Haiti adoptions: Keeping youths in the right hands

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti — 

Farrah Leolo, a 9-year-old with a charming smile, was dressed for an important journey.

Her hair was braided and she wore a crisp white blouse and pink slacks. In her pocket, she had cookies and passport-sized photos.

A few minutes after Farrah left the Horizon of Hope child-care center with French Embassy officials this week, her adoptive mother called the center’s owner, Kathelen Douyon, from Paris.

“She looked so beautiful,” Douyon told the mother. Then, choking back tears, she silently handed the phone to an aide and put her face in her hands. “She was one of my favorites,” Douyon said.

The earthquake that ravaged Haiti two weeks ago has the Haitian government and foreign embassies scrambling to speed up adoption paperwork in cases like Farrah’s, and joyous scenes of new parents in the United States and elsewhere greeting their Haitian children at airports suggest the system is working.

The earthquake’s aftermath, though, has created a dangerous situation for children in a country that, even before the disaster, had some of the world’s weakest adoption regulations. As foreigners with generous hearts offer to adopt children orphaned by the Jan. 12 quake, relief agencies fear an increase in human trafficking in a country with a barely functioning government, a porous border with the Dominican Republic and, more important, no way yet of knowing how many children lost their parents.

“This is the kind of situation that people take advantage of, and it’s very scary,” said Roshan Khadivi, a spokesman for UNICEF. “Our main job is to reunite these children with their parents or, if the parents are not alive, with their families.”

Foreign adoptions in Haiti have skyrocketed, doubling between 2002 and 2006 to 1,400 a year, according to UNICEF. Few of those children are orphans. Most have at least one parent who has left them at private child-care centers, which function as adoption agencies here, because the parent was unable to provide.

Now, hundreds of thousands of children have been affected by the quake, officials say, losing homes or relatives. Those for whom no parent or relative can be found have been taken to “safe spaces” set up by UNICEF and Save the Children. As of Tuesday, 275 of those children, whom UNICEF calls “unaccompanied,” are staying in those locations.

“There’s just no way of knowing how many children have been orphaned,” said Julie Bergeron, UNICEF’s director of child protection in Haiti.

“We just know that a lot of kids are affected. And we’re worried that the shortage of food will put pressure on parents to abandon their kids.”

Relief organizations, working with the Haitian government, are setting up a tracking system for children. But until there’s a list of the dead -- and that could be months away -- they won’t know which children have been orphaned and which have been separated from their parents or families.

Last week, in a move hailed by child protection officials, Haitian President Rene Preval ordered that all adoptions in Haiti had to be approved by his office. But relief agencies said Tuesday that they were hearing of cases in which other government ministers were approving adoptions, which suggests the process could be open to abuse.

UNICEF and the government have placed teams at the airport and at border crossings to check the papers of anyone leaving with children. They also have been visiting child-care centers and orphanages registered with the government to deliver food, water and tents.

The canvassing “gives us a chance to check how these people are doing business,” Bergeron said. But, she added, dozens of centers and orphanages are not registered with the government.

At Horizon of Hope, the 25 children range from 18 months to 8 years old -- Farrah, at 9, was the oldest and had been there five years. Each child has at least one parent and all are being processed for adoption, Douyon said.

Some of the parents, Douyon added, see a foreign adoption as a way to give their children opportunities they wouldn’t have in Haiti.

Her two-story building suffered only minor structural damage in the quake. Still, the staff and children, fearful of aftershocks, are sleeping under a large blue tent in the street.

Since the earthquake, several parents have asked the center to take their children, she said, but she’s turned them away because she wants to get out of the business.

“I’m not against adoption, but I’d like to help teach parents to take care of their kids,” said Douyon, a psychologist.

After Farrah’s departure this week, a Canadian consular officer came by to check on three other children whose adoption papers had been in the works for several months. The three -- ages 18 months, 3 and 4 -- were ushered in to see the embassy official, who took their photographs. They will be leaving once their paperwork is complete.

The days when Douyon says goodbye to one of her children, she said, are the hardest. And this had been one of those days.

scott.kraft@latimes.com