Read Online The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce - Free Book Online

where they have never cooked for themselves, done laundry, or seen a functioning family.
    After the earthquake Benz assumed that his familiarity with Ukraine’s bleak narrative would translate neatly to the Haitian orphan crisis. When the quake hit Haiti—“Hay-dee,” in Benz’s Kentucky-bred drawl—he and Larissa felt God calling them to reassess their plans. They began to imagine the beds at BridgeStone filled with Haitian children instead of Ukrainians.
    Providence aside, initiating the BridgeStone retreat with Haitian children made good PR sense. After Benz announced the need for extensive renovations to ready BridgeStone for Haitian orphans, he was overwhelmed with volunteer support and donations. Miles of new plumbing and electrical wire were laid for the center’s twenty-two aging and weather-beaten cabins, and three new permanent staff buildings began construction, including one for Benz and his family to move into and another for his father—almost all with donated materials and labor. Volunteers made extensive capital improvements to the camp that benefited the ministry’s ability to generate income from rent-paying church groups. Understanding the volunteers’ motivations was easy: hard work on the grounds of BridgeStone seemed like a concrete way to do something for Haiti at a time when much of the country watched the nearby disaster with a sense of impotent despair. Benz’s “army of volunteers” came from as far as the Carolinas and Iowa and as near as the local Auburn University football team.
    While BridgeStone was being transformed, Benz continued to talk up his plan and sign up parents who wanted to adopt a Haitian child, an ad-hoc campaign that is far afield from how international adoptions are actually processed. “We’ve got more parents than we’ve got kids,” Benz told me, predicting that “Most of the kids who come [to Alabama] will be returning.” After a few weeks, though, Benz downgraded his estimates for the first group of Haitian kids coming from 150 to 50.
    Benz was conscious of the tensions in Haiti over Western adoption efforts, but he gave them little thought. Because he had a friend who had connections at the State Department, Benz told me—and anyone else willing to listen—he was confident that he could wrangle the system by passing off his adoption scheme as a cultural exchange, “a foreign studies program, more or less.” When I reminded him of the mission to “incubate adoptions,” Benz laughed. “Well, that’s absolutely part of our agenda, but you know, that’s not the thing we’re going to emphasize to the Haitian government! We’ll emphasize the exchange part of it, the English studies.”
    It was hard to understand how Benz thought this plan—misleading the Haitian government about his intentions while he spoke openly about them to US journalists—would work. If the similarities between his plan and the Silsby scandal occurred to him, as both promised to Haitian officials a temporary trip for the children while simultaneously offering adoption opportunities to US parents, he didn’t reveal it. He spoke of the Silsby affair as a mere “stumbling block” thrown in the road by people whose “hearts were in the right place, but their documents weren’t.”
    In response to criticism that the crisis was being used to secure more adoptions for prospective US parents, thus serving their needs more than Haiti’s or the children’s, Benz repeated his standard disclaimer: “What I shared with people, in Haiti or Ukraine, is that I really don’t care what nationality the adoptive family is. . . . My goal is not to get kids adopted in the US; my goal is to help orphans find great families in Christian homes.” With a good-natured, conspiratorial chuckle, he delivered the punch line: “It just so happens that the place I work is the US, and the families I know are primarily in Alabama.”
    As time wore on and passports for the Haitian children were not