixed baby formula and cuddled newborns under a tent. Youngsters in fresh clothes lined up for a spoonful of cold cereal with milk. Seven toddlers clung to the rail of a crib. A dozen others played in a tent filled with mattresses.
But mostly the children wanted to be held. By anyone.
They walked up to strangers with arms outstretched and longing in their eyes.
Yeah, showing up in vomit encrusted dirty clothing and filth probably wasn’t going to go over so well with their soon-to-be-adopters. Might raise some unpleasant questions, that.
The answer to such basic human needs is not putting dehydrated and vomiting kids on 90+ degree buses to wait for hours, attempting multiple trips and facing long delays before putting them on an airplane for the flight to Florida.
The real answer is organized and effective distribution of humanitarian aid coupled with genuine access to medical care to the people of Haiti, all of them, kids and adults.
Not needlessly risking medically “compromised” kids lives further by shipping them to another country.
After the first flight out, the Maison des Enfants de Dieu remained the poster child for the American media. Faux news also ran a number of pieces most of them along these lines.
Meanwhile stateside, there is at least some further examination being done on some of the would-be-adopters:
“One of the things we’re concerned about is making sure all the groups that are claiming the children here are actually vetted,” said Jacqui Colyer, regional administrator for Miami-Dade and Monroe counties for the state Department of Children & Families. “We have ramped up our diligence and vigilance in looking at who these people are.”
In South Florida and Sanford, meanwhile, child welfare administrators bolstered their efforts to screen adoptive parents as well, requiring last-minute criminal background checks, for example, for families whose screenings were done years ago.
Among the concerns of child welfare workers: ensuring that none of the arriving children end up in the hands of human traffickers, Colyer said.
Once again, we see kids brought into the states and be brought directly into “faith based” infrastructures, essentially the outsourced and privitized child welfare system of Florida:
The 50 children who arrived Monday spent the day at His House Children’s Home in Miami Gardens, where they were treated to a traditional Haitian dinner of black rice with mushrooms, chicken or turkey and a large sheet cake decorated with fruit in the shape of an American flag, said His House’s spokeswoman, Iris Marrero.
“Welcome to America,” the cake proclaimed.
His House’s Mission:
His House Children’s Home is a faith-based social services agency fulfilling God’s directive to “defend the cause of the weak and the fatherless” by providing excellent care and a safe place to call home.
Without a hint of irony, His House Children’s Home includes within its welcome statement on its webpage the following (emphasis mine):
His House Children’s Home is a healing place giving wounded children a warm, loving home and renewed hope for a brighter future. We are coloring away the darkness in little hearts all over South Florida.
The article also makes mention of Florida’s first foster case from the kids being brought in with medical needs, emphasis added is mine:
Meanwhile, a severely injured infant of uncertain parentage became on Tuesday the first survivor of Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake to enter foster care in Florida. A Miami judge ordered the baby — who is being claimed by a family in Port-au-Prince — into the custody of state child welfare administrators.
The baby girl, whose case was heard in court Tuesday, believed to be between 2 and 3 months old, was airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital on Jan. 16 after she was discovered amid rubble with a fractured skull and two crushed arms, a DCF caseworker said in court.
DCF, which has been heavily involved in the repatriation of Haitian-American families as well as the processing of adoptive children from the island, asked Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jeri Beth Cohen to place the infant under the state’s care while investigators try to determine whether she has family in Haiti.
Cohen asked the agency to look “diligently” for the girl’s family, while at the same time beginning efforts to place the girl up for adoption in Miami should no family be found.
“We want to help,” Cohen said in court. “We don’t want to further traumatize this family. We must make sure we work very diligently to find her family. That is very, very important.”
The baby girl, whose name remains unknown, is believed to be the first child brought from Haiti to enter foster care in Florida. Another child may have been sheltered by federal immigration workers last week, Colyer said.
While the infant was recovering at JMH last week, her identity a mystery, a man and woman who thought their baby daughter had died in the rubble got word that their child had been found and flown to Miami.
A journalist working for ABC News who was passing by the rescue took the baby to a field hospital in Port-au-Prince and later returned to the crumbled home to find the family.
There, a relative gave her contact information for Junior Alexis and Nadine Devilme, who believe the baby in Miami is their daughter Jenny. Alexis, 24, had searched for the baby for days after the quake, which knocked Devilme, 23, unconscious.
The couple moved to a camp in front of the Canapé Vert Hospital.
Last week, they told a Miami Herald reporter that they had no proof that the baby in Miami was theirs. But Alexis said he was prepared to take any test necessary to prove fatherhood.
The International Committee of the Red Cross was contacted by officials at the hospital as well as the journalists who brought the baby to the triage center in Haiti.
Workers with the organization in Haiti have been trying to get in touch with the couple, according to the Red Cross.
So in Miami at least, they’re dual tracking those kids coming in under medical necessity; search for family, BUT AT THE SAME TIME begin adoption proceedings.
Yet another tale of yet another kid not in any adoption mechanism pre-quake undergoing at least the preliminary steps towards an American adoption now that they’re on American soil.
***
Finally, I strongly urge new readers to see my Haiti Series Introduction for a series of posts I have written as well as a number of links to pieces both here on the site and to what others have written in relation to the these Haitian adoptions and the ongoing human rights violations still unfolding.
Please read and share this Statement on Haiti released by the Adoptees of Color Roundtable of which AFAAD is a main collaborator: (Official AFAAD statement Wednesday, January 27th, 2010)
and this, with emphasis added by me,
Please contact the Adoptees of Color Roundtable by leaving a comment on the statement page if you would like to endorse this statement, and keep checking back as the site will soon be expanded.
Again, I strongly encourage all readers who have not already done so to spend some time reading over the Adoptees of Color Roundtable statement.
All adoptions from Haiti must be stopped and all efforts to help children be refocused on giving aid to organizations working toward family reunification and caring for children in their own communities.
I absolutely support and personally endorse their statement.
It must be read in full, and needs to be heard around the world.
This statement reflects the position of an international community of adoptees of color who wish to pose a critical intervention in the discourse and actions affecting the child victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We are domestic and international adoptees with many years of research and both personal and professional experience in adoption studies and activism. We are a community of scholars, activists, professors, artists, lawyers, social workers and health care workers who speak with the knowledge that North Americans and Europeans are lining up to adopt the “orphaned children” of the Haitian earthquake, and who feel compelled to voice our opinion about what it means to be “saved” or “rescued” through adoption.
We understand that in a time of crisis there is a tendency to want to act quickly to support those considered the most vulnerable and directly affected, including children. However, we urge caution in determining how best to help. We have arrived at a time when the licenses of adoption agencies in various countries are being reviewed for the widespread practice of misrepresenting the social histories of children. There is evidence of the production of documents stating that a child is “available for adoption” based on a legal “paper” and not literal orphaning as seen in recent cases of intercountry adoption of children from Malawi, Guatemala, South Korea and China. We bear testimony to the ways in which the intercountry adoption industry has profited from and reinforced neo-liberal structural adjustment policies, aid dependency, population control policies, unsustainable development, corruption, and child trafficking.
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. Our adoptions from Vietnam, South Korea, Guatemala and many other countries are no different from what is happening to the children of Haiti today. Like us, these “disaster orphans” will grow into adulthood and begin to grasp the magnitude of the abuse, fraud, negligence, suffering, and deprivation of human rights involved in their displacements.
We uphold that Haitian children have a right to a family and a history that is their own and that Haitians themselves have a right to determine what happens to their own children. We resist the racist, colonialist mentality that positions the Western nuclear family as superior to other conceptions of family, and 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 for the fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Western and Northern desire for ownership of Haitian children directly contributes to the destruction of existing family and community structures in Haiti. This individualistic desire is supported by the historical and global anti-African sentiment which negates the validity of black mothers and fathers and condones the separation of black children from their families, cultures, and countries of origin.
As adoptees of color many of us have inherited a history of dubious adoptions. We are dismayed to hear that Haitian adoptions may be “fast-tracked” due to the massive destruction of buildings in Haiti that hold important records and documents. We oppose this plan and argue that the loss of records requires slowing down of the processes of adoption while important information is gathered and re-documented for these children. Removing children from Haiti without proper documentation and without proper reunification efforts is a violation of their basic human rights and leaves any family members who may be searching for them with no recourse. We insist on the absolute necessity of taking the time required to conduct a thorough search, and we support an expanded set of methods for creating these records, including recording oral histories.
We urge the international community to remember that the children in question have suffered the overwhelming trauma of the earthquake and separation from their loved ones. We have learned first-hand that adoption (domestic or intercountry) itself as a process forces children to negate their true feelings of grief, anger, pain or loss, and to assimilate to meet the desires and expectations of strangers. Immediate removal of traumatized children for adoption—including children whose adoptions were finalized prior to the quake— compounds their trauma, and denies their right to mourn and heal with the support of their community.
We affirm the spirit of Cultural Sovereignty, Sovereignty and Self-determination embodied as rights for all peoples to determine their own economic, social and cultural development included in the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the Charter of the United Nations; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The mobilization of European and North American courts, legislative bodies, and social work practices to implement forced removal through intercountry adoption is a direct challenge to cultural sovereignty. We support the legal and policy application of cultural rights such as rights to language, rights to ways of being/religion, collective existence, and a representation of Haiti’s histories and existence using Haiti’s own terms.
We offer this statement in solidarity with the people of Haiti and with all those who are seeking ways to intentionally support the long-term sustainability and self-determination of the Haitian people. As adoptees of color we bear a unique understanding of the trauma, and the sense of loss and abandonment that are part of the adoptee experience, and we demand that our voices be heard. All adoptions from Haiti must be stopped and all efforts to help children be refocused on giving aid to organizations working toward family reunification and caring for children in their own communities. We urge you to join us in supporting Haitian children’s rights to life, survival, and development within their own families and communities.
I am publishing part 7 out of chronological order so as to be timely (this piece was published on Monday the 25th.) We’ll come back for parts 5 and 6 soon enough.
At the European Union foreign ministers meeting January 25th, a decision was made concerning whether or not additional EU countries will be “fast-tracking” child removals from Haiti.
Please see the comment below for the update to this piece.
***
As the Haitian child exports are receiving a great deal of attention at the moment I’d like to welcome new readers and recommend a visit to my about page and my WTF page. They answer many basic questions and lay out my comments policy.
If you are new to this series please backtrack and read the previous articles on my Haiti tag as this series relies upon definitions of words such as “orphanage” that I’ve already discussed in my previous Haitian posts.
Without at minimum reading the short Introduction, you will miss the context these parts or chapters were written in.
I am an adult adoptee, writing from an explicitly Bastard perspective on these matters.
***
Part 7: France and the European Union
The article makes several brief mentions of the French removal of children and the Unicef objections to their removal, rooted it attempts to preserve what shards of family history and identity the Haitian children have left now that the government held records, birth certificates and the like, have been destroyed in the quake ( a loss to Haitians and these uprooted children that stretches far beyond what words can express. Again, there’s an entire post to do right there, as well. So once again, I note the importance thereof, but try to continue on.)
Mayi Garneadia-Pierre, a Unicef child protection volunteer, at the orphanage of Our Lady of the Nativity, in Port-au-Prince, from where children were sent to France for adoption on Friday, is concerned about their future.
“We wouldn’t stop any child from being saved,” she said. “But when a child grows to 15-years-old he has an enormous need of signposts of his identity. It’s not abuse in the sense of mistreatment, but it’s abusive in the sense of making a permanent break. You need to keep links.”
Monday, at the European Union foreign ministers meeting, a decision was be made (see comment below) concerning whether or not the EU would fully join in on the adoption gold-rush (though note that Haiti *MAY* be acting to protect its children from export.)
The issue is expected to deeply divide a meeting of European Union foreign ministers on Monday after Spain proposed “speeding up procedures for adoption cases” across Europe.
Roelie Post, of Against Child Trafficking, a Brussels-based group, said: “It is madness. It is insane. If the EU supports this it will lend its power and credibility to an adoption industry driven by greed and money.”
The Spanish presidency of the European Union will next week urge the bloc to forge a common position on fast-track adoptions from Haiti, Madrid said Friday.
and
Several countries are fast-tracking adoption procedures already under way, including Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States.
Finally, the following chart represents United Adoptees International’s attempt to document some of the numbers on the kids being exported. It comes from the UAI news blog’s lefthand sidebar.
EXPEDITION LIST HAITIAN CHILDREN
In order to have an overview of numbers, the UAI herewith tries to collect the numbers of Haitian adoptions or airlifts since the earthquake:
TOTAL NO 24.01.2010 : 300 (between 18.01.-24.01.2010) 4450 awaiting.
The American numbers are low, I’ve documented more via news accounts of the flights, but this at least gives a starting place to understand what’s happening.
***
Read the comment below for the outcome of Monday’s meeting
***
Back to read part 4, (perhaps the most important piece of the series.)
