US Baptists deny Haiti child trafficking
Updated on 01 February 2010
Baptists from a church based in Idaho say they tried to take orphan children out of Haiti to give them a better life. But charity workers now looking after the children say many of them had surviving relatives - and are now in a "very bad emotional state". Inigo Gilmore reports.
The group, all from a church based in Idaho, claimed the children were orphans and they wanted to give them a better life.
But charity workers now looking after the children said most of them did have surviving relatives - and were in a "very bad emotional state".
The American Baptist group accused of attempting to take dozens of children out of Haiti planned to help low-income Christian families in the US adopt the children, according to a mission statement obtained by Channel 4 News.
The statement from The New Life Children's Refuge (NLCR) was posted on the websites of the Central Valley Baptist Church and the Eastside Baptist Church in Idaho, and states that the group wanted to "Provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation... 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."
A 10-member team of Baptist church members - mainly from Idaho in the US - was arrested in Haiti on Saturday after trying to take dozens of children out of the quake-devastated country and into the Dominican Republic.
For more Channel 4 News coverage of the Haiti earthquake
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- Blog: searching for faith in difficult times
- Haiti quake: how you can help
- Haiti quake: Channel 4 News Twitter list
According to the document, the NLCR is currently buying land and building an orphanage in Magante in the Dominican Republic "to provide a loving environment for up to 150 children, from infants to 12 years old".
The group says it planned to lease a hotel in a nearby town to house the children while the permanent facility was completed.
"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."
The group lists a prayer request: “For God to continue favor with the Dominican Government in allowing us to bring as many orphans as we can into the DR.” But there's no reference to the government of Haiti.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the Americans could face serious consequences.
"We did not arrest Americans, we arrested kidnappers," Bellerive told Reuters. "We just hope that the people were acting in good faith and that they were doing what they were doing to try to help the children."
Laura Silsby, a leader of the Idaho group, denies the group were trafficking children. Speaking to CNN after her arrest, she said: "The truth ultimately is that we came here to help the children, and we know that God will reveal truth."
The group was arrested for taking dozens of children aged two months to 12 years out of the country with no paperwork. Silby told CNN this was true. "They really didn't have any paperwork. It's just a misunderstanding on my part. I didn't think they needed it."
She earlier told Reuters the group had permission from the Dominican Republic to bring the children to an orphanage there.
The New Life Children's Refuge describes itself as "a non-profit Christian ministry 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".
The statement makes several requests. It calls for willing helpers: "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."
The children have been taken to an orphanage in Haiti run by international aid group SOS Children's Villages.
Jasmine Whitbread, Save the Children UK's chief executive, told Channel 4 News: "It's a place with desperately poor families... In straightened circumstances like this... they fall prey, really, to people to who promise their children a better life somewhere else, and they get labelled as orphans.
"So this is a long-standing problem in Haiti which is just being made worse now because of the emergency."
She went on: "The children will have, in most cases, some form of extended family. And what my staff on the ground are telling me, actually, is how incredibly the Haitian community is really reaching out and really pushing all of their resources to the limit in order to enable them to look after children."
"You don't know who are the traffickers and who are the people who mean to do well, but either way it's going to harm children. So the priority has got to be for these children's families to be traced and to be left in the places where they can be reunited with their families."
Ms Whitbread said that border controls in Haiti were being strengthened to make sure that children were protected. "Our job," she said, "has got to be to try and reinforce those governmental efforts."
