The 33 Haitian children at the center of a US abduction row were finally reunited on Wednesday with their families, but the fact that not one of them turned out to be an orphan raised fresh concern.
SOS Children’s Villages, the international aid group caring for the children since the drama erupted seven weeks ago, said it was only right for them to be handed back to their families.
“It has turned out that all of the 33 children have parents. SOS Children’s Villages is convinced that in most cases, the best place for a child to be cared for and protected is within the family,” the group said in a statement.
Laura Silsby and nine fellow Baptists from Idaho were arrested on Jan. 29 as they tried to take the children into the Dominican Republic by bus without the necessary documentation.
The group denied wrongdoing, saying it was only trying to help orphans in the wake of Haiti’s devastating Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless.
Some parents told the judge they willingly handed over the children because they could no longer care for them following the quake that destroyed much of the Haitian capital.
Nine of the accused have since been released and returned to the US, but Silsby, the leader of the New Life Children’s Refuge group, remains in a Port-au-Prince jail facing child trafficking charges.
SOS Children’s Villages spokeswoman Line Wolf Nielsen said that although it was in many cases a tearful reunion, or departure, many parents had actually been visiting for weeks.
“It wasn’t as if you had parents and children running toward each other,” she said. “The children were dressed in their finest clothes and playing with the SOS ‘mother’ they had been living with.”
“It was a happy event but a few tears were shared. Quite a few kids have made many friends here and they were sad to say goodbye,” she said.
The smallest of the children was only a few months old and will have spent almost half her life in the care of a “mother” assigned to her by the SOS Villages charity, which was founded in 1949 in Austria.
“We will continue to follow these children on home visits and make sure things are fine and well,” Wolf Nielsen said.
The reunions followed weeks of painstaking registration work by Haitian government officials who had to make sure all the parents were bona fide.
Several of the 22 families that claimed the children — many were siblings — left it until the last minute, Wolf Nielsen said, explaining it was difficult for some to get there while others may have feared prosecution.
The national director of SOS Children’s Villages, Celigny Darius, said the high-profile case, which diverted valuable media spotlight off the massive relief effort in Haiti, had raised serious questions.
“This case has highlighted the risks of separation in emergency situations, when destitute families see no other way than to give up their children,” Darius said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN