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Baptists Offered Kids Pool, Tennis Courts
From CBS Evening News:
The 10 Americans were arrested trying to drive a bus with the children across the border Friday night. As they were crossing the Dominican border, one of the children started crying so loudly it alarmed the guards, who looked inside and found that the children had no papers.
No passports, no documents – but one of the children did have a flier from the “Americans’ New Life Children’s Refuge” promising an education, a swimming pool and tennis courts in the Dominican Republic.
From CNN:
Lely Laurentus thought he was doing the right thing when he handed his two young children over to an American woman who promised to take them to a better place.Laura Silsby, a member of Idaho-based New Life Children’s Refuge, had given him a flyer from her charity saying that it wanted to help “children who have lost their mother and father in the earthquake or have no one to love and care for them.”
She promised schooling, soccer fields and even a swimming pool. She told Laurentus that she had government permission to carry out her plan, he said.
……
“The children certainly were not fully willing to go, because in some cases, from what I heard, they were asking for their parents, they wanted to return to their parents,” Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN.
Haiti’s government requires documentation stating approval for children to exit the country. Silsby acknowledged she had none.
From the Telegraph:
It emerged on Monday that 21 of the 33 removed children by the Americans came from a small mountain village and had been willingly given up by parents and relatives, who had been told the children would be given good care, a proper education and even their own swimming pool….
…But according to staff at an Austrian-run orphanage where the children are now staying outside Port-au-Prince, some complained they had not wanted to leave Haiti and had believed they were going to boarding school or holiday camp.
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