String ‘em up!

I’m sure you’ve seen the news story about 10 Baptist missionaries that were caught kidnapping 33 Haitian children. They claim they’re not kidnappers and that they were there to help orphans.

My take? They were there to kidnap 33 children and completely understood what they were doing. I’m sure that they are fully deluded beyond repair. That from their perspective they were rescuing children from godless satanic Haiti. Does their perspective in any way change the fact that they’re criminals exploiting children in a devastated country and need to be rotting in a Haitian jail? No more than the perspective of a rapist thinking “she was asking for it” should impact his sentence.

I don’t think for the briefest moment that there was any mistake here. I am sure from their eyes, all the children of Haiti need to be “rescued” from their parents. Orphans would be convenient, but any children would do.

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Roosewelt Pinheiro/Abr

It disgusts me completely that their culpability is even up for discussion. Headlines like “Criminals or Saviours?”. Why is this a question? One of the small girls was crying that she wasn’t an orphan and that she was mislead into believing she was going to a boarding school or camp. For a legitimate group, to hear such a thing from one of their charges would send them into a sleepless panic until the horrible mistake was fully rectified.

At least one of the parents had said that they willingly gave their child to live in a better place. So that’s ok, right? Not at all. These confidence artists expertly exploited their position. A mother in the midst of a disaster cannot make such a choice in the brief time that could have been allotted. If she could, then groups with the child’s real welfare at heart need to become involved to protect the child from such a dangerous situation. Whether the solution in such a case is working with the mother or not, this should be a red flag that complicates the process, not a situation that speeds it. One also cannot fail to miss that this incident begs the question, “if you were here to rescue orphans, why were you soliciting parents to relinquish their children?”

Thankfully, the Haitian Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive smells this stinking rat. He has said, “For me, it’s not Americans who’ve been arrested, it’s kidnappers who have been arrested.”

I hope the Haitian penalty for kidnapping, with planning and foresight, 33 helpless children is particularly brutal. Unfortunately, I think the end result will be U.S. government meddling, well placed bribes from tax-free church coffers, and a ticker-tape parade for these poor, persecuted heroes.

Rescuing orphans or trying to fast-track adoptions sounds like a grand idea. The bureaucracy is hugely inconvenient and, when performed solely for bureaucracies sake, can be a terrible detriment. Not now. Not when the good bureaucracy is in disarray along with the bad. I would love to see an international agreement that froze all adoptions from regions impacted by a significant natural disaster. I don’t pretend to know how this would work, exactly. I do realise that the waiting parents would suffer greatly, as might the poor children caught up in it. I just feel that if you are going to fast-track anything, it should be support from their future home country to aid them and improve their conditions while they wait for the country to recover.

The alternative is clearly demonstrated.