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Haiti's 'orphans' all had close family
Source: Agencies |
February 22, 2010, Monday
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THE 33 "orphans" a United States Baptist group said it was trying to take out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti, all have close family still alive, according to The Associated Press.
A reporter who visited the rubble-strewn Citron slum, where 13 of the children lived, talked to parents on Saturday, all of whom said they turned their youngsters over to the missionary group voluntarily in hopes of getting them to safety.
Similar explanations were given by parents in the mountain town of Callabas, outside Port-au-Prince, who said on February 3 that desperation and blind faith led them to hand over 20 children to the Baptist group.
Since the arrest of the missionaries at the border on January 30, the parents in Citron have been worrying they might never see their children again. One mother who gave up her four children, including a 3-month-old, is in a trancelike depression, occasionally erupting into fits of hysteria.
Her husband and other parents in Citron said they relinquished their children to the US missionaries because they were promised safekeeping across the border in a newly established orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
Their stories contradict the missionaries' still-jailed leader, Laura Silsby, who said the day after her arrest that the children were either orphans or came from distant relatives.
"She should have told the truth," said Jean Alex Viellard, a 25-year-old law student from Citron who otherwise expressed admiration for the missionaries.
He took them cookies, candies and oranges during their nearly three weeks of detention before eight of the 10 were released on Wednesday and flew home to the US.
Silsby, 40, and her assistant, Charisa Coulter, 24, remain jailed as the investigating judge interviews officials at orphanages the two visited prior to the devastating January 12 quake. The two are due in court again tomorrow.
As they left the jail and boarded a US Embassy van, the freed Baptists waved and thanked Viellard, who later called them "great people who were doing good for Haiti."
The Americans, most from an Idaho church group, were charged with child kidnapping for trying to remove the children without the proper documents to the Dominican Republic in the post-quake chaos.
Silsby had been working since last summer to create an orphanage. After the quake, she hastily organized a self-styled "rescue mission," enlisting missionaries from Idaho, Texas and Kansas.
She was led to Citron by Pastor Jean Sainvil, an Atlanta, Georgia-based Haitian minister who recruited the 13 children in the slum.
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