Could I adopt a Haitian child?

By Amelia Duarte de la Rosa - Special correspondent - Granma.cu

ONE can see this question repeated throughout the web.  A rapid Internet search on the situation of children in Haiti throws up disturbing results.  Millions of websites, blogs and pages note how to adopt these minors, as if the solution to the problem were to uproot them from their land.

The question increased after the earthquake when international humanitarian aid descended on the Caribbean nation.  In the midst of the chaos, many provided selfless assistance, but others took advantage of this cover to enrich themselves.

Prior to the quake, there were an estimated 380,000 orphans in the country.  According to UNICEF figures, 3.8 million infants were in a situation of extreme vulnerability in 2009 and, after January of 2010, one million children swelled the ranks of those without family care.

The disaster exacerbated their lack of protection and opened the gates to illegal adoption and human trafficking.

Even though international legislation prevents adoption proceedings in the case of military conflict or natural disaster, and adoptions in Haiti were suspended in 2007 due to the lack of legal guarantees, many governments gave the green light and facilitated those in progress.

The United States, France, Holland and Luxembourg headed the list of countries receiving dozens of young children.  The Barack Obama administration, for example, allowed emergency travel visas for Haitian children being processed for adoption, even when they lacked documents, and they were able to immigrate on humanitarian grounds.  The first group of Haitian orphans arrived in the United States just 10 days after the earthquake.

The speeding up of adoptions in the midst of disaster and without meeting international requisites endangered children’s rights, in addition to facilitating illegal acts.  There were incidents of the theft and kidnapping of minors, as well as abandonment once they had been transferred to other countries.  Trafficking networks existed previously in Haiti and increased with the situation.

By the end of January 2010, UNICEF had already denounced the theft of 15 children from Port-au-Prince hospitals.  None of them were orphans.  The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and non-governmental organizations like Save the Children expressed concern over the thousands of children separated from their families.

This organization demanded effective measures to protect children from all forms of violence and exploitation, including sexual violence and kidnapping under the cover of adoption; at the same time it froze international adoption and instigated alarm mechanisms.

Priority was given to tracing families and the reintegration of children with their parents, extended families, or family friends prepared to look after them.  On the other hand, international adoption or children being taken in by foreigners requires an international agreement between the participating governments.

In relation to the current fate of infants, Haitian President Michel Martelly is promoting education at all levels.  Last October, four million began the school year – according to authorities – including 712,000 children beginning to benefit from free education.  The government also launched a program against extreme poverty, which seeks to guarantee the education of children with very few resources and to alleviate the burden of families living in vulnerable areas.

Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and First Lady Sofía Martelly set in motion the Ti manman cheri program, the principal objectives of which are to improve school attendance and performance and promote women’s autonomy.  The program, benefiting children in 200 elementary schools, is financed by the Venezuelan government’s Petrocaribe regional solidarity project.

The question forming the title of this article has a response which does not appear on any website: the support needed by Haiti is not the adoption of its minors.  Poor children are not a merchandise needing adoption.  It is the task of the state and their families to shelter and protect them so that they can develop normally in their own environment. The country needs aid which respects its autonomy.

THE STORY OF A SMILE

It all began with a smile.  I was sitting on a stair landing and without me initially noticing her, a little girl was standing in front of me, staring fixedly.  I gave her a timid smile and that was enough for her to come closer. . "Bèl cheve," she said and immediately began to play with my hair.  She wasn’t even four years of age but looked like a simplified version of a young woman with bare feet.

I deduced that she didn’t live very far away and effectively, almost immediately three more children arrived in search of their playmate.  Within seconds, I was surrounded by young girls who smiled, sang, and played with my hair.  They decorated it with colored ribbons, showed me their dolls, assaulted me with questions and, from the little I could understand, I tried to answer them.  I resigned myself to showing them the camera and taking photos of them.

Not more than five minutes had passed when the reclaiming cry of a mother broke the spell.  The girls ran off happily toward her open arms.  They looked back once and said goodbye with a smile.

I couldn’t begin to imagine those small children with a mother in another country and speaking another language.  The future is uncertain for everyone, but there is nothing like returning to one’s mother, I thought.

July 12, 2012

Granma.cu

Haiti and the adoption issue

By Jean H Charles:


Some forty years ago, upon graduation from Columbia University School of Social Work, I was eager to engage in the kind of hard core advocacy championed by my late professor cum community organizer, George Bragger.

He had convinced the then mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, through theoretical essays and street demonstrations, that black people coming from the south of the United States to escape inhospitality in their hometowns were as American as apple pie and as such deserved decent housing, a solid education and upward mobility.

I wanted to replicate the same engagement for and towards the newly formed Caribbean immigrant population migrating into New York City from Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and Haiti.

I enrolled in the Association of Black Social Workers to network with and synergize the movement in the black community. My enthusiasm was dampened, though, by the leadership of the then president of the association, the late Ciney Williams, who strongly opposed the adoption of black children by white parents.

Coming from a culture where the national ethos through self-determination has long overcome the per se prejudice of black-white racism, I felt uncomfortable with that policy. My own reasoning told me that a child, irrespective of the color of her or his skin, needs a window of opportunity of 16 to 18 years in a stable and secure home to turn into a well adjusted and mature individual, ready to face the vagaries of life.

In fact, some forty years later the damages of that policy are staggering. The few black children adopted by or born into a mixed or white family turn out to be like… say, Barack Obama! They are as American as apple pie, and as black as Frederick Douglass.

Fast forward to the adoption issue in Haiti; the debate is already fierce amongst this huge tragedy that has caused almost a million orphan children. The issue is whether the Haitian government and the adoptive countries should develop a liberal policy towards facilitating as many adoptions as possible while eliciting a stringent method of monitoring of post adoption follow up to weed out child exploitation. A cursory visit, more frequent at the beginning, less frequent later, will delineate the bad apples from the good ones.

UNICEF has indicated there might be more than a million orphaned children after the earthquake. Haiti does not have the means to handle such a large number of displaced children before the earthquake, voire after the tragedy. The large amount of sympathy from all corners of the globe that engulfed the country should not be dampened by the alleged issue of child exploitation launched by the public relations machine of the same UNICEF.

The Haitian government recently detained ten US Baptist church members, who were trying to cross the border to the Dominican Republic with 33 alleged orphaned children without the proper exit documents. They spent some time in jail on the serious offence of Mafioso pending a judicial determination on the criminal intent of the missionaries: child snatcher’s or misguided do-gooders?

All indications are that they fall within the range of the latter.

They have no history of child exploitation, they were bringing the children into an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, and they even have the authorization, albeit not written, of the children’s parents. The Haitian government is flexing its muscle on the back of the missionaries to demonstrate some remnant of effective power and leadership that it has failed to exhibit before and, above all, after the earthquake.

The scope of the international media that should focus on the three million displaced persons has been displaced to zero on the fate of the jailed missionaries. The jazzy and controversial story of the white Americans languishing into a Haitian jail after a devastating earthquake is spicier than the fate of the mothers and the children deprived of food, shelter, and water. The sooner this travesty of justice ends, the better it will be for the millions of orphans and quasi orphans no longer secured of their immediate and long range future.

May reason, conscience and good faith prevail! God’s thunder is still on display! The mistreatment of the Haitian people, the mistreatment of its children in particular by its own government, as well as by the international community is repugnant to His benevolent magnitude!

Note: A Haitian judge has released pending further investigation the missionaries from the Haitian jail. One step for justice, two steps for common sense.

February 13, 2010

caribbeannetnews

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