I, as have many I presume, have been following the story of the Baptist church group who decided to move a bunch of children to the DomRep for their own good.
I grew up Baptist and feel like I understand that community. I doubt there was any nefarious intent in this but my goodness what a bunch of silly people. According to news reports some of these children have existing families. I find it very difficult to believe that they just drove around PAP asking if anyone wanted to leave the country. Some Haitian person or group must have helped and to me that is the scary part of this. Did they buy the kids?
One of the very few out and out belly laughs I have had in this entire situation was when I read in a number of news reports that one of the lawyers representing the arrested individuals complained about the conditions under which the detainees were being held.
He complained, from the Dominican Republic, that the detainees were being held in terrible conditions without, amongst other things, air conditioning. Or electricity.
Here we have a bunch of well meaning fools who went to do something none of them knew how to do. The Haitian government rightly stopped them. Now the world media is concentrating on this sidebar story while people die of thirst starvation and untreated wounds. The belly laugh stops quickly when one thinks of the actual situation.
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thanks for posting this. i was wondering what your take on this was. Good intentions, road to hell and all that. What a waste of resources these folks have caused, not to mention the toll on the already traumatized children.
ReplyDeleteYou are right JD. This is crazy and I saw it repeated four times in the news crawler in one hour of watching the news. No news about unserved starving kids of course. A shame.
ReplyDeleteRick
RVD - Julia Bear post was Laura, not me, though I agree with her comment. Can't imagine what good could be brought to starving children if resources devoted to this sort of thing were re-directed. And the clock tick-tocks on the little bellys. Tragedy on tragedy.
ReplyDeleteI have been remiss on not commenting on previous posts. Will pontificate here and copy to the appropriate post. In situations where life is at risk and donors exist there will always be profit-takers. Figure 20% to 30% loss to greed-hounds. Fine. Let's get the 70% tp 80% to the people that need it right now. Right now is all that matters to them.
Sorry Laura I thought Julia Bear was a consolidated family ID. You both are correct.
ReplyDeleteRick