Baptist missionaries or child traffickers?

Ten people from a church in Idaho are being held on possible child trafficking charges. They contend they were taking 30 "orphans" from a church orphanage in Haiti to a yet to be built orphanage in the Dominican Republic.

Their paperwork was not in order and they are currently awaiting a hearing before a Haitian judge.

In the aftermath of the earthquake many do gooders have come to Haiti to help, but many children have been taken out of the country fairly quickly. The adoptions were supposedly in the works prior to the tragedy, but situations like this current one need to be looked at closely.

In this case, some of these children claimed to have parents, uncles and aunts that were on other parts of the island, but they were still herded into the bus for a trip to this new "orphanage."

I am not here to determine whether the motives of the Idaho group were pure or not, but I am happy to see some semblance of law is questioning whether or not these children are going from a bad situation to a worse situation.

Haiti has experienced an incredible crisis but their children are not throwaways. Some people are there to offer these children a real future, but others are offering these children a life of unpaid servitude, and that would be a second tragedy that the Haitian government is trying to stop.

My only hope is this is not too little too late. It has been three weeks since the quake and many children have left the island never to return. Most of them do not speak English, so wherever they go it will be difficult for them to communicate and sometimes that barrier works to the benefit of those whose motives are not pure.

At this point we can pray for those who are already gone, but it is the responsibility of the Haitian government to make sure the rest of the children are actually moving on to a better future.

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