Fools, For Christ’s Sake!

We’ve all seen the story.  Ten American “missionaries” were arrested in Haiti and are facing charges of child trafficking. The bizarre story is that a church in Idaho sent these ten unprepared volunteers to Haiti to find 100 orphans from the streets and move them to a hotel in the Dominican Republic that they would operate as an orphanage until a new orphanage there could be completed. They were caught trying to get across the border with a busload of kids, were refused entry because of missing paperwork, returned to Port-au-Prince, where they were arrested. Reports also said that not all of these children were orphans.

There are some things about this story that just don’t make much sense to me. Maybe these people are, as they claim to be, well- intentioned fools for Jesus, and just very very stupid and naïve, but it certainly makes me wonder if there is not some other motive in play here that has not yet come out. It would not be the first time that religious fundamentalists used an opportunity for some purpose beyond what it appears on the surface. Their home church in Idaho is trying to raise a lot of money to fund this venture.

They said they believed they had all the paperwork they needed…. No passports, no visas, no government clearances. For the past week the news has been flooded with stories about the difficulties of getting kids out of Haiti who were in process of being adopted and had most of their paperwork completed. It took the intervention of authorities from both Haiti and the Embassy to try to find a legal way for these kids to get to their adoptive parents in the U.S. The government of Haiti, such as it is, had announced that all movement of kids out of the country was to be stopped to prevent child trafficking at least until processes could be put into place to determine that possible orphans had no living relatives and that their identities could be determined and verified. They didn’t know any of this? They don’t read newspapers or listen to TV? The pastor didn’t know this? Don’t they have an attorney advising them on processes and procedures for doing what they say they wanted to do?

They say they had been working on this project for months and decided to accelerate their plans when the earthquake hit. They say they were going to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. Why there? These are Haitian kids. Why move them from their country? The need in Haiti is great and their orphanage could have been part of the rebuilding project and given jobs to those who needed them. There are many potential qualified employees for their proposed orphanage already in Haiti. Haitians speak Creole. Dominicans speak Spanish. Why make this any more complicated for the kids than it has to be?

One of the ten said in a CNN interview that god had called her for this mission. If god called anyone to do this wouldn’t god have called someone qualified to run an orphanage? Wouldn’t god have called someone with a skill set sufficient to know that you cannot just go into a foreign country, scoop up kids off the street and move them across international borders? If god was calling people to run an orphanage wouldn’t she have had the good sense to call someone with a background in social work and experience in running an orphanage? God’s personnel office seems to have blown this one.