Haiti charges U.S. church missionaries with kidnap

I've been following this on the news, and it all seems very strange. I don't believe the group leaders when they say they didn't know they were doing something illegal. Who in their right mind thinks they can just load up a bunch of kids in a bus and take them out of the country. I'm glad Haiti officials are trying to get to the bottom of this, something just seems wrong. However, I am concerned that this is going to draw attention away from the relief effort.

 

No good deed will go unpunished!

It seems highly unlikely that this church group was attempting to "traffic" in children for profit. Most probably they were trying to rescue the children from deplorable conditions. The U.S. government should ask for extradition, investigate, and decide the matter. If the "corrupt" and incompetent government of Haiti sentences them to prison time it would be absurd. The U.S. must act now. If we can send millions in aid, surely we can help our own citizens who were apparently attempting to save children. This is really insane.

 

At every chance it gets the world is going to try to crap on America even as America is handing over billions of dollars.

Not saying we deserve a free pass, but to charge 10 missionaries of child kidnapping?

**** them. My walet is no longer open to Haiti.

 

Why don't you wait until all the facts come out before making that kind of decision?

 

The lady leading this group doesn't have a clean resume. I read somewhere that she knew what they were doing was illegal but none of the others did.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35243272/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/

Jailed missionary left trail of legal woes
Idaho woman who led ‘rescue’ mission in Haiti faces court woes at home

updated 5:53 p.m. CT, Thurs., Feb. 4, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE - The leader of a group of American missionaries charged Thursday with kidnapping for trying to take 33 children out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti faces legal troubles in her home state of Idaho as well.

Laura Silsby, 40, is the subject of several lawsuits accusing her and her Boise-based company, PersonalShopper.com, of failing to pay her employees. She also has a history of failing to pay debts, and the $358,000 house at which she founded her nonprofit religious group, New Life Children's Refuge, was foreclosed upon in December, according to a report in her hometown newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

The Boise newspaper said Silsby has been named in at least eight civil lawsuits and 14 unpaid wage claims.

On Thursday, she and nine other Americans appeared in a Haitian court, following their arrest on Jan. 29 for allegedly trying to cross into the Dominican Republic with a busload of Haitian children they said were orphaned by the quake. A prosecutor forwarded their case to a judge to determine their fate.

Silsby said at the hearing: "We simply wanted to help the children. We petition the court not only for our freedom but also for our ability to continue to help."

A longtime Idaho businesswoman, Silsby founded PersonalShopper.com, an Internet gift-shopping service site, in 1999. As its CEO, she was named businesswoman of the year in 2006 by eWomenNetwork, which lauded her for founding a company "based on a conviction that busy working mothers, like herself, needed a time-saving personal shopping service that would help simplify their hectic lives."

The Idaho Department of Labor confirmed that 14 claims for nonpayment of wages were filed against Personal Shopper Inc. in 2008 and 2009. The company’s former marketing director also filed a civil lawsuit against Silsby and the company in October for unpaid wages, wrongful termination and fraud, the newspaper said.

Silsby is due in Idaho court next week in the case and a jury trial is scheduled for Feb. 22.

Court records show that Silsby also is due in court in March to answer to another civil lawsuit filed by Beer & Cain, a Boise law firm. The lawsuit says Silsby has failed to pay more than $4,500 for services rendered.

An e-mail circulated Wednesday at PersonalShopper.com urged employees not to speak to the press or post any information on Web sites. "Given the aggressive nature of the press and the fabrications already being invented, we need to make sure nothing in writing is published that can be misconstrued in any way," the e-mail said, according to the Statesman.

Mission gone wrong
Silsby and her nanny, Charisa Coulter, 23, who are both members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, founded New Life Children Refuge, a nonprofit that Silsby incorporated in Idaho in November.

The religious charity’s mission was to build an orphanage for Dominican and Haitian children.

"The folks in the church embraced their vision, and it became a shared vision," Coulter's father, Mel, told the Statesman. "The church made it part of their mission's program."

Before the Jan. 12 earthquake devastated Haiti, the charity had planned to buy land and build an orphanage, school and church in Magante on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, BBC News reported.

But after the disaster, the mission's aim became to "rescue Haitian orphans abandoned on the streets, makeshift hospitals or from collapsed orphanages in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, and bring them to New Life Children's Refuge in Cabarete, Dominican Republic," the charity stated in an online document.

 

So you would have no problem with French missionaries loading a bunch of American kids onto a bus and trying to take them across the border to Canada without authorization?

That you would characterize Haiti enforcing it's own laws as trying "to crap on America" is absurd.

 

MSNBC on Wed interviewed a couple of people who run orphanages in Haiti, one an American and he said he came into contact with this group and warned them not to try attempt something like this.

 

It would be the Baptists...

 

I agree this doesn't quite pass the smell test.

These people are either very naive, shady or both. If they don't even have an orphanage built what were they planning on doing with the kids? Even if they try to bring them to the US INS is going to have something to say about bringing 30+ undocumented Haitians.

I don't know if these people actually had the best interests of the kids at heart if they did they should've been willing to try to go through proper channels to do so than smuggle them out on a bus.

 

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I closed my wallet in the mist of this situation and I'm fully capable of re-opening it later.

Again, jailing/trying prosecute 10 missionaries for making a mistake at the same time taking hundreds of millions of dollars from their government strikes me as boastful ungratefulness.

I have a friend now in Rwanda doing missionary work. He thinks of nothing but what he can do to help people. Every missionary I know is like this. So yes, it bothers me to hear about 10 missionaries jailed with criminal charges pending.

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are you saying any kidnapper doesn't deserver to be jailed/prosecuted as long as the kidnapper's country donates millions of dollars?

 

Why would they take them to the Dominican? It's not like the entire Haiti half of the Island was destroyed:

 

First off, its idiotic to compare what happens during Haiti's catastrophe to anything of America.

If you take what happened in Haiti and have it happen in American, proportionately, I don't think I'd be telling the world that 10 Canadian missionaries were trying to abduct what looked like orphaned kids into Mexico while I was happily accepting dollars from their government.

Now, if there were a known cult of Child Apducting Missionaries, then yes, be suspicious. But when its just people trying to do the right thing with no ill intent, I think extra consideration would be incouraged.

 

there will be ample time to help plenty of kids. there is no excuse for this group even under the best intentions to try to subvert the process.

 

Who makes that call? Should the border guards just say "OK, take these undocumented children into another country even though they may have other family here. It's cool if I lose my job and face prosecution as well because you are 'trying to do the right thing.'"

Should the prosecutors just say "You guys are free, even though I have sworn to uphold the laws of my country, I will just let you guys go and face the consequences myself."

 

You do realize there was a problem with buying and selling children for forced labor in Haiti before the earthquake, right?