Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts

Baptists Caught Taking Kids Out Of Haiti

Sunday, January 31, 2010
Map of Haiti with Port-au-Prince shownImage via Wikipedia

Apparently, it is not enough that the Baptists brainwash Haitian children with their Christian mind poison but now they need to sneak them out of their country.

Haiti detains Americans taking kids across border

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Ten American Baptists were being held in the Haitian capital Sunday after trying take 33 children out of Haiti at a time of growing fears over possible child trafficking.
The church members, most from Idaho, said they were trying to rescue abandoned and traumatized children. But officials said they lacked the proper documents when they were arrested Friday night in a bus along with children from 2 months to 12 years old who had survived the catastrophic earthquake.
The group said its "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" was an effort to help abandoned children by taking them to an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic.
"In this chaos the government is in right now we were just trying to do the right thing," the group's spokeswoman, Laura Silsby, told The Associated Press at the judicial police headquarters in the capital, where the Americans were being held pending a Monday hearing before a judge.
The children, some of them sick and dehydrated, were taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children's Villages, which was trying to find their parents or close relatives, said a spokesman there, George Willeit.
"One child, an 8- or 9-year-old, said she thought she was going to some sort of summer or vacation camp in the Dominican Republic," Willeit said.
The Baptist group planned to scoop up 100 kids and take them by bus to a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic, that they were converting into an orphanage, Silsby told the AP.
Whether they realized it or not, these Americans — the first known to be taken into custody since the Jan. 12 quake — put themselves in the middle of a firestorm in Haiti, where government leaders have suspended adoptions amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to child trafficking.
The quake apparently orphaned many children and left others separated from parents, adding to the difficulty of helping children in need while preventing exploitation of them.
While many legitimate adoption agencies and orphanages operate in Haiti, often run by religious groups, the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration reported in 2007 that bogus adoption agencies in Haiti were offering children to rich Haitians and foreigners in return for processing fees reaching US$10,000.
The agency said some Haitian parents were giving their children to traffickers in return for promises of financial help.
Silsby said the group, including members from Texas and Kansas, only had the best of intentions and paid no money for the children, whom she said they obtained from Haitian pastor Jean Sanbil of the Sharing Jesus Ministries.
Silsby, 40, of Boise, Idaho, was asked if she didn't consider it naive to cross the border without adoption papers at a time when Haitians are so concerned about child trafficking. "By no means are we any part of that. That's exactly what we are trying to combat," she said.
She said she hadn't been following news reports while in Haiti.
Social Affairs Minister Yves Cristallin told the AP that the Americans were suspected of taking part in an illegal adoption scheme.
Willeit, the SOS spokesman, said the children arrived at the orphanage" very hungry, very thirsty, some dehydrated." All had their names written on pink tape on their shirts.
Many children in Haitian orphanages aren't actually orphans but have been abandoned by family who cannot afford to care for them.
Children's rights groups have urged a halt to adoptions until it can be determined that the children have no relatives who can raise them.
The government now requires Prime Minister Max Bellerive to personally authorize the departure of any child as a way to prevent child trafficking.
UNICEF and other NGOs have been registering children who may have been separated from their parents. Relief workers are locating children at camps housing the homeless around the capital and are placing them in temporary shelters while they try to locate their parents or a more permanent home.
U.S. diplomats met with the detained Americans and gave them bug spray and field rations, according to Sean Lankford of Meridian, Idaho, whose wife and 18-year-old daughter were being held.
"They have to go in front of a judge on Monday," Lankford told the AP.
"There are allegations of child trafficking and that really couldn't be farther from the truth," he added. The children "were going to get the medical attention they needed. They were going to get the clothes and the food and the love they need to be healthy and to start recovering from the tragedy that just happened."
Silsby said they had documents from the Dominican government, but did not seek any paperwork from the Haitian authorities before taking the children to the border.
She said the children were brought to the Haitian pastor by distant relatives and only those with no close family would be put up for adoption.
The 10 Americans include members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, and the East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho. Friends and relatives have been in touch with them through text messages and phone calls, Lankford said.
The group had described its plans on a Web site where it asked for tax-deductible contributions to help it "gather" 100 orphans and bus them to Cabarete before building a more permanent orphanage in the Dominican town of Magante.
"Given the urgent needs from this earthquake, God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now versus waiting until the permanent facility is built," the group wrote.

 

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Doesn't He Have A God For That?

Sunday, January 24, 2010
Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase
Nope. Apparently he has an app for that.

A Christian aid worker was trapped in the rubble of a hotel after the earthquake in Haiti but instead of relying on his god to get him through his injuries he used an iPhone app. So much for looking to a god for help. But wait, he says, "he's grateful to God for getting him through the ordeal." Hold on now, didn't he use an iPhone app and get rescued by rescuers?

Trapped father survives with help of phone app

By Josh Levs, CNN
January 24, 2010 5:10 p.m. EST
 
(CNN) -- Alone in the darkness beneath layers of rubble, Dan Woolley felt blood streaming from his head and leg.
Then he remembered -- he had an app for that.
Woolley, an aid worker, husband, and father of two boys, followed instructions on his cell phone to survive the January 12 earthquake in Haiti.
"I had an app that had pre-downloaded all this information about treating wounds. So I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound fracture," Woolley told CNN.
The application on his iPhone is filled with information about first aid and CPR from the American Heart Association. "So I knew I wasn't making mistakes," Woolley said. "That gave me confidence to treat my wounds properly."
Trapped in the ruins of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, he used his shirt to bandage his leg, and tied his belt around the wound. To stop the bleeding on his head, he firmly pressed a sock to it.
Concerned he might have been experiencing shock, Woolley used the app to look up what to do. It warned him not to sleep. So he set his phone alarm to go off every 20 minutes.
Once the battery got down to less than 20 percent of its power, Woolley turned it off. By then, he says, he had trained his body not to sleep for long periods, drifting off only to wake up within minutes.
Woolley's job keeps him tech savvy. He oversees interactive projects for the Christian child advocacy organization Compassion International in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
With his injuries tended to, he wrote a note to his family in his journal: "I was in a big accident, an earthquake. Don't be upset at God. He always provides for his children even in hard times. I'm still praying that God will get me out, but he may not. But even so he will always take care of you."
The journal is stained with his blood.
After more than 60 hours, Woolley was pulled from the rubble.
"Those guys are rescue heroes," he said of the crew that pulled him out. 
His colleague David Hames has not been found. The two had been standing together when the earthquake struck and the Hotel Montana crumbled. They were making a film about poverty in Haiti and had just gotten back to the hotel, heading to the elevator in the lobby.
"Then all of a sudden just all craziness broke loose," Woolley said. "Convulsions of the ground around us, the walls started rippling and then falling on us. [Hames] yelled out, 'I think it's an earthquake!' I looked for someplace safe to jump to and there was no safe place."
When the shaking stopped, Woolley couldn't see. And his friend was not with him.
He turned on the focus light of a camera he was wearing around his neck, but he didn't have his glasses. "So I actually took some pictures and would look at the back of the lens of the camera and saw in one of those pictures the elevator that I ended up hobbling over to. And that became my safe place."
Once in the elevator, he used the app -- called "Pocket First Aid & CPR" from Jive Media -- to tend to his injuries. Woolley said his phone "was like a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife that enabled me to treat my own injuries, track time, stay awake and stay alive."
Woolley heard voices of some other people trapped nearby, and they spoke with each other.
"About a day, maybe day and a half in, we heard rescuers, and they had a list of our names at that point, because they were able to talk to one of the people we were talking with. And so then it seemed like, OK, this is going to happen, we're actually going to get rescued.
"But then it just took a long time and there were times where I didn't hear anything or I'd hear drilling in a far part of the building and just didn't get any reassurance they were still coming for me," Woolley said.
"The scene outside was a lot more chaotic and less simple than I imagined in my head. ... But eventually they came for me and did an amazing rescue."
Back home now in Colorado Springs with his wife Christina and children Josh, 6, and Nathan, 3, Woolley said he's grateful to God for getting him through the ordeal.
"Happiness is a morning with ... family, filled with Legos, kissing boo-boos and normalcy."
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