Desperate parents' plea: Please take our children

Posted on Tuesday, 02.02.10

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THE CHILDREN

Desperate parents' plea: Please take our children

Parents try to make the ultimate sacrifice -- giving their kids to strangers so they'll be taken out of Haiti.

BY KATHLEEN MCGRORY AND CAROL MARBIN MILLER

KMCGRORY@MIAMIHERALD.COM

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- In tent camps where thousands of people are living in the Haitian capital, women approach aid workers and journalists with a desperate request:

Take my baby.

``I love him, but I have no choice,'' Mirle`ne Benéche, 26, pleaded with a woman to take her 4-month-old son, Jean Kenley, back to the U.S. ``I don't have enough money to take care of him.''

In a country where many parents had abandoned their children even before the earthquake in hopes they would be adopted by parents in a more prosperous country, the practice has now become a matter of life-and-death.

Parents don't have enough money to buy food. Suffering is widespread and death imminent. Orphanages don't have enough beds.

`COMMON'

``It's an unbelieveably common occurence,'' said Tom DiFilipo, who heads the Joint Council on International Children's Services, one of the nation's oldest and largest child welfare organizations.

``The country was a disaster to start with,'' DiFilipo said. ``Now you are living in a camp where there is no sanitation, disease is rampant. Then you get a chance to get your child out of that -- and it may be the only thing you've got. You want to keep your child alive, but there's only one way to do it: try to get your child into another country.''

760,000 ORPHANS?

Prior to the earthquake, about 380,000 Haitian children had lost one or both of their parents. Experts believe the number has doubled.

Child-welfare officials are now expressing concerns about orphaned children being trafficked into prostitution or slavery. Last week, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Miami Herald that he would not release any children for adoption without his permission.

``We are trying to do something about this,'' said Bellerive. ``There are few chances these children will ever get to the States and that in some occasions they are going to end up in bordellos in Santo Domingo or be used to get organs.''

In addition, the U.S. government is only allowing children with valid adoption papers or children who were in the process of being adopted to enter the country. Other countries have designed their own policies.

Even if a foreigner agreed to take a Haitian child, the Haitian government would likely not allow it. Many Haitian officials believe that some parents are being encouraged to sell their children by intermediaries.

On Sunday, 10 U.S. citizens were detained for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti through the Dominican Republic without documentation. Members of the group said they were not kidnapping the children, but rather bringing orphaned Haitian children into safe homes. They remained in custody on Monday.

``We are working in a more institutional approach but the arrest on the border of 10 Americans is a consequence of these measures,'' Bellerive said.

`LINE OUT THE DOOR'

At the Maison des Enfants de Dieu, an orphanage in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, adoption director Jean Kuislin Alexis said more than 100 parents had knocked on the doors since the earthquake, each for help finding homes for their children.

The orphanage isn't accepting new children now.

``If we say that we're receiving children, there will be a line out the door,'' he said.

His priority is finding homes outside the country for the orphanage's 135 children.

As of Monday, only 27 remain in his care.

After the earthquake, Diliane Florial, 35, brought four of her children to a Port-au-Prince orphanage. Thinking their photographs would be taken, the mother bathed her children and gave them clean clothes to wear, she said.

When the family arrived at the orphanage, they were told there were not enough beds. The director took the mother's phone number, but never called.

``It hurt me so much,'' Florial said. ``I want them to go to school and learn something so they will not be like me.''

Florial was still hoping to have Lender, 13, Jhenica, 12, Beverly, 9, and Tailor, 8, adopted -- hopefully by a family from the United States, she said.

``This is not a good place for children,'' she said of the makeshift tent in the city center, where she moved her family after the quake. She pointed inside.

Flies buzzed around the children, the stench of garbage and human waste thick in the air.

ANOTHER VIEW

Diana Boni, with Kentucky Adoption Services has been helping Haitian children find adoptive homes.

``I think Haitian people love their children more -- and more unselfishly -- than we do,'' said Boni.

People in the United States often express scorn for parents who simply give up their children -- but they can't comprehend what it's like to raise a child in crushing poverty, she said.

``A lot of birth parents are often shunned and scorned by their neighbors'' for giving up their children, Boni said. ``But when you are watching your child die, your neighbor's opinion matters a little less.''

Miami Herald staff writer Jacqueline Charles contributed to this report.

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