Melanie Augustin, 58, says she gave her 10-year-old daughter Jozin to American missionaries who promised the children a better life. The missionaries were arrested and charged with child trafficking last week while attempting to take 33 Haitian children into the Dominican Republic.
Associated Press
CALLEBAS, Haiti -- Desperate parents in this struggling village perched above Haiti's earthquake-flattened capital said they gave their children away willingly, trusting the American missionaries who promised to take them to a better life.
The stories the villagers told Wednesday contradict claims by the Baptist group's leader that the children came from orphanages or were handed over by distant relatives. But they also attest to the misery of a nation that was the hemisphere's poorest even before the Jan. 12 earthquake struck.
The 10 Baptists, most from Idaho, were arrested last week trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border into the Dominican Republic without the required documents, according to Haitian authorities, who have accused them of child trafficking.
The Americans are to appear today before a prosecutor who will decide whether to file charges or release them, Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said. Even Prime Minister Max Bellerive has said he recognizes the Americans may simply be well-meaning do-gooders who believed their charitable Christian intent justified trying to remove the children from quake-crippled Haiti.
"There is no government in Haiti," their lawyer, Jorge Puello, argued Wednesday by phone from the Dominican Republic.
Standing amid piles of debris that used to be their homes and the makeshift shelters of tin and plastic sheeting that have replaced them, the people of Callebas told how they came to surrender their children.
It all began last week when a local orphanage worker, fluent in English and acting on behalf of the Baptists, convened nearly the entire village of 500 people on a dirt soccer field to present the Americans' offer.
Isaac Adrien, 20, told his neighbors the missionaries would educate their children in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the villagers said, adding that they were also assured they would be free to visit their children there.
