No thanks to Pres. Obama's Administration who seemingly tried to throw them under the bus without getting all the facts.
Praise God! Prayer does work.
As I stated in a previous blog post those 10 Missionaries were being used as a scapegoat to hide the fact that Haiti's Gov't is full of Corrupt leaders, who waste Foreign Aid funds for personal use and allow Haitian Orphans to be sold in Child Trafficking/ Sex Slavery schemes.
The international media spotlight on this situation also exposed that most of Haiti's Orphanages are nothing more than Money Laundering fronts used to procure more Foreign Aid. (This too was mentioned in my post.)
In fact the NY Times later published a post to substantiate what I wrote about Haiti's Orphanages and CNN reported on Haiti's Corruption.
The Missionaries hired a Haitian lawyer but he was actually a crook who tried to extort them for $50,000. and was working against them.
Thank God they discovered his devious plans and fired him.
After they hired a Honest Dominican Republican Attorney to represent them, the truth about their real purpose for being in Haiti was finally revealed.
Now they are being freed.
The outcome of this case along with reports of miracles regarding Haitian Survivors (after Earthquake), proves that God is real and he does answer prayer especially for people who were just trying to help Poor, Black Children.
God Bless those 10 Missionaries and much success!
For more coverage on this story check out the videos and articles below.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Haitian Judge Recommends Release of 10 U.S. Missionaries
Judge Bernard Saint-Vil must now send his recommendation to the prosecutor, who may agree or object, but the judge has the final authority to decide whether they stay in custody or go free.
Saint-Vil said he was making his recommendation a day after questioning the Americans and hearing testimony from parents who said they willingly gave their children to the Baptist missionaries, believing they would educate and care for them.
"After listening to the families, I see the possibility that they can all be released," Saint-Vil told The Associated Press. "I am recommending that all 10 Americans be released."
Later, Saint-Vil said he would recommend provisional freedom for the detainees while the investigation continues. But it wasn't clear whether their possible release means they would be allowed to leave Haiti, or what implications the judge's decision could have on whether the charges may be dropped.
By midday Thursday, Saint-Vil had yet to deliver his formal recommendation to the prosecutor.
Gary Lassade, an attorney for one of the Americans, said he expects the judge will recommend the case be dropped — though the prosecutor could also appeal that ruling.
The Americans, most from an Idaho Baptist group, were charged last week with child kidnapping and criminal association after being arrested Jan. 29 while trying to take 33 children, ages 2 to 12, across the border to an orphanage they were trying to set up in the Dominican Republic.
The following day, group leader Laura Silsby of Meridian, Idaho, told the AP that the children were obtained either from orphanages or from distant relatives. She said only children who were found not to have living parents or relatives who could care for them might be put up for adoption.
However, at least 20 of the children are from a single village and have living parents. Some of the parents told the AP they willingly turned over their children to the missionaries on the promise the Americans would educate them and let relatives visit.
Drew Ham, assistant pastor at Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, said Thursday that the judge's recommendation is encouraging but it's too soon to celebrate with the detainees still in custody.
"It's a good sign," Ham told the AP. "But we still don't have confirmation of their release."
On Wednesday, from behind cell bars in the stuffy, grimy jail where they have been held, the missionaries refused to be interviewed.
"We've said all we're going to say for now. We don't want to talk now," Silsby said. "Maybe tomorrow."
The women were held separately from the men, who shared their cell with nine Haitian men, some of whom played checkers on the cell floor.
"We will not talk unless our lawyer is present," said Paul Thompson, pastor of the Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho. Lassade represents Thompson's cousin, Jim Allen of Amarillo, Texas.
A Dallas attorney for Allen, Hiram Sasser, told the AP that his client was recruited just 48 hours before the group left last month for the Dominican Republic on what Silsby termed an emergency rescue mission.
"He did not know many of the other people who were on the mission trip, or what other people were going to do, or about paperwork," Sasser said.
Silsby had decided last summer to create an orphanage in the Dominican Republic and in November registered the nonprofit New Life Children's Refuge foundation in Idaho.
After Haiti's catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, she accelerated the plan and recruited her fellow missionaries. Silsby told the AP she was only interested in saving suffering children.
She told the AP after her arrest, however, that she did not have all the Haitian papers required to take the children out of the country.
A Dominican diplomat told the AP he warned her that without those papers she could be arrested.
Americans Jailed in Haiti Plead for Aid From U.S.
The 10 Americans detained on kidnapping charges are pleading for the United States government to do more on their behalf and for the news media to focus on them less.
“Help us,” one of the detainees, Carla Thompson, said Monday as she lay on a bed in a scorching Port-au-Prince jail cell of about 8 feet by 5 feet, her ankles bandaged from infected mosquito bites. “That’s the message I would give to Mr. Obama and the State Department. Start helping us.”
Sitting on a dirty concrete floor in the cell, another detainee, Corinna Lankford, nodded in agreement, a frustrated look on her face. “I have faith in God,” Ms. Lankford said. “But maybe the U.S. government could help a little more, too.”
“No one is giving us any kind of information about what is going on,” she added.
The detainees, most of them affiliated with Baptist churches in Meridian and Twin Falls, Idaho, arrived in the chaotic days after the Jan. 12 earthquake. They were detained as they tried to take 33 Haitian children whom the Baptists said had been orphaned into the neighboring Dominican Republic.
Some of the children later said they had parents, and Haitian prosecutors have charged the Americans with kidnapping and criminal association. The Americans have said they were on a charity mission.
Asked whether they believed their case had become a distraction to the quake disaster, several of the prisoners became upset.
“Yes, without a doubt,” said Ms. Thompson as she suddenly started to cry.
“We came here to help, and now there is all this attention on us,” Ms. Lankford chimed in as she, too, began to cry.
The investigating judge, Bernard Saint-Vil, questioned the prisoners on Monday and Tuesday and planned to hear from them as a group on Wednesday.
“I want to hear what they thought they were doing,” he said. “I hope to hear from the parents of the younger ones.”
On Monday, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Associated Press that his country would consider having the Americans transferred and tried in a United States court, since most government buildings in Haiti — including the country’s courts — had been severely damaged in the earthquake.
Mr. Bellerive has suggested the country would not oppose a trial of the Americans in a United States court because of the severe damage to Haiti’s own government buildings, including the courts. American officials have said they intend to let the Haitian justice system take its course. Judge Saint-Vil has said he intends to investigate the case fully.
For Laura Silsby, the leader of the group of Americans, that process began on Monday.
Sitting on a brown tattered couch in Mr. Saint-Vil’s office, she waited to discuss her fate. A Bible lay on her lap, and her hands shook. “I’m nervous,” said Ms. Silsby, 40, furtively glancing at the judge.
In an interview before the judge questioned her, Ms. Silsby said she, too, was frustrated with the level of American government involvement.
“It has mostly been missionaries, not the government, that has been providing us with food and medicine,” she said, adding that one of the prisoners, Charisa Coulter, 24, who is diabetic, was lacking insulin for the first week of her detention. On Sunday, a missionary was allowed to deliver medicine to her.
The Americans said that they were being treated well by guards and other prisoners. They said they were passing the time reading the Bible, napping, praying and snacking on sugared cereal and potato chips provided to them by missionaries.
They also said that they took the children in good faith.
“We were told by officials at the border that we could go back the next day and get the remaining papers,” said Silas Daniel Thompson, 19, as he stood in his cell surrounded by Haitian men.
Ms. Silsby said she was going to do that on behalf of the group, he said, “but then they arrested us before we got the chance.”
Listening attentively from the adjacent cell, Nicole Lankford, 18, the daughter of Corinna Lankford, began shaking her head.
“Our point was to draw attention to the plight of Haitian orphans,” she said. “We came here to help, not to become the story.”
On Tuesday, Reginald Brown, an American lawyer for Jim Allen, one of the detainees, wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, asking her to personally get involved in the case. Mr. Allen is a construction worker from Texas who said he was in Haiti to rebuild orphanages.
“We think it is clear that the unprecedented situation that exists in Haiti now requires a response beyond what would be expected in the ordinary course,” read the letter, which was released by Mr. Brown’s office.
Also on Tuesday, Haitian officials allowed Louis Gary Lissade, a former justice minister in Haiti who is also representing Mr. Allen, to bring a satellite phone into the jail so Mr. Allen could call his wife, Lisa, who was in Dallas, and assure her that he was all right. He said that he was not getting much information about his case, but was optimistic that he would be released as soon as the facts were known.
“I love you, I miss you, we’ll be O.K.,” he was heard telling her. “Don’t worry.”
Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages Raises Fears
The floors were concrete and the windows were broken.
There was no electricity or running water. Lunch looked like watery grits. Beds were fashioned from sheets of cardboard. And the only toilet did not work.
But the Foyer of Patience here is like hundreds of places that pass as orphanages for thousands of children in the poorest country in the hemisphere. Many are barely habitable, much less licensed. They have no means to provide real schooling or basic medical care, so children spend their days engaged in mindless activities, and many die from treatable illnesses.
Haiti’s child welfare system was broken before the earthquake struck. But as the quake shattered homes and drove hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, the number of children needing care grew exponentially.
Chronic problems — like inadequate services, overwhelming poverty and shady orphanages — have only intensified, while the authorities fear that some of the less scrupulous orphanages are taking advantage of the chaos to round up children in crisis and offer them for sale as servants and sex slaves.
But it took the arrest last weekend of 10 Americans caught trying to leave the country with 33 Haitian children to focus international attention on the issue. While there is no evidence that the Americans, who said they were trying to rescue children in the aftermath of the earthquake, intended any harm, the ease with which they drove into the capital and scooped up a busload of children without documents exposed vast gaps in the system’s safeguards.
“This has called the world’s attention because it is the first clear piece of evidence that our fears have come true,” said Patricia Vargas, the regional coordinator for SOS Children’s Villages, which provides services to abandoned children around the world. “Our concern as an organization is how many other cases are out there that we are not aware of.”
At the front lines of the system are the orphanages, which run the gamut from large, well-equipped institutions with international financing to one-room hovels in a slum where a single woman cares for abandoned children as best she can.
Most of the children in them, the authorities said, are not orphans, but children whose parents are unable to provide for them. To desperate parents, the orphanage is a godsend, a temporary solution to help a child survive a particularly tough economic stretch. Many orphanages offer regular family visiting hours and, when their situations improve, parents are allowed to take their children back home.
But instead of protecting Haiti’s most vulnerable population, some orphanages have become tools of exploitation, the authorities fear.
“There are many so-called orphanages that have opened in the last couple of years that are not really orphanages at all,” said Frantz Thermilus, the chief of Haiti’s National Judicial Police. “They are fronts for criminal organizations that take advantage of people who are homeless and hungry. And with the earthquake they see an opportunity to strike in a big way.”
There is no precise count of the number of orphanages in this country, the number of children living in them, or of the children who are victims of trafficking, although Unicef estimates that number in the tens of thousands per year. The authorities said thousands of those trafficked were sold as servants, known as restaveks, to well-to-do Haitian families. Others, officials say, are smuggled into the Dominican Republic to do domestic and agricultural work, often in appalling conditions.
In recent years, the government has tried to crack down on trafficking, establishing special police units known as child protection brigades that monitor children leaving the airports or crossing borders. But a State Department report issued last year said the brigades did not pursue trafficking cases because there was no Haitian law against the practice. The government “did shut down a number of unregistered orphanages whose residents were believed to be vulnerable to trafficking,” the report said.
And in the wake of the earthquake, the authorities suspended all adoptions pending a review of hundreds of applications already in the system.
But Haitian authorities acknowledge that the fledgling efforts of a financially struggling government long plagued by corruption have proved little match for the highly organized, multimillion-dollar criminal networks.
Manuel Fontaine, a child protection specialist with Unicef, said his agency was also concerned that Haiti’s inability to monitor orphanages and keep track of children moving in and out of them left them open to abuses.
“With the system already fragile before the quake, we knew something like this could happen,” he said of the effort by the 10 Americans. “We warned authorities here to be on the lookout.”
It was unclear what the future holds for the 50 children crammed into two bedrooms at the Foyer of Patience, some of them scampering around in clothes that were either too big or too small, and others wearing no clothes at all.
The director of the orphanage, Enoch Anequaire, said he opened the center five years ago but has had no time to get a license. He said he provided an education to the children, but there was not a single book, piece of paper or pencil in the house.
He said he fed them three square meals. At noon, one recent day, several said that they had had nothing to eat.
Mr. Anequaire, whose own clothes were pressed and shoes polished, said he had been overwhelmed with new children since the earthquake. He pointed out five boys who arrived last Wednesday and said that an aunt had brought them in because their homes had collapsed, and that their mothers were unable to feed them.
Some of the children, however, said Mr. Anequaire had come looking for them.
“He came to my house and told my mother he needed 10 more kids,” said one of the boys, whose names were withheld from this article to protect them from retribution.
Mr. Anequaire denied this version of events.
Across the street stands another orphanage, two-story compound called the Foyer of Zion, where more than 60 children live in airy, cheerfully decorated rooms. Still, on a recent visit, it was woefully understaffed and poorly equipped. Children in the nursery were kept in stacked wooden boxes rather than cribs.
The director, Marjorie Mardy, said that the center was financed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and that several members from the United States had rushed to Port-au-Prince after the earthquake to take home children who had been in the adoption process for more than two years.
Most of the children, however, were in legal limbo, she said. Their parents had not given up custody, nor had they any clear plans for bringing the children home. Many children had been dropped off at the orphanage without any documents providing their names, ages or need for specialized care, which Ms. Mardy acknowledges she is unable to provide.
There was a baby so frail and shriveled she was clearly sick, but Ms. Mardy said she had not been able to take her for tests. A toddler who seemed lethargic and unresponsive had been running a low-grade fever since arriving at the orphanage after the earthquake. But she had not been taken to a doctor.
“In Haiti, it’s not like the United States where people have jobs and homes and security,” Ms. Mardy said. “And if people have no security, how can they give security to their children?
“We try to give them that security,” she said. “But at times like these, it’s overwhelming.”
The solution, say child protection advocates, lies as much in fixing families as fixing orphanages.
“If we are going to really protect children, orphanages have to become a family’s last resort,” said Suzanna Tkalec, a human rights lawyer and child protection specialist at Catholic Relief Services, which is developing a program to provide social and economic support for the families of some 2,000 displaced children.
“Anything that recreates a family is a much better option.”
Lomene Nerisier is a living example of what is possible. After her husband kicked her and their three children out of their house in La Mardelle, she begged an orphanage in the village to give the children to a family that might provide them a better life.
The director, Gina Duncan, offered Ms. Nerisier a job instead. She received part of her salary in cash and the other part in materials to build her own house. Three years later, she not only takes care of her own children, but she also teaches preschool.
Today she is proud of her accomplishment, but not naïve about what sets her apart from the vast majority of mothers in this country.
“I am lucky,” she said. “So many women do not have jobs. They do not have land to grow food for their children. If their choice is to watch their children starve or give them away, they are going to give them away, and hope that they have put them in good hands.”
Either way, the decision is heart-wrenching for parent and child. Stanley Vixamar, 10, cried through the night on his first night at the Foyer of Patience.
“I wanted to stay with my mother even though our house has fallen down,” he said. “I love her.”
Haiti Judge Could Rule In Americans' Case
A Haitian judge could rule Thursday on whether to release on bail 10 Americans detained in Port-au-Prince on child abduction charges, an attorney for one of the Americans said.
The judge has investigated the case against the group thoroughly, Hiram Sasser, director of the Liberty Legal Institute, told CNN's "American Morning," and the testimony of Haitians in the case "really exonerated Jim [Allen] and the others."
Allen is among 10 missionaries charged a week ago with kidnapping children and criminal association for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without proper documentation following the January 12 magnitude-7.0 earthquake there.
His wife, Lisa Allen, said Thursday she has suffered "horrific anxiety" since the detentions. "I'm confident that the people of Haiti will do the right thing and bring Jim home," she said.
Sasser said he hopes the ruling comes Thursday, or else it will not come until Monday. Friday is a day of mourning for quake victims in Haiti.
The 10 will not be required to appear in court for the ruling.
The Americans have said they were attempting to help the children get to a safe place and wanted to establish an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. Some of the Americans have said they thought they were helping orphans, but their interpreters have told CNN that they were present when group members spoke with some of the children's parents.
Some of the parents also said they had willingly given their children to the Americans, who promised them a better life and said they could see their children whenever they wanted.
Earlier this week, Jorge Puello, a Dominican attorney hired to represent the group, said the missionaries had authorization from the Dominican Republic to bring the children across the border, but he did not show the documents to reporters.
Dominican officials have said previously the Americans did not have permission to transport children into the country, and Puello did not say whether the group had authorization from Haitian officials.
Allen said she was able to speak with her husband briefly on Tuesday. "He sounded good. He said he's well," she said. "That's what I'm having to go on. It was a very short conversation, but it was great to hear his voice."
She said her husband is a construction welder who wanted to help after seeing the devastation wrought by the Haiti quake. Asked whether she thought her husband was unaware of plans involving the children and had been tricked, she said no, but did not elaborate.
Sasser said Jim Allen was called on the trip to "participate in construction activities. ... Whatever happened and the facts there, we'll find out when he gets home and we'll piece it together."
Another attorney for Allen, Reginald Brown of Washington, sent U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a letter on Tuesday asking her to intervene in the case personally, but a State Department spokesman said Clinton would not get involved.
"It would be highly unusual for the secretary of state to intervene in a case involving the judicial process of another country," spokesman P.J. Crowley said.
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Sources: Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, Google Maps
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