The tragedy of the January 12th earthquake in Haiti is still producing heart wrenching stories that challenge our very abilities to comprehend the most elemental components of human behaviour. The most recent story to raise the hackles of those who vigilant enough to care is that of a group ten Southern Baptists from Idaho who have been detained in Haiti after attempting to take 33 children into the Dominican Republic as ‘orphans’. The only problem was that the Americans not only didn’t have papers for any of the children, some of the children were not orphans; some being old enough to explicitly state for themselves that they were not in fact orphans, something that some might call a minor issue and which others might call the ‘illegal trafficking of children’.Read the entire story here.
The thing that frightens me the most about this story is the casual disregard that these individuals have shown for the law of a land in turmoil. Rather than trying to work within the system – to use their talents and abilities to help rebuild the demolished Haitian system – they instead chose to circumvent it, believing that the easy route was the best route, without questioning the legality or the morality of their choice. They certainly weren’t concerned about the fact that some of the children that they assumed needed to be ‘rescued’ were, in essence, being kidnapped. If this is the state of contemporary Christian missionary work, God help those who are being ministered to; do they now have to be concerned about where their children are while the missionaries take them to school?
