Adopting Special Needs Children from Haiti

Part 1 of 3

Haitian special needs adoption is the topic of the day in the nation’s newspapers. In an article for Knight Ridder Newspapers, April Saul detailed the story of a Pennsylvania family who traveled to Haiti to adopt a 4-year-old boy who had been burned and abandoned, and a 3-year-old boy who is HIV-positive.

The U.S. is one of the few countries that allows families to adopt a foreign child with HIV, writes Saul. According to the boy’s mother, Heather Maeding, a Haitian official who didn’t believe that she and her husband would want to adopt an HIV-positive child delayed the adoption for months.

Adoption Glitches Common in Haiti

Delays in the adoption process are common in Haiti (no matter what the reason), due in large part to a governmental system that is in huge disarray. I have visited Haiti twice on short-term mission trips, and spent a significant portion of my first trip in various orphanages for special needs children. What I experienced in those orphanages was shocking, troubling, and heartbreaking.

In Haiti, where 75 percent of the population can barely afford to put a meal on the table, parents (who cannot afford birth control and who usually have many children despite their poverty) haunt the gates or orphanages, begging the orphanage directors to allow them to leave a child (or two, or three) there. At the orphanage, they know, at least their child will get fed and will have some modicum of health care.

At one orphanage I visited, Mother Teresa’s home for malnourished children, babies in row upon row of cribs held their spindly arms up and silently begged me to pick them up and cuddle with them. I gently picked up what I thought were infants (because of their tiny frames) but later learned they were 2- and 3-year-olds.

In the next post: More reflections on my trips to Haitian orphanages

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