A U.S. man who founded an orphanage in Haiti was charged Monday with traveling from Miami to the Caribbean country to have sex with underage children after spending over a decade dodging accusations that he abused minors in his care.

Michael Karl Geilenfeld, 71, who was arrested Saturday in Denver, had even won a multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuit in a Maine federal court against an advocate who accused him of sexually abusing boys at his orphanage in Haiti. Geilenfeld had also been arrested in Haiti on the very same allegations that landed him in a Port-au-Prince jail amid the defamation battle —only to have the case dismissed by a judge when some of his alleged victims were a no-show in court.

Geilenfeld is expected to have a detention hearing in federal court in Denver on Thursday, and will later be flown to Miami. A federal grand jury has indicted him on a charge of traveling to Haiti from Miami International Airport “for the purpose of engaging in any illicit sexual conduct with another person under 18.” Geilenfeld is accused of traveling to the country between November 2006 and December 2010, when he was operating the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in Port-au-Prince. He founded the orphanage in 1985.

The alleged sex-tourism offense, investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI, carries a possible sentence of up to 30 years in prison.

Musician Samuel Vekeman was adopted from Congo as a toddler with a hereditary disease. He made a play about it with Dimitri Leue. “Ban international adoption? No, it saved my life.”

Sam Renascent is the stage name of musician and producer Samuel Vekeman (30), aka “the Antwerp reincarnation of Kanye West and Stromae”. There is a special meaning behind it. “Renascent comes from the Latin verb renascere which means 'to be reborn',” Vekeman explains. “I see my adoption as a rebirth. In Congo I might never have been able to turn my passion into a profession. Here I was given the opportunity to build a new life and I am very grateful for that.”

As a drummer and actor, Vekeman has often appeared on stage with his mentor Dimitri Leue (49). Now the duo is making a theater performance together for the first time. One of the first about adoption in Flanders, they claim. In Loos , in which actresses Clara Cleymans and Inge Paulussen also play, the life of a couple with a fervent desire to have children intertwines with that of a sister and her adopted brother, who take stock after the death of their father. Copywriter Leue talked to numerous adoptive parents and children. At what price can you tear a child away from his homeland? And can the love between parent and child ever truly transcend the blood bond?

It has become a piece that Vekeman would have liked to have seen when he was 16, to better understand why he always felt “between two worlds”. Not from here, but not from there either. When he was 2, he was given up by his parents in Kinshasa. He ended up with a warm family in the Catholic community of Sant'Egidio in Antwerp. The man who took him to Belgium by plane disappeared at the airport with the northern sun ("I was his one-way ticket to Europe"). But otherwise, Vekeman's story bears little resemblance to the abuses that made the news in the autumn, when it emerged that several Ethiopian children had not been voluntarily given up and that there were errors in their files. In anticipation of the new adoption decree, Minister of Welfare Hilde Crevits (CD&V) imposed an intercountry adoption stop .

Dimitri Leue and Samuel Vekeman have worked together before. — © Ksenia Kuleshova

She is second mother to 14 Indian girls nobody else wanted and she sold her house in the USA to be able to raise them to adulthood. "My girls are doing so well," she says. She wears a sari but her Jewish identity grew stronger in the Hindu country.

Dr. Michelle Harrison just celebrated her 80th birthday, surrounded by the 14 girls she is raising in Kolkata, India and the dedicated staff who are helping her. Four of these abandoned girls are now young adults preparing to embark upon professional careers.

How does a Jewish doctor born in New York City end up running a home in India for girls nobody else wanted, I ask, unoriginally, at the beginning of our Zoom conversation.

“In my generation, there were lots of people entranced by India -- and I wasn’t one of them,” she answers, impishly raising her shoulders and smiling.

Harrison never retired. A family doctor, psychiatrist, and OB-GYN, she was involved in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program, The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, taught at Harvard, Rutgers, and the University of Pittsburgh, and served as Worldwide Director of Medical Affairs for the Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) Consumer Division and then as Executive Director of J&J’s Institute for Children. Following a break to recover from cancer, fate conspired to bring her to India to raise girls rejected for adoption, six of them severely disabled.

EXAMINATIONIN ADOPTION CASESMEANING IIFROM THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICEADOPTION COMMITTEE

RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association supports the implementation of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, which entered into force with respect to the United States on April 1, 2008, so as to advance the responsible practice of intercountry adoption as an integral part of a comprehensive, concurrent strategy to address the problems of children around the world who are without permanent homes;

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association supports international adoption as an integral part of a comprehensive child welfare strategy to address the worldwide problem of children without permanent homes and supports policies that make the process of international adoption more timely, less costly and less burdensome, while ensuring that international adoption practices are ethical and legal;

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association supports the provision of comprehensive social services, economic support, and other family preservation resources in countries of origin to parents, or other relatives who have assumed a parental role, so that they can keep and nurture their children, and urges the United States government to provide resources and technical assistance to support such efforts;

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association supports worldwide development of safe and nurturing family-like temporary care for children without permanent homes pending their reunification with families of origin or their permanent placement with adoptive families, avoiding institutional placements to the greatest extent feasible so as to prevent the detrimental effects of such placements on the cognitive and psychological development of young children;

FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association supports laws, policies, and practices that help assure that in-country adoption, permanent guardianship, and other permanent nurturing placement options are readily available for children without permanent homes; and

Norway has already stopped adoption from the Philippines. Now the Swedish authorities are considering doing the same.

Last week it became known that Bufdir recommends a complete halt to all foreign adoptions to Norway.

It also became known that all adoptions from Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines have been stopped.

This happens after a year in which VG has made a number of revelations about illegal adoptions to Norway.

Among other things, VG has told about how babies are sold in the Philippines - and that fake birth certificates are a big problem.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK — 

A Danish report on Thursday said adoptions of children from South Korea to Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s was "characterized by systematic illegal behavior" in the Asian country.

These violations, the report said, made it "possible to change information about a child's background and adopt a child without the knowledge of the biological parents."

The report was the latest in a dark chapter of international adoptions. In 2013, the government in Seoul started requiring foreign adoptions to go through family courts. The move ended the decadeslong policy of allowing private agencies to dictate child relinquishments, transfer of custodies and emigration.

The Danish Appeals Board, which supervises international adoptions, said there was "an unfortunate incentive structure where large sums of money were transferred between the Danish and South Korean organizations" over the adoptions.

In a girlish lilac-colored diary stamped ''Secrets,'' Isabel Brodersen, 40, writes daily entries to Leah, the 10-month-old Georgian orphan she came here to adopt.

''I studied your physique. I had an awful feeling of alarm,'' she wrote on May 27, the first time she saw the baby, who, among other things, suffers from brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen at birth. ''Oh, my darling Leah,'' she added. ''You are such a mess.''

Ms. Brodersen, a neonatal and pediatric physician's assistant, has been waiting in Tbilisi for more than a month, trying to persuade the Georgian authorities to release Leah and let her take the baby home to Berlin, Conn.

But Ms. Brodersen and her husband, Nicholas Chirico, 49, along with 14 other American couples, have found their adoption papers stuck in a deeply politicized bureaucratic struggle that pits them against Nanuli Shevardnadze, whose husband, Eduard, is President of Georgia.

Though the numbers are small, the impasse the couples face reveals a great deal about the way people in lands once controlled by the Soviet Union increasingly react to the idea of Americans' saving their children by making them Americans.

Women living in camps for refugees of Bangladesh’s war of independence were told a local care home would look after their children. Decades on, many are still searching for them

More than four decades have passed, but Sayrun Nisa still cries for her son as if she lost him yesterday. In 1977, she had been taking care of her child and sick husband at home when there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find two people who claimed they were from Terres Des Hommes Netherlands (TDHn), an organisation that operated in the Dattapara camp for people displaced in the Bangladesh war of independence, where she lived.

“They started telling me about a children’s home they were running,” says Sayrun, now 80. “They said they could take care of my son for me and give him a good education. I had no reason to doubt them as they were from what I thought was a respectable organisation.”

Sayrun recalls feeling unsure as she watched her six-year-old playing in the corner. But when she discussed it with her husband, they felt it might not be a bad idea. “My husband had been sick for a while and was unemployed. If we put our son in the home, it would mean that I could find work,” she says.

There are almost half a million minors living outside their families in reception institutions in Europe and Central Asia. What are the possible interventions to counter this situation, always with a view to the supreme interest of the minor?

According to a recent UNICEF analysis  , nearly half a million children – 456,000 – live in reception facilities, including large institutions, in Europe and Central Asia.
This is double the global average and a painful legacy to overcome.

The children most affected

The report shows that children with disabilities are most affected by this situation, while some countries have made progress in deinstitutionalization and kinship care. Western Europe, however, has the highest rate of children in reception facilities, partly due to the arrival of unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers.

A welcome based on family and community