Posted on 02/03/2010 6:19:11 PM PST by topfile
I see from your profile page that you live in Atlanta. You’re practically neighbors with the pastor who gave Silsby “permission” to take a bunch of kids out of the country. Unlike the other Haitian pastor involved in this, who has wisely decided to make himself scarce, Sainvil popped up in Norcross yesterday, where it turns out he lives, and was singing like a canary to reporters (sounding more like a lunatic than a criminal, but you’d think Silsby might have taken note of that earlier if she was really on the up and up).
So GovernmentShrinker, which of these Southern Baptist's necks should get the Haiti burning tire first?
You could light the fire with your rolled up NY Times Newspaper. I'm having such a hard time deciding which one to suggest first. Part of me says go with the Christian with the worst financial history. Nah, I say you start with the slimy child traffickers on the far right. She looks just scared enough, doesn't she? Their profiteering has to stop.
You really nailed them.
The opinion that these people were disorganized means nothing. It's pretty clear that even the US gov’t relief effort is disorganized. I have seen nothing to suggest a profit motive, except speculation. Volunteers are often limited to vacation time, so short stints would seem normal. I have seen numerous groups come/go to Haiti for only a few weeks stay.
How much credence can you give a mother who gave her child to foreign strangers to take to a neighboring country? Did she really expect to see them again, or just didn't give a damn? And if she didn't give a damn, would she admit it to authorities or the press?
Unless you can show me where the children were actually stolen, then I believe these parents gave up these kids willingly, knowing they would have a better life, regardless of where the kids finally were settled. But if they tell that to Haitian police, they will be arrested. So they say they were lied to & tricked to give up their kids.
Adult adoptee blogs? The term sounds almost porno. Wouldn't that be the perfect place to attract pedophiles? I recall recently a guy in Georgia, I believe, who was sexually abusing his adopted children, so our adoption rules & regs. are less than perfect. And adoption agencies are often in the business to make a profit.
Is it not possible that these people were going to do exactly what they said they were going to do - open an orphanage for children that needed help? I believe it is possible & even probable.
The tell will be when the Haitian gov’t starts extorting other relief orgs. Wait for it - it WILL happen.
Don't you find yourself a little uncomfortable siding with one of the most corrupt gov'ts in the world? Are you confident they will receive a fair trial, especially now that HRC has decided the case? Do you sincerely believe the Haitian Gov't gives a damn about 100 or even 1000 kids? If I have to take the word of a Baptist missionary vs. the Haitian gov't, I'll go with the Baptist every time.
BTW, I expect these people will be released soon by the Haitians, & I'll bet it will be wads of cash that does the trick. The Haitians will say it is the right thing to do, with a wink & a grin. Proving in my mind that it was all about bribing the Haitians, or failing to, the whole time.
Try the Wall Street Journal if you prefer:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575043691704446642.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLEFifthNews
They’ve added a few new bits of information today, to the growing mountain.
Most people are just not up on this stuff.
Maybe this will help.
"They were headed for a Dominican Republic orphanage, existing only on paper, later to be "adopted" by US Evangelical Christian families. When stopped at the border, Haitian agents found them packed inside a bus. None had passports, and no documents authorized their transfer."
At the very least you do not remove a child from a country without a passport.
Little if any of the damning information that's come out about this group has any Haitian government source. Most of it consists of things Silsby says to reporters, that turn out not to be true, or are replaced by a conflicting story from Silsby before anyone even has time to check out the first story, and from things Silsby put on church websites, and from public records in the US. If a Haitian government official announces he believes the sun rises in the East, I'm not going to disagree just because he's an employee of a notoriously corrupt government.
Now Silsby and her crew have taken to responding to tough questions from a CNN reporter by singing hymns (just like Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper, when they haul him into court for competency hearings). Nobody's forcing these people to meet with a CNN reporter, and if they've agreed to do so, why aren't they willing to answer questions, or in specific cases, say politely that their lawyer has advised them not to discuss that particular matter?
It matters less whether the children were actually "stolen" (which doesn't appear to be the case -- more like given away based on false promises), than that Silsby has told so many conflicting stories about how she got the children, what she knew about their backgrounds, what she was going to do with them, etc, that it's no longer reasonable to assume she's been acting in good faith all along.
It is emphatically NOT normal to rely on short-term volunteers to run an orphanage. There isn't even any staff that has ANY experience with such things, to give any direction to the volunteers. The pastor of Silsby's church says that's okay, because they were *going to hire* qualified people -- he knows full well that Silsby and the others currently down there can't make any plausible claim to know how to run an orphanage full of traumatized children in a third world country known for ruthless child trafficking. But hey, might as well go ahead and grab a busload of kids *now* and worry about how to take care of them later. As for the permanent orphanage that Silsby has been promising to build, and initially told reporters she'd already bought land for, the mayor of the town where she said the land was located says she'd approached him a while back about buying land for this project, but that the discussions fell through due to legal problems. No response to that so far, from Silsby or her attorney.
Adult adoptee blogs? The term sounds almost porno.
"Adult adoptees" are people who were adopted as children, who are now adults. Their first-hand experience from the child's point of view gives them an important perspective on how adoptions are handled. The authors of these particular blogs have an angry tone (as do many adult adoptees), but they've done a good job of channeling their anger into pulling together solid information from various sources. BabyLoveChild1 BabyLoveChild2 Bastardette
For a long, but *very* worthwhile read on the larger issue of international adoptions, from an objective source, see this article in Foreign Policy: The Lie We Love
Thanks for adding a voice of first-hand experience, as well as an informative link.
The sad thing is how very little money would be required to keep these children with their families who, in the case of many if not most of the children rescued from Silsby’s bus, clearly would prefer to keep them. But well-meaning church-goers are being suckered into forking over their hard-earned money, probably in huge quantities, to support this insane and self-serving scheme set up by Silsby and her pals. Instead of building a big adoption mall/resort in the Dominican Republic, how about building some sturdy little shacks and schoolhouses in Haiti and delivering some food periodically? But of course, there’s no profit to be had from going that route.
See the article from Foreign Policy that I linked to in my previous post (”The Lie We Love”), if you haven’t already. I found it very informative and would like to hear what you think, since you have much more direct experience with international adoption than I do.
There are certainly healthy toddlers in many countries and I think they can be parented as mostly normal kids, most of the time. Though they probably all have a slight developmental delay as they mature.
A lot of us doing international adoption were ok with older kids that just needed homes and help. We took three kids that no one else would consider, for instance, and in one case a child that had been rejected at the last minute.
But definitely it is about money and it is a place where money and the culture of the country are a huge factor.
Very few people here have visited a third world country and so they just don't get it. You can't read about this stuff and understand it from the US.
I once walked the slums of Tbilisi feeding the street dogs and encountered a lovely child who told me all about her cat. The animal looked sick to me so I gave the child five dollars to care for it better. She promptly put the cat in my arms, thinking I was buying it. Average monthly rent for a flat then was about ten US dollars so you have to see that five dollars was a huge amount of money for them at that time.
So just exchange the cat for an infant. I am sure it happens.
Americans are clueless about how people live on the edge of survival and how that changes everything.
YES. Exactly. The arrogance of these people to remove these children from families, and then think they were doing better for them to place them in US homes and make 20 grand/kid.... .
Indeed, many are.
I lived in a third world country when I was a preschooler, while my father was working at the US Embassy there. My parents would usually give a few coins to beggars we encountered. But they never gave to the ones who were accompanied by a child with a horribly misshapen leg. Even at my tender age I noticed this and asked my mother why. The first few times she brushed me off and changed the subject. But eventually, when I kept asking and kept telling her as we passed them that she should give them money, she had to explain to me why we couldn't give them money. The reason there were so many beggars with young children with legs bent at right angles was because they break their own children's legs to make them look more pitiful and thus increase begging revenue.
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