It’s a relief to hear that the group of six Haitian orphans stopped this week while leaving for their adoptive families in the U.S. will be in their new homes soon.  One line from today’s AP story on the matter particularly struck me:

“Police briefly detained the women [who’d been accompanying the children] and the orphans — ages 1-5 — spent three nights sleeping on the ground in a tent city.”

Notably, this is a situation in which the Haitian government, the U.S. government and the U.N. were all aware and involved.  Most orphans, of course, can hope for far less “accommodation.”

This story highlights vividly what is very often the real world alternative to inter-country adoption.  Adoption advocates should certainly put robust energy into backing a full array of in-country supports for orphans.  But individuals who support these efforts to the exclusion of adoption should keep in mind what it means to children to make them wait for years for far-off reforms:  sleeping on the ground in a tent city…and often much worse.

The AP this weekend reported that all 33 of the children being transported out of Haiti by the arrested American group had living relatives.  This finding is being used, appropriately, to broadcast one very important point:  the importance of family reunification efforts.  Most children classified as “unaccompanied minors” following a natural disaster do have living relatives.  Clearly, after immediate physical needs are met, first priority for such children should always be reuniting them with families if at all possible.

However, several addition observations should also be made that the headlines seem to miss:

1) The children’s families sent them with the group voluntarily. As the Miami Herald described, “A reporter’s visit Saturday to the rubble-strewn Citron slum, where 13 of the children lived, led to their parents, all of whom said they turned their youngsters over to the missionary group voluntarily in hopes of getting them to safety.”  This doesn’t excuse errors made by the group, but it does set the matter in clearer context.

2) The primary issue wasn’t adoption. Prior to traveling to Haiti, the group expressed hope on their website that they’d eventually be able to enable adoptions from the orphanage they planned to build in the Dominican Republic.   However, there’s no indication the group intended to send children that still had living parents off to the U.S.  Nor would U.S. law have allowed them to do so without thorough documentation.  It appears this general portrayal—mostly by rumor and innuendo—was promoted by groups that wanted to associate adoption with amateurism or bad actors.

3) It’s unhelpful to equate this effort with human trafficking. Circumventing Haiti’s laws to get the children to care in the Dominican Republic was both wrong and unwise.  However, to equate these actions with “human trafficking”—one of the most vile crimes imaginable, often perpetrated with the goal of slavery or sexual exploitation—is very unhelpful.  It casts far worse light on the Baptist group and far better light on traffickers than is deserved.

4) This is certainly not the worst thing happening in Haiti. Right now, children are experience untold evil within Haiti, from amputations and severe hunger to household slavery and worse.  Even the U.N. has affirmed that it is “failing to adequately manage the relief effort.”  This isn’t necessarily an indictment of the U.N.  It’s just that responding to disaster, especially in the developing world, is always going to be difficult and messy.   

5) Broad misunderstanding of the term orphan. The NY Times article on the issue began with the words, “There is not one orphan among the 33 children that a U.S. Baptist group tried to take from Haiti…”  The U.N. definition of orphan, however, includes children that have lost one or both parents.  Thus, while the children did have living relatives, many of them were—by U.N. definition—orphans.  This isn’t a particularly important point, aside from the fact that the decision by the U.N. to use this definition of an orphan for all of its official statistics has created widespread misunderstanding.

These words from an email sent me by a friend in Port-au-Prince highlight the struggle of those seeing the tragedy in Haiti firsthand, grappling with how to share what they are seeing with friends without appearing sensationalistic:

I am struggling to find a balance to educate people.  Some things seem too awful to put in writing.  In the rural areas, there are still MANY bodies visible in unreachable places in the rubble.  Like many third world countries, Haiti has lots of dogs and they are feeding on the carcasses.  Children are seeing this.  One person with me says 80 countries and several war zones have not prepared him for what we are seeing.  Most of the public schools were shoddy government construction and hundreds of children died in them but I have not seen this reported. We have seen heavy equipment digging where schools were and bodies of children remained.. One man told us the villagers already went thru the rubble searching for their children, but they found “mostly parts not bodies.”  We all have photos and stories like this but not sure how to share. Please pray about this…we need discernment.  Most of the media have stayed in Port au Prince downtown..  The world has not seen the full reality and may never now that we have Tiger Woods and the Olympics.  This is only a 3 hour flight from the U.S and Americans can help in such big ways. This is way beyond 3rd world poverty…

All that being said, while I write this, the sun is setting and people are singing praise songs on the roof next door.  Another church near us has no roof but the people kneel there at 4:30 every morning on the concrete to pray and worship. The faith here is overwhelming.

If you aren’t already, I’d strongly encourage you to read the updates and snapshots of life on the ground in Haiti coming from the HORT Team.  As one team member emailed me yesterday, “Without exaggeration, I would have to say it is at least 20 times worse here than what you see on CNN.”

Here is the start of the most recent post from Paul Myhill…

Things don’t have to be shattered to be deeply broken. During the night (Wednesday night), the rains came. The pastor’s house we’re staying in started to leak at multiple points, including waterfalls gushing into a bedroom and stairwell. From a distance the home looks fine but, up close, you see the cracks running deeply at the ceiling line throughout the whole structure. Under foot, the tiles shift and rock on the second level, evidence of a floor that had buckled just enough to separate ceramic facade from concrete plane. Sure, the house is fine under normal circumstances but, when tested by the storm, it gives way to penetrating outside forces….

You can read more here, but be warned that the details Paul describes are very strong.  If you haven’t taken steps to help Haiti yet–sharing financially, or praying or anything else–and definitely don’t intend to, it might be better for you not to read the rest.

Dr. Karyn Purvis  is one of the nation’s foremost experts helping adoptive parents to connect fully with their children.  Dr. Purvis will be leading several highly-sought after workshops at Summit VI in Minneapolis, with topics that range from addressing the trauma orphans have faced to helping adopted children connect and share fully with their new families.  Dr. Purvis’ book and videos have been a tremendous help to my wife Rachel and me through our own adoption journey, and I now also have the privilege of considering Dr. Purvis a good friend as well.

Dr. Purvis has teamed up with our friends at Tapestry to produce a suite of tremendous new resources through what they are calling, “Empowered to Connect.”   They’ve recently added several new items to their growing online library, including two new topical videos featuring Dr. Purvis.   Click here to view Empowered To Connect video resources as well.

Whether for an adoptive parent, a supportive friend, or ministry leader seeking to support couples in their adoption journey, Empowered to Connect is one of the most important resources available in the adoption world today.

The Families for Orphans Act is currently before key committees in the U.S. House and Senate.  This bill would create a special office in the U.S. State Department charged with making sure that U.S. foreign aid policies and funds consistently emphasize the goal of ensuring children grow up in families.  The office would promote initiatives that keep existing families together, that reunite children in orphanages with living family members, that support in-country adoption, and that enable inter-country adoption when appropriate.  Learn more from our friends at Kidsave.

Join your prayers this weekend with the HORT Team as it begins its initial 2-week deployment to Haiti on Valentine’s Day.  (See here for other ways you can be involved as well.)

It’s thrilling to see the ways so many Christian Alliance for Orphan s’ organizations and churches joining their strengths in this initiative.   It is also tremendously encouraging to see the truly unselfish way in which World Orphans has worked to provide lead coordination to HORT, continually emphasizing not their brand name, but the broader coalition.

Current HORT organization partners are below—a list that will continue to expand over the months ahead as an extensive network of American and Haitian churches are paired in joint orphan care efforts:

• Together For Adoption
• Hope for Orphans, a ministry of FamilyLife
• World Orphans
• Sweet Sleep
• Orphan Lifeline
• Loving Shepherd Ministries
• Love Haiti
• Global Aid Network (GAiN), a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ
• Lifesong for Orphans
• Project 1.27
• Stop Child Trafficking Now (SCTNow)
• Orphans First
• University of North Carolina School of Public Health

If you haven’t seen it yet, Christianity Today’s interview with the U.S. State Department’s Michelle Bond is worthy reading for anyone weighing how best to care for Haiti’s orphans.  Overall, the perspective Bond articulates is wise and well-balanced.  She explains why adoption cannot be a primary focus immediately, why adoption isn’t the ultimate solution for a large percentage of Haiti’s orphans, and why in-country responses are so critical.  Alongside these cautions, Bond also affirms inter-country adoption as a vital solution for children that cannot be matched with caring families in Haiti, as well as the potential role for the U.S. government in helping foreign governments to create safer and more efficient systems for inter-country adoption.

One phrase—offered  to explain the perspective of those resistant to inter-county adoption within Haiti’s government—deserves a bit further attention.  Bond  describes, “Haiti has these restrictions [on inter-country adoption] to make sure they aren’t wiped clean of children by richer nations.”

This phrase, and the sentiment it describes, is worthy of much discussion.  The best place t start is with empathy and an effort to understand why some feel this way.  I dare say it would not be easy for many Americans if we realized that some of the children in our communities would do better with families overseas.

Still, two central facts directly counter the assumptions underlying the outlook Bond highlights.  First, even if inter-country adoptions from Haiti increased significantly, the impact upon the total number of children within Haiti would be entirely negligible.  While boosting adoptions could significant cut the percentage of children living on the streets or as “double orphans” in orphanages without any living relatives, Haiti would certainly not be left with a dearth of children.

More importantly, inter-country adoptions are certainly never about “wiping countries clean of children.”  Rather, adoptions—rightly carried out—are about erasing the reality of thousands of children growing up outside of a loving home, living on the streets or in institutions, waking each morning without the care of mother or father.  This is something we can all agree ought to be “wiped away.”

Our good friends at Project 1.27 shared some very encouraging news from Colorado yesterday.  According to the Colorado State Division of Child Welfare, the number of foster children in need of adoption has been reduced to only 365 for the entire state.  Just five years ago, that number sat at 875.  This means more than 500 fewer children today are waiting to be adopted than were five years ago.  Sharen Ford, who helps oversee the state government’s efforts to find homes for foster children, has shared with me that Project 1.27 has played a vital role in this success—recruiting, training, and supporting foster families through ministries rooted in local church communities.   (Incidentally, the 100^th adoption directly facilitated by 1.27 will be finalized on February 23.  The soon-to-be-former-foster-youth is 16, currently recovering from cancer and is stabilizing now with the family that will stick with him forever.)  Alongside 1.27, another Alliance member organization, Focus on the Family, has played a key role as well.  The powerful “Wait No More” events hosted by Focus and a wide array of church partners to stir Colorado’s churches to embrace foster children has resulted in hundreds of Christian families entering the process to become foster and/or adoptive parents.   What a tremendous picture of Christians rising to God’s call to care for orphans in their distress…changing the reality for an entire state’s foster system, and countless precious children, as a result!

Representative Pete Hoekstra’s has introduced, H.R. 4603 (the HOPE Act), designed to expand the reach of the Humanitarian Parole policy announced by the Department of Homeland Security on January 18.  This legislation is aimed at helping those Haitian orphans that are eligible for intercounty adoption but did not have a prospective family at the time of the earthquake.

According to Rep. Hoekstra’s office, the HOPE Act addresses those Haitian orphans that were not covered by the DHS policy exemption by:

1. Having DHS create a “third category” to expand their humanitarian parole policy on a case-by-case basis for Haitian children who were legally confirmed as orphans eligible for intercountry adoption prior to the earthquake on January 12, 2010.
2. Providing that, if a suitable family is not found to provide care for a Haitian orphan, they are eligible for placement in the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Program.