Word: haitians
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Merely days after the devastating Haitian earthquake of Jan. 12, Stephanie Rosborough ’96 and Hilarie Cranmer arrived via helicopter to set up a field hospital near Port-au-Prince at an orphanage and school run by the organization Love A Child...
...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...
...That was the case, for example, with a 6-year-old Haitian boy named Kenzie, who lost his parents in the earthquake. The leg injury he sustained got bad enough that he was sent to the U.S. naval hospital ship Comfort for emergency treatment. Doctors might have been inclined to then send Kenzie to an orphanage - until a volunteer Haitian nurse on board, Edith Philistin, who was in contact with the UNICEF project, did some detective work and found the boy's relatives, who have since taken him in. "They thought he was dead [until] I pointed...
...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...