The following is reprinted with permission from the author, Saundra Schimmelpfennig. The original can be found here on Saundra’s excellent blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough.
Imagine that you’re at work when whatever natural disaster is most probable in your state strikes. For me it would be an earthquake, for you it might be a flood, volcanic eruption, or hurricane. The natural disaster has toppled telephone poles and cell phone towers, damaged roads, and collapsed bridges. You try desperately to contact family members but no phones are working.
What was a simple 45 minute commute this morning has become an almost impossible journey. The freeway is impassible and roads are covered in debris. It takes you almost a week to reach home. When you finally arrive you receive word that your sister and her husband were seriously injured and did not survive. As you absorb this loss you worry about your three year old niece and five year old nephew.
After several frantic days you make it to your sister’s destroyed house only to find out from her neighbors that your niece and nephew have been taken by foreigners to be cared for in an orphanage. You are thankful to hear that they survived and are determined to find and care for them. Unfortunately, the neighbors don’t know which organization took the children. All they know is that they spoke only a little English and wore matching green shirts with words in either Spanish or Portuguese written on them.
You are frantically searching for the orphanage when word reaches you that foreigners have begun flying plane loads of children out of orphanages to be adopted in other countries. You start to panic for fear that by the time you find this orphanage it’ll be too late. If your niece and nephew have been taken to another country you may never be able to find them and bring them back. It’s now a race against time.
*****
Don’t do this to someone else’s child. Children in orphanages often have parents or extended family trying desperately to care for them. Adoptions of Haitian children must be stopped until all efforts of reuniting them with their family have been exhausted.
—–
“Aid agencies continued to warn against adopting children from Haiti today, amid unconfirmed reports that a number of children who had gone missing from hospitals in the devastated country may have been trafficked.
An adviser for Unicef told reporters that about 15 children had disappeared from hospitals, presumed taken.
Jean Luc Legrand was quoted as saying: “Unicef has been working in Haiti for many years and we knew the problem with the trade of children in Haiti which existed before, and unfortunately many of these trade networks have links with the international adoption ‘market’.” – Guardian
But Child Relief, a Swiss-based international adoption agency, said that 90 percent of children in Haitian shelters were given up by poverty-stricken parents to people “who promise them money.”
“Child trafficking is common in this country and after the earthquake the risks are now increasing,” the agency said in a statement on its Web site.
In past international disasters, “orphans” sometimes turned out to have merely been separated from parents or other relatives, Pertman said.- Salt Lake Tribune
Related posts:
