For-Profit Orphanages Keep Haitian Families Apart

This article is written by the coordinator of the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) family tracing and reunification program in Haiti. Their goal is to remove children from exploitative situations and place them in loving family envirnoments. She discusses what occurred at an unnamed Port-Au-Prince faith-based for-profit orphanage in January 2011 and recruitment campaigns for sponsoring children.

The Children At Risk

“While there are an estimated 124,000 children who lost one parent and 7,000 who lost both parents during the earthquake that struck Haiti last January, (according to USAID/DCHA), and others who were orphaned before last year’s disaster, the reality is that the majority of children in these orphanages are not orphans at all. Many have living parents and relatives who, while they love their children, feel that they do not have the economic means to house, clothe, feed and send them to school. Orphanages that promise a better life for children may appear attractive to poor families, but there is often no way of knowing whether the children are treated well and given access to health care and education, or whether they are being exploited, abused or trafficked. Some Haitian orphanages are run by well-intentioned people who have the means and ability to properly care for groups of vulnerable children, but many of these facilities are unregulated and routinely disregard basic human rights.”

The For-Profit Orphanage

Jennifer went to this orphanage with trained social workers and representatives from the government Institute for Social Well Being and Research (IBESR)(the group that also regulate international adoptions) after “reports of suspicious deaths, disappearances and abuse of children.”

“We suspected that the orphanage director, who runs one of an estimated 600-plus orphanages in Haiti, was making a profit by using children to garner donations and fees from dubious adoptions.”

“The faith-based group that ran the orphanage was openly hostile to our presence and reluctant to give us access. Once we managed to get inside, it was a dismal scene. Small children sat inertly in rows, some on benches and others on the floor, and I was struck by the lack of noise in a space where there were more than 70 children. The children barely talked or moved, returning our greetings with vacant stares. A few children showed a spark of interest in playing with my colleagues, but most of the younger children were unresponsive, while the older children were extremely wary and distrustful of speaking to strangers. Several of the children were brought to a nearby IRC medical clinic and treated for high fever, flu and a variety of skin infections. Several of the children were also found to be malnourished and were referred for treatment.”

Other Orphanage Stories

“A colleague from another international child protection organization recently told me about a troubling visit he made to a residential center for children in the south of Haiti. The children, my colleague said, were all painfully thin. He asked the head of the center if they had the means to feed the children adequately, and the director replied: “We have lots of money. But we if keep the children thin, when we send pictures to church groups in the United States, they send more money. If we send pictures of children who look healthy, they don’t send as much money.”

Another colleague, an international aid worker who had worked in a Port-au-Prince orphanage, told me of an orphanage where she had witnessed babies being placed on a chair and then left unsupervised, where they were in danger of rolling off onto the floor. When the aid worker instinctively rushed to catch one child, she was scolded by the orphanage staff to let the child fall: “This is how they learn to keep still and quiet.””

Save the Children Report-Sponsorship Donations INCREASE Family Separation

“A recent report by the international aid organization Save the Children detailed these “recruitment” campaigns by unregulated institutions, outlining how children from poor families are then sold for profit to child traffickers and shady adoption agencies. The report criticizes the financial and material support of such agencies, often by unwitting or unknowing donors in foreign countries, noting that such support can actually lead to an increase in the separation of children from their families and result in psychological and emotional damage to children. “For every three months a child spends in an orphanage,” the report says, “they lose one month of development. If young children grow up in large group care, a lack of long-term individual care can result in permanent brain damage.””

For-Profit Orphanages Keep Haitian Families Apart
[The Huffington Post 3/21/11 by Jennifer Morgan]

Questionable Sponsorship Programs in Haiti Already Documented

Issues with orphanage sponsorship would not surprise anyone who has read A Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid, and Drug Trafficking by Timothy T. Schwartz, PhD, a self-published book about his time in Haiti. Dr. Schwartz “tried for four years with the assistance of an agent to find a publisher that would take the necessary risks to put such a book on the market” according to this review. At one time, his job was to census local communities. Other times, he worked for CARE to account for orphans and estimate needs. This led him to a variety of orphanages and interviews with workers.

Chapter 8 is entitled “Orphans with Parents and Other Scams.” In it, he discusses a faith-based orphanage in Baie-de-Sol, which is an 8-hour drive from Port-au-Prince. All the children in this orphanage had parents. On Page 131, he explains that 21 orphans between ages 14 to 19 had been kicked out.

Page 132 continues with asking where the children went. The response, “Most are back with their parents…”Some of the orphans have two or three sponsors, ” Heith continues and then, shaking his head: “You know what Harry said when I asked him why he was kicking the orphans out ? He said that he can’t sell them anymore. They are too old, people don’t want to sponsor them. Can you believe that? ‘he can’t sell them anymore’

As I was to learn in the coming days, what Madame Slimette and Heith had done was inadvertently peel back the first layer of a system that benefitted almost everyone involved except poor, destitute and parentless children foreign sponsors intended to help when they licked the stamp and put their checks in envelopes and mailed them off to the orphan foundation. The operators of orphanages and nearby or affiliated schools were, in every case I came across, spending only a fraction of the money they raised for the children and pocketing the rest. Orphanages in the area were a business.”

Page 133 discusses how this particular orphan sponsorship operation received $20 per child but spent the money in Haitian dollars, when Haitian dollars were only worth 1/3 of the US dollar at that time.

Two Other Orphanages

Page 135 discusses another faith-based orphanage in Blano that received $20 per child. Asked whether the children could ever go back to their parents, the worker responded, “We have children who probably could go home. Their parents are doing better. But how do we tell the sponsor? Sponsors don’t like it when you write and tell them their child has left. We usually lose the sponsor. And when we lose the sponsor, we lose not just $20 that goes to feeding that one child, we lose $20 that goes into the over-all budget.” This particular orphanage closed in 2007 when an orphan reported sexual abuse.

Yet another faith-based orphanage that had sponsorships for street children is discussed on Pages 141-142. This one had been funded for 18 months for 32 children. The operator said that they slept on carpet on the floor.

When he asked to see the inside of the house, the operator responded, “Well, we haven’t actually opened the house yet, non. It is still being repaired.”

He asks, “I thought you said the children were sleeping in the house?”

She responds, “Not yet, non…I don’t have a carpet yet.”

He asks, ” You are feeding the children, aren’t you?”

She responds, “Every day they go to the kitchen, oui. They eat at 7:00 in the morning and 4:00 in the afternoon.”

He wants to see the children and asks, ” Then I can stop by during mealtime?”

She responds, “well,” She says hesitantly, ” I am not feeding them in the afternoon anymore. Just in the morning. I don’t have the money to feed in the afternoon, non.”

So he says, “Why don’t I stop by at 7:00 tomorrow morning?”

She replies, “Tomorrow’s a bad day.”

Gros Mon Orphans

Pages 144-145 discuss the School for the Deaf and orphanage. When he arrived, the director stated that the School for the Deaf had moved. When asked about the orphanage, a worker cut in and said, “Didn’t Nurse Matt take children and they were never heard from again?”

Dr. Schwartz went on to say that “Nurse Matt was working for a French adoption agency. She would approach poor families and offer to adopt one of their children, usually in the five to six year age range.Promised the child would be educated and well cared for, the family would be given a sum of money and the child supposedly sent to live with a French family. Thirty to forty children left in this way. Not one had been heard of since. Isa explains that, ” Not one of the families had ever received a single letter from the agency or from any of the adoptive parents. An SOS employee obtained the address of the parent organization in Paris, but when they called, the person who answered the phone said that the agency had moved and left no forwarding address.” Nurse Matt died a  year prior to Dr. Schwartz’s visit.

The Summary of Sponsorships

On Pages 146-147, he summed up the sponsorships that he found in this province in which he took a census. He tells a friend, ” I have been to every single orphanage in the Province and Gonaives. They all look like scams to me. I don’t think I should write a report that says the orphanages are all scams.”

He continued, ” World Vision and Compassion International have 58,500 sponsored children in Haiti, a large portion of these are in the Province. CAM (Christian Aid Mission) sponsors 10,000 children in Haiti, some 2,000 of them are out here. The Haiti Baptist Mission has 57,800 sponsored children, many of them out here.”

He additionally specified the following for the sponsorship program of Pastor Sinner, referring to the major evangelical school in the Village: “He gets $70,000 per year to help 190 children.” He added that he has not accounted for the many small sponsorship programs or any run by the Catholic Church.

REFORM Puzzle Piece