PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

The plight of Haitian children is even being noted as far away as Australia, just as the Asian tsunami was closely watched here. Below is a republication of an article featured by the Sydney Morning Herald, which is turn took it from another site. (It is Friday, over there, when it is Thursday here.)

Help Haiti to help all the children

 February 4, 2010

OF ALL the horrors suffered by Haitians before and after the January 12 earthquake, it is the plight of the children that most haunts many people living in the comfort of the West. It is natural to want to give them new lives in good homes. Less than a week after the disaster, the first group of 53 orphaned Haitian children flew to the US, which loosened visa requirements to hasten their adoption. Days later,

33 children arrived in Paris to meet their new families.

Since then, more disturbing events should have forced people to think deeply about how best to help Haiti's children. Ten US Baptists from an Idaho-based charity, New Life Children's Refuge, were charged with child trafficking after trying to take 33 supposedly orphaned children across Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic. The children, aged between two months and 12 years old, had no documents, but some of the older ones told aid workers their parents were alive. Most still had family, officials said. ''Our hearts were in the right place,'' said one of the Americans, which is probably true of almost all people who seek to adopt children from Haiti.

Sadly, the apparent obvious solution to helping such children, adoption, is appropriate for only a few, at best. For a start, it is no small thing to take a child away from everyone and everything they know and expect them to overcome their trauma and grief among strangers in a strange land. Removals en masse also stymie family reunifications.

A more sinister aspect to taking children from one of the world's poorest and most corrupt nations is that traffickers exploit a ready supply of children to meet demand from wealthy adoptive parents, or worse. Faced with well-founded concerns about child trafficking for adoption or, in the worst cases, prostitution, organ donations and slavery, Haiti has wisely suspended adoptions.

Where does that leave Haiti's children, of whom up to 1 million are unaccompanied, orphaned or have lost one parent? Given that almost one in two Haitians is under 18, there is only one way to give them a better life, and that is not to create a Haitian ''stolen generation''. All who care for Haiti's children ought to care equally about rebuilding Haiti.

People in affluent nations should push governments to waive Haiti's debts, which cost more to service than Haiti spends on health and education, and back long-term efforts to help this cruelly exploited nation emerge from its state of subsistence on the fringe. That is the way to give all Haiti's children their best chance of recovery and a better life.

Source: The Age

Underlining added by the TerryReport

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