FERMATHE, Haiti — Guerlaine Antoine pushed aside a tub full of laundry, wiped her soapy hands on her T-shirt and rushed barefoot to bring out photos of the 8-year-old boy she entrusted to 10 American Baptists.
More Multimedia on the Haiti Earthquake“Do you think I would give this child away?” she said, opening a grade school yearbook to show her son, Carl Ramirez Antoine, in cap and gown, at his kindergarten graduation. “He is my only treasure.”
As a Haitian judge on Tuesday questioned five of the 10 Americans who were detained after trying to exit the country illegally with 33 children, the questions swirling around the case threw this town high in the mountains overlooking Port-au-Prince into confusion.
It is home to many of the children the Americans said they had planned to raise at a new orphanage in the Dominican Republic. The Americans said that the children had been orphaned in the earthquake, and that they had authorization from the Dominican government to bring the children into the country.
But it became clear on Tuesday that at least some of the children had not lost their parents in the earthquake.
And while the Americans said they did not intend to offer the children for adoption, the Web site for their orphanage makes clear that they intended to do so.
In addition to providing a swimming pool, soccer field and access to the beach for the children, the group, known as the New Life Children’s Refuge, said it also planned to “provide opportunities for adoption,” and “seaside villas for adopting parents to stay while fulfilling the requirement for 60-90 day visit.”
An empty house in an unfinished subdivision in Meridian, Idaho, is listed on the nonprofit incorporation papers filed in Idaho for the organization. The address was listed in November on papers Laura Silsby filed to establish New Life as a nonprofit. Two days after the papers were filed, records show, Ms. Silsby sold the house at a substantial loss.
Signs in front of the house on Tuesday offered it for sale as a foreclosed property.
The missionaries’ account of their activities in the Dominican Republic was hard to verify. They said they had been in the process of buying land and building a complex in Magante, on the north coast of the country.
Mayor Aniceto Balbuena said that he had been approached by two women about building an orphanage, but that the idea had fallen through because of a legal entanglement.
In Fermathe, where most of the children were born and raised, it was clear that while their homes were woefully lacking in many ways, some of the children — and perhaps many of them — were not orphans.
Kisnel and Florence Antoine said they sent two of their children with the Baptist missionaries because they had offered educational opportunities for the children in the Dominican Republic. Ketlaine Valmont said she had sent a son.
They showed school photos and academic awards to demonstrate that they had not selfishly sent their children away to lighten their load.
In a country where more than half of all children come from families too poor to keep them in school, the parents said that the Americans’ offer of an education seemed like a gift from heaven.
They also wanted to give opportunities for something better to their children. They said that the missionaries had promised they would be able to visit their children in the Dominican Republic, and that the children would be free to come home for visits.
“If someone offers to take my children to a paradise,” Mrs. Antoine said of Carl and her daughter Jenisa, “am I supposed to say no?”
Several parents denied accusations that they had been given money for their children, or that they wanted their children to be put up for adoption.
They trusted the Americans, they said, because they arrived with the recommendation of a Baptist minister, Philippe Murphy, who runs an orphanage in the area. A woman who answered the door at Mr. Murphy’s house said he had gone to Miami. But she also said that he did not know anything about the Americans.Ms. Valmont wondered whether her trust in Mr. Murphy had been misplaced.
“I just wanted him to have more than I have,” Ms. Valmont said of her 6-year-old son, Darwin. “What future can I give him here?”
Ginger Thompson reported from Fermathe, Haiti, and Shaila Dewan from Magante, Dominican Republic. William Yardley contributed reporting from Meridian, Idaho.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/world/americas/03orphans.html?scp=2&sq=&st=nyt
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