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

forthcoming, BridgeStone’s improvements continued with donated money and supplies: more housing for volunteers, overhauling existing buildings for staff, central heating and air in the cabins, four trailer homes donated by the local Air Force base that Benz gladly accepted along with a seventy-two-passenger bus that a church gave as a love offering.
    Progress was slower back in Haiti. The estimated number of Haitian children coming to Alabama dropped again, this time from fifty to twenty-six. A Haitian pastor was helping to find and identify adoptable children to send, but communications were an ongoing problem and paperwork often got lost. The ETA for the children’s arrival never seemed to change from three to four weeks out, but Benz remained optimistic, hinting at connections who could speed things along. “We made friends in Haiti—and in Haiti, a lot of things are based on friendships. Having a friend in the right place can make all the difference in the world,” Benz told me with the confidence and excitement that had become so common among postquake rescue missionaries. He seemed to share the sense that the crisis could propel everyday people into action-hero roles and the shiver of giddy anticipation at the prospect of engaging a shady system, none of it quite real, as though making a deal or slipping a bribe would feel natural in the moment and unfold as though scripted. “I think if we make the right connections, we might walk in one day and walk out the next with their passports,” he said. I could imagine the wink as he continued, “We might have to bless some people to make it happen!”
    In May Benz announced that his primary partner in Haiti had “decided to bail out of the process” on the eve of submitting the group’s paperwork to the State Department. In what seemed a familiar Plan B, Benz began calling other people they had met in Haiti, including For His Glory Adoption Outreach and their Port-au-Prince orphanage, Maison des Enfants de Dieu. By late May the number of children Benz told a local Alabama TV station he was expecting had dropped to ten. Then in September a fundraising missive pled for continued patience as the group sought to “bring children out of darkness and suffering into faith and life in Jesus Christ” despite all the hurdles that had been put in their path.
    That was the last time Benz’s newsletter mentioned Haiti. Soon thereafter “Haiti” dropped out of the title of the OrphansNoMore Project, and Benz began speaking about bringing children from other countries for adoption. In October his newsletter announced BridgeStone’s pending open house to mark the launch of Benz’s Ukrainian adoption program. At some point over the fall Benz’s Haiti blog came down. Then in December 2010, almost a year after the earthquake, Benz welcomed his first group of Ukrainian orphans, whom he would come to call “the Christmas group,” and announced his hopes that each one would find God’s love and a forever home.
    To a cynical eye the entire enterprise could appear as a massive bait and switch. Under the promise of forthcoming Haitian orphans, Benz hadmanaged to elicit substantial donations and volunteer labor that transformed his BridgeStone property from a crumbling antique to a functioning, elaborate Christian retreat camp. But I can’t imagine this is what Benz intended. I imagine him first bewildered that his Scooby-Doo plan to slip Haitian orphans across the border on benevolent but false premises didn’t work out, then becoming depressed and then motivated to salvage the project with a return to the original plan: bringing Ukrainian kids to the Deep South.
    This type of progression, leaping from one country to the next, has become a common spectacle in the international adoption world, where advocates lobby hard for the needs of children from a specific country, only to move swiftly to another nation when the hurdles of adopting from the first are too large. It’s a