I hear your concerns, but think you’re off base in a few places.

Yes, Haiti has a large scale problem with systemic corruption – I have no disagreement there but you stated this:

The enormous foreign aid already given to Haiti has done nothing but ignite a feeding frenzy of bribery, looting and criminality.

Yes, some of the aid money where it is not properly tracked or administered is probably being used for dubious purposes, but to say that it has done nothing but that is simple angry hperbole that betrays the untold amounts of great and effective work taking place.

I work for a development organisation in Aotearoa (NZ) and can attest to the fact that we very carefully monitor where the money is going. We pick our partners on the ground carefully, making sure we are using trusted and effective organisations engaging in work that actually makes a difference.

Also, and I say this as a licensed Christian Minister with sympathies for well meaning Christians, the fact of the matter is that those ten Baptist missionaries were very unwise no matter what their intent – and I give them the benefit of the doubt in that regard.

Good practice in a disaster such as this is to exhaust all avenues for reconnecting children to their relatives and communities before trying to remove them from a country – such removal is an extremely serious last resort. Many of the children they were trying to move have been shown to have living family, some of whom the missionaries had contact with. Even if the parents agreed to have their children taken out of the country because of their desperate situation, it should not have been done. Rather, work should be pursued to put support systems in place so a parent would not feel a need to make that choice, or where the parents have died, then systems that see local communities integrating orphaned children. The saviour mentality of many foreigners in these situations only creates more problems and helps to destabilize the already weak communities even further.

What they did was simply stupid, well meaning maybe, but still stupid.

Would they have been noticed if they had been involved in paying bribes to actually traffick the children? Maybe not, but they are facing the consequences of a poorly thought out action.

Every such issue has layers; reducing the complexity of Haiti’s problems simply to corrupt systems while trying to whitewash the actions of foreigners does nobody any favours.

Now as new sources of wealth flow into that tiny country, Haitian government officials insist ten U.S. Baptists entered their country to engage in child trafficking??? Nonsense! The Haitian government is infested with criminals who control a slave trade involving hundreds of thousands of Haitian children (called Restaveks) who have been sold as laborers, domestic servants and prostitutes. These bureaucratic maggots control the courts and the police; they are upset because they didn’t get bribes from the ten American Baptists! If these missionaries really were child traffickers – and had paid U.S. dollars to smuggle the children out – the world would never have known about thirty-three impoverished Haitian children or the ten loving Christians from the United States who tried to rescue them from lives of poverty and hopelessness.

Dane Dahl, Author and Historian

The removal of children from the databases is partly a safety response to protect those children from trafficking vultures. We are keeping in close contact with Compassion at the moment.

There are almost 700 children in Haiti currently sponsored by New Zealand donors through TEAR Fund.

Commercial sexual exploitation of children is one of the cruellest kinds of activity in our world today. The two girls I sponsor through Children International have both been through this. Learning about these issues, and the risks that children face in poor countries all over the world, is just heartbreaking. As a sponsor, I pray every day that my eight children will be protected from all forms of violence, abuse, exploitation, coercion and forced labour. We need to become more aware of these things, however painful that is. We can be thankful that our God is always ready to redeem anyone who cries out to Him for mercy, and that He can give anyone a completely new start no matter what their situation.