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Haiti’s orphans

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Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Tom DiFilipo, head of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, about the plight of thousands of children left orphaned by the earthquake in Haiti.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Tom DiFilipo heads the joint council on International Children Services, a U.S. advocacy group.  Now that sounds Tom, like a very dire situation at that makeshift hospital.  Why shouldn’t some of these children, who are thought to be orphans already, seek a new life in more developed countries?  I mean it seems like a valid humanitarian gesture but is it a good idea right now?

TOM DIFILIPO:  Well it’s certainly understandable why anyone would want to go into Haiti and bring children into Western countries for permanent care and certainly, I mean just listening to that physician and hearing reports from our own staff, what they’re going through, any child that’s in a medical emergency certainly needs to be treated either in Haiti, or if not, flown into a hospital in the States or in another country where they can get the medical treatment.  But in terms of your special question, it’s certainly understandable that any citizen, any family would want to go to Haiti and adopt an orphan or bring them into their home but we need to make sure that a child in Haiti does not have any living relatives, living parent before we remove them from their country.  We see situations where during an earthquake, a child may be in school and the parent at work.  Or the child may be in a relative’s home and the mother or father working on the other side of the island.  The earthquake hits, you see the child alone for days, for weeks and the assumption the child’s an orphan.  They would be put on a plane and flown to another country, only to find out that the parent was in the hospital or could otherwise, or was otherwise retained and couldn’t travel because the roads are impassable.  So in this kind of situation, we would be separating a child from their living parent or their living grandparents or aunt or uncle where they could remain in their family of birth.  So we certainly don’t want to be doing that.

WERMAN:  Right.

DIFILIPO:  It would be the last thing we would want to do.

WERMAN:  Let me ask you this Tom.  We’ve been watching images today of dozens of very young Haitian orphans landing in Pittsburgh and these were children, as we understand it, who were already in the process of being adopted from Haiti before the earthquake.  Are these types of images though causing some confusion among the public about the possibility of adoption from Haiti right now?

DIFILIPO:  I believe it might be causing confusion.  I think the general public doesn’t understand the adoption process. In Haiti, it takes 3 years to complete an international adoption.  Many, many safeguards are put into place.  Adoptive parents need to get three different agencies of the U.S. government to approve them.  They need to be approved by the Haitian government.  The child’s background needs to be checked, as I said, early in the process to make sure that they are legally free for international adoption so it’s not as easy as it may appear, where you just go in, take a child who’s obviously an orphan, put them on a plane and bring them to the United States.  We have learned, as a community, a lot of lessons. The airlift, the boat lift out of Vietnam back in the seventies, the tsunami that hit during this decade …

WERMAN:  What lessons …?

DIFILIPO:  Other airlifts that have taken place out of Cuba for instance.  We’ve learned quite a number of lessons over the years.

WERMAN:  And what have you learned specifically that you think will be applicable to Haiti?

DIFILIPO:  Well specifically what you want to do is make every effort to go back to the village or the community that that child was from, talk to the neighbors, create databases with the child’s name, if it’s at all possible, to determine in.  Create databases of family members who are missing children or missing nephews, nieces, grandchildren.  You create them, you match them up, you walk around literally, into the neighborhoods with the pictures of the children and see if anyone recognizes them.  We don’t want that to take ten years because the child could suffer more harm in an orphanage over an extended period of time.  It’s a no-win situation, you know?  There could be damage done if you separate a family or if you leave a kid in an orphanage for too long, there’s damage done that way, too.

WERMAN:  Tom, from all the people that you’re associated with on the ground in Haiti, what are you hearing from them about the flow of aid so far?

DIFILIPO:  It’s never enough and it’s never fast enough, no matter how fast or how much we’re sending.  We have orphanages running out of water and young people can dehydrate very, very quickly.  We’ve already had a few deaths over the weekend for the population of children that we’re assisting.  When we do get supplies in there, gangs come in and loot the water, the food, the medical supplies because the orphanage staff is skeleton, maybe two people caring for 80 or 90 children so it’s really a dire, dire situation.  We need everything from security to basic necessities.

WERMAN:  Is it a situation that you think is par for the course in a country like Haiti that’s just gone through a magnitude seven earthquake or is it especially worse than similar situations?

DIFILIPO:  I think it’s especially worse.  The government was not very functional, as we all know for decades.  There were not a lot of services for the general population and certainly not for children and because of the poverty rate and the lack of infrastructure; you had a horrible situation to begin with for orphaned children or children in general.  Now that what was there is gone, it’s even more so.  I’ve never really seen reports coming out of any country the way we are with Haiti and the devastation is just, it’s unimaginable.

WERMAN:  Clearly this earthquake is going to leave in its wake unspeakable numbers of orphans.  What is your organization, the Joint Council on International Children Services, actually advising people to do who want to help these Haitian kids without parents?

DIFILIPO:  Well the first thing that we need to do is get them emergency aid, get them safe.  As you just heard on the earlier piece, if we need to, fly them out to get the medical treatment.  So that’s the one thing they can do is continue to donate.  Another thing they can do is if they are interesting in adopting, to call an adoption service provider.  Talk to them, get on a list so that when adoption does start up again, in Haiti and we don’t know when that will be, way too early to tell, but when it does start up, that they will then be able to proceed and adopt an orphan in a legal fashion, that will be in the best interest of that child.

WERMAN:  Tom DiFilipo heads the Joint Council on International Children Services, a U.S. advocacy group.  Thanks for speaking to us about this dire situation.

DIFILIPO:  Thanks for bringing the needs of the kids to your audience.

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