The Haiti Ten

by VorJack

More news about the “Haiti ten,” the American missionaries who were arrested for trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border without proper authorization. The principle organizer was a woman named Laura Silsby, and she is the focus of a lot of the attention right now.

First, from the Idaho Statesman,

Passing acquaintances and those who know Laura Silsby well use many of the same words to describe the Boise businesswoman: intelligent, confident and persuasive.

These qualities led people to work for her company for weeks, even months, without pay. Fellow church members dropped everything on short notice to help her rescue orphans in Haiti, where the group of 10 was intercepted Jan. 29 at the Dominican Republic border and taken to jail.

It seems like Silsby had a history of trying to help others, but getting in over her head. She is the subject of a number of civil suits for failing in to pay employees of her online company, and was supposed to go to court this week. It looks like she failed to get the proper authorization, but may have decided to charge ahead anyway.

According to The Guardian, several of her acquaintances agree that Silsby moved too quickly and without thought. According to a long-time aquaintance, Carolyn Groom:

“Her purpose was good, her execution horrible,” says Groom. “She might have been so intent on achieving her goals she wasn’t aware that she had overstepped the mark.”

The other arrested Baptists appear to have developed similar criticisms of their leader. A note handed to NBC television from their jail cell earlier this week reads: “We only came as volunteers. We had nothing to do with any documents and have been lied to.”

But then there are other, stranger elements to Silsby’s behavior:

In the hectic days after the quake, when she was assembling the group to go out to Haiti, she somehow managed to track down a couple from Kentucky, Richard and Malinda Pickett, to offer them help in extracting three children they were already in the process of adopting. She phoned three times, and on each occasion was told by the Picketts that on no condition should she try to move the children. Remarkably, she didn’t stop then. Once in Haiti, Silsby turned up at the orphanage where the children were and asked to collect them. Richard Pickett told Associated Press that she had claimed to be his wife’s friend. The three children had by then already been moved, so Silsby asked the orphanage managers if they had any other children she could have.

“She asked for kids at each of the orphanages, and at the end of the day when no one would give her any, she cried. Why would you cry after you see these kids are being taken care of?” Pickett told AP.

Also very interesting is the first person account from Anne-christine d’Adesky on her blog Haiti Vox. d’Adesky had an encounter with Silsby and her group in Santo Domingo before their entry into Haiti. She warned them that they would need certain documents.

The next day, in Haiti myself, I discovered that their group had clearly disregarded the advice and protocol I’d offered, and instead, seemed to be racing to round up children as they’d planned. When I got to the capital, and started visiting orphanages, I met the director of His Home for Children in Haiti who said a bus had turned up at his orphanage (near Delmas 60) late the night before, unannounced, with a missionary group that asked him to turn over remaining children in his care. He declined, telling me ‘it smelled fishy.’

Most of this could be simply be an example of too much enthusiasm. There might be children that needed saving now, and the paperwork would have to wait. But some of Silsby’s actions seem a little odd, like the fact that she was so eager to get children that she repeatedly made requests of orphanages where the children were already being cared for.

The spectre hanging over all this is the threat of child abduction and trafficking. No one really seems to think they’re involved with that, but now one of their self appointed legal representatives has turned out to have an ugly past. According to the NYT, Jorge Puello, who stepped in and offered his legal services pro bono, is wanted “in at least four countries in connection with charges including sex trafficking of girls and women…”

It still seems too early to be drawing any conclusions from all of this. Still, it seems fair to say that Silsby and her group are guilty of doing harm, at least inadvertently. Here the Guardian article mentions the children that were taken from their families by the group:

A girl aged nine told an SOS worker that she could not wait to be reunited with her family. But she added that she wanted to be with her father, not her mother “because she gave me away”.

Georg Willeit, a member of SOS’s emergency team in Port-au-Prince, says several of the children were depressed and confused because they too were having to deal with the shuddering ­realisation that their parents had willingly handed them over. He was baffled why the Baptists would have consciously inflicted such deep trauma on vulnerable kids.

“How can you rush into a family and tell them: ‘You are so poor you cannot care for your child’? How can you say: ‘We know what’s best for your child, it’s God’s gift’? That takes away the dignity of the parents. It is against all human nature,” says Willeit.