[- Disappearing Haitian children from Gros Mon:
Orphans with Parents and Other Scams at p. 145)
"...Nurse Matt was working for a French adoption agency. She would approach poor families and offer to adopt one of their children, usually in the five to six year age range. Promised the child would be educated and well cared for, the family would be given a sum of money and the child supposedly sent to live with a French family. Thirty to forty children let (Haiti) in this way. Not one had been heard from since.
..."Not
one of the families ever received a single letter from the agency or
from any of the adoptive parents." An SOS (Enfants Without Frontiers)
employee obtained the address of the parent organization in Paris but,
when they called, the person who answered the phone said that the
agency had moved and left no forwarding address...
*
I am back in Baie-de-Sol sitting in Sharon's plush apartment. The air conditioner is blasting. Albeit and Tobe are here with us. Perhaps ironically, we have been watching the new version of Cinderella, the one where everyone is black. Whoopie Goldberg is the fairy Godmother and she turns a miserable Cinderella's orphan world into an underprivileged girl's dream come true. But I am barely paying attention. I can't shake the irony of the orphanages and the problem that is facing me: What am I going to tell my employers at CARE?
"Sharon," I say, "I have been to every single orphanage in the Province as well as Gonaives. They all look like scams to me. I don't think I should write a report that says the orphanages are all scams."
Sharon turns her attention away from the fairy godmother and toward me. "You have to do what you think is right," she says.
"Look at this," I say and get up and walk to where my book bag is hanging on a dining room chair. Sharon follows and we both sit down at the table. From the book bag I pull lists I got from a friend in the States.
"This
thing is a lot bigger than just the orphanages I visited. Even if the
orphanage directors are ripping off a lot of money, at least we know
orphanages really exist. But there is much more to this."
I show her the lists.
"World Vision and Compassion International have 58,500 sponsored children in Haiti, a large portion of these are in the Province. CAM (Christian Aid Missions) sponsors 10,000 children in Haiti, some 2,000 of them are out here. The Haiti Baptist Mission has 57,800 sponsored children, many of them out here. And these are the ones I could get the figures for. They are only a fraction of it. In the Province you have Blue Ridge Mountain Homes, Plan International, Child Care, Tear Fund, and God knows who else. Then there are the small operations."
"Look at Pastor Sinner," I say, referring to the major evangelical school in the Village. "He gets $70,000 (U.S.) per year to help some 190 children. There are small sponsorship programs all over the place. There is Henry Humperdickel who may have hundreds of children on sponsorship. There is Harry Wothem. All throughout the mountains there are little Harry Wothem and Henry Humperdickel operations that we know nothing about. This is to say nothing of the Catholic Church which must have its own programs. For Christ's sake, there might be more children on sponsorship out here than there are children. And the corruption? At best, most of the money pays institutional expenses to educate kids who don't really need help. Okay, we could say that it is lifting crooked Haitian pastors and their families out of poverty. But now, now think about all the money that must be collected and never even gets here."
"It looks pretty bad," Sharon agrees.
"I am sure there are at least some needy children in these institutions," I say. "But I can't help feel disturbed by it all. So many people at these orphanages are outright lying. Most of the children are not orphans. That's a misnomer. The least they could do is call them "children's homes."
"That's weird, huh," Sharon muses.
"Ah, Sharon, it is beginning to look like you guys are the only honest charity in the Province?"
"It
wasn't easy," Sharon says, and begins to tell me how difficult it was
for her and her family to establish a respectable school. "At first
everyone laughed at us. The said our school was no good and they sent
their children to the Catholic school."
*
