Word: childrene
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...Many - if not most - of those 33 children, it turns out, aren't even orphans; they were given to Silsby's group by desperate parents, either directly or via orphanages. De la Soudiere, a French citizen and veteran child advocate in disaster and war zones, believes the Haitian children's registry will make people like orphanage directors and clueless missionaries "think twice" before unlawfully scooping up lost or abandoned kids. "It gives these children a legal identity they didn't have before," she says. "In the end, I also think it will strengthen Haitian family culture, because Haitians have been...
...January earthquake, which the Haitian government says killed more than 200,000 people, left thousands of children orphaned or separated from their families. But UNICEF and its partner NGOs in the registry effort, including Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services and Relief International, insist that it's better for aid workers to help identify and make the effort to locate those kids' relatives - and place them in temporary foster-style care with network-monitored and supported families - than to hand them over to orphanages. The vast majority of the children, they say, have an immediate or extended family member...
...media, like radio, for her family. What's more, even though the woman who found her is poor, she has been allowed to care for the infant under the UNICEF network's supervision - largely because experts like de la Soudiere says it's often a better option to keep children in their own communities instead of giving them to wealthier families who might make them restaveks...
...nascent UNICEF campaign has registered only about 130 Haitian children, but thousands are expected to be in the agency's database before the year's end. Not everyone backs the no-to-orphanages philosophy, of course. Referring to the Idaho missionaries, an American Christian missionary who helps run an orphanage in northern Haiti told TIME this week, "You can't let a few misguided people like them cast a shadow over the genuinely good work others are doing with Haitian children...
...That's true; but the UNICEF registry, if it can really reach out to an appreciable number of Haitian kids, could at least show Haitians an alternative to their troubling tradition of discarding children in the face of poverty and all the country's other hardships. Meanwhile, the project may want to add the 33 children the Idaho Baptists tried to carry away. As the case gets resolved, they're being housed in a Haitian orphanage - which to child advocates like de la Soudiere is the real Philistine victory...