Haiti mother tells of giving twin sons to US missionaries
Arrested Americans said they were taking 'abandoned' children to orphanage
Inigo Gilmore in Calebasse, Haiti
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 February 2010 21.30 GMT
A mother in a remote village outside Haiti's main earthquake zone has told how she allowed her twin sons to be taken by American missionaries now under investigation for child trafficking, because they promised to provide a life of hope and opportunity for her children.
Maggie Moise, who has eight children, said she was contacted by a local man who works in an orphanage in her village and was told that "some white people" wanted to help her family.
Ten Americans affiliated with two Baptist churches in Idaho were arrested on Friday while trying to take the busload of children out of the country without documents or permission.
The group, who are being held at the headquarters of Haiti's judicial police, have not yet been charged, but Haiti's prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, has described them as "kidnappers" who "knew what they were doing was wrong".
Yesterday, Moise, who lives in the village of Calebasse, an hour and a half's drive from the centre of Port-au-Prince, described how she agreed to let her nine-year-old-twin sons, Volmy and Kimley, leave with the Americans for the Dominican Republic.
"They said they wanted to go with our children and told us 'don't worry, everything will be fine'," she said. "They put the names of the children on a paper and asked me to sign the paper to accept. The white woman told me: 'Don't worry, you will be able to access your children.' They showed me a brochure of the place where the children would be going to live. They told us they were going to help my boys. I gave them my boys because there is nothing for them here."
She identified the woman as Corinna Lankford, one of the Baptists currently being detained in jail, and said a local man named Isaac had acted as a go-between. Neither Isaac nor the orphanage's director, Phillippe Murphy, a Haitian American, were present there today and workers said they knew nothing about the missionaries' activities.
As many as 20 of the children who were with the 10 Americans when they were arrested are thought to come from Calebasse, which is in the Fort Jacques mountains south-east of Port-au-Prince.
The Baptists said they had planned to take abandoned children orphaned in the earthquake and raise them at a new orphanage in the Dominican Republic. But according to locals, none of the children taken from Calebasse were orphans nor even particularly desperate. Few houses in the village have suffered any damage in the quake.
Meanwhile, as medical teams in Haiti today pressed ahead with a major campaign to vaccinate thousands of children, a Swiss court said that at least $4.6m in Swiss bank accounts which had previously been awarded to charities must be returned to the family of Haiti's former dictator, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.
The decision was reached hours before the quake, on 12 January, but only published today, prompting the Swiss government to issue an emergency decree to keep the money frozen in a Swiss bank until a new law can be passed allowing it to be donated to aid groups in Haiti.