Suffer the children.

[alexandraerin]

I've still got the follow up to my "Throat-Punching" post saved up, but I'm going to wait a few days for my blood pressure to go down before I try to tackle that subject again.

In the meanwhile, here's a nice, calm, relaxing topic instead:

According to the USDA, which apparently tracks such things in the United States, the typical cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is a hair short of $125k for the poorest bracket of households and just shy of $250k for the wealthiest. Keep those figure in mind.

The chart on that page actually breaks down the cost year by year, by age, so if you were looking at a hypothetical situation where somebody took on the responsibility of raising a child who had already been born, you could do the math appropriately.

These figures aren't any kind of absolute benchmark for the resources needed to merely keep a human being alive from one age to another, of course... they're based on the amount of money that is spent on children in the country that is sort of the poster child for the First World. It's based on our way of life and our standard of living.

This is how much money we spend on a child, on average. It doesn't include the cost of bringing that child into the world. It doesn't include the cost of post-secondary education.

If an American adopts a child from a country that's impoverished, that's the kind of money that is going to be spent making sure that child has "a good life": making sure they have nutritious food and clean water and education and possibly health care, clothing and shelter and toys to stimulate and educate and entertain and distract.

$7,000 to $14,000 dollars a year to take this one person out of a life of poverty... is that a bad price, to take someone out of those circumstances? It might not be, if our reaction to the sort of desperate circumstances that much of the world exists in is to take one specific human being and remove them from those circumstances.

But with that kind of money... well, the gross capita income in Haiti is $480. (It was, anyway, at the point that chart was made. I think the figure for 2010 might be lower.) Think about how little money it would take to change somebody's life if that's all that they have to get by on to begin with.

You could pick twenty-eight random people and double their income with $7,000 dollars. How many mouths would that feed? How many lives would that change?

You could give clean water to 500-1,000 more people a year, with the amount of money it costs to raise a child in America.

You could send Afghan children to school.

You could invest in infrastructure and education. You could support economic opportunities for disadvantaged women. If you had the money to take on a child from overseas, you could, in short, spend that money... you could even spend a fraction of that kind of money... to change the conditions that we find so horrifying to view from afar that it motivates us to swoop in and "rescue" children from their own families.

...

Now, I don't honestly think anybody reading this right now has an extra hundred grand per year and is thinking to themselves, "Gosh, I can't make up my mind... do I want to adopt a child from overseas or do I want to start a lifetime of philanthropy to try to change things from the ground up?" While it would be great if the above motivates a few donations, the other purpose is to lay the groundwork for what I'm going to say next.

Laura Silsby is, unless the news has been uncharacteristically skewed against a white American Christian lady, a human trafficker. Another word for that is "slave trader".

What's going on in Haiti right now is not that a group of well-meaning people, through their ignorance or lack of judgment or impulsiveness, have been accidentally ensnared by a law meant to curtail an activity that their plan sort of resembled. The law accomplished its purpose.

There's enough coming out in the news that there is room for some semi-informed speculation about Silsby's motives, but I'm not even going to get into that. I'm just talking about what she did.

Her plan involved claiming (both to authorities and her co-congregants, it seems) that she had documents giving her permission to take "100 Haitian children" out of Haiti and into the Dominican Republic, where she'd be able to put them up for adoption. Stop and think about that. 100 children. Not "the following children". Not "the individual children listed below". She was claiming to have permission to pick up 100 children and transport them across the border, where she would make money giving them to people.

She was claiming the right, in other words, to treat the children of Haiti... brown-colored children of a poor, non-Christian, non-American nation... as a commodity. An absolutely interchangeable commodity.

And... though she didn't really think this through... she obviously believed this claim was plausible. Anybody who was working with her who wasn't actually in on the scheme certainly found it perfectly believable. The authorities she dealt with on both sides of the Haitian/Dominican border were less persuaded.

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert on international adoption. Even knowing that there are abuses of the system and there is endemic exploitation and there is commercialization and commoditization of children going on within the legal channels, I doubt very much that any nation which actually tracks such things issues papers that say, in effect, "This document entitles the bearer, A Nice White Lady, to one hundred (100) children." Her imaginary document apparently had no reference to the legal status of these children and put no onus on her to coordinate what she was doing with any kind of authorities who might be tasked with looking after their welfare... again, not just on the Haitian side of the border.

Her whole scheme seemed to hinge on the idea that for any Dominican Republic officials who happened to notice a new orphanage suddenly appearing in a posh resort catering to wealthy white people from overseas, "oh, these are Haitian children" would be sufficient explanation for how they came to be in her (and this really is the right word) possession.

Commodities.

To anybody who thinks that under the circumstances she should be let off with a warning because of some sort of perceived "gray area" or the idea that maybe she really didn't understand the enormity of what she was doing, it turns out she was let off with a warning the first time she tried to steal a busload of kids. And she turned right around and picked up another batch of lil interchangeable commodities to try again.

Given our history in this country... our shameful and not at all distant (150 years is only two, three human lifetimes) history as the last "civilized" nation of western, European-descended folk who thought it was really cool to literally commoditize human beings of another race... we should be way more sensitive about this stuff than we are. We should be way more aware of this.

There should be nobody in the United States who misses the undertones of what was going on here, but of course there are.

Look, we all know there are people who are also trafficking in children for much worse purposes... there are children being trafficked who suffer far worse fates than being adopted by well-to-do foreigners. But that doesn't change what Silsby was doing. She can't claim ignorance of the law when at every turn, she was told by officials on both sides of the border that what she was doing was trafficking and chose to ignore it. Did she think the laws of Haiti wouldn't dare to descend upon her? Did she think that the risk wasn't big enough to outweigh the reward?

I don't know.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for her cohorts. I understand how they might have been sucked in... there are actually numerous scams going on in the United States at any given time that are based on taking advantage of the belief that one's congregation is full of people who are Right With God and who will never lie or deceive you. It's a dangerous belief, and one that's not particularly well-supported by the Bible (I don't recall what number of people the Bible says are righteous, but I think it's smaller than the number it takes to fill a church), and even that speaks to an arrogance, a sort of imperialism: we are the good people and everybody else is bad. Anything WE do is right. Anything they do is suspect.

And of course that leads right into any child is better off with one of US than with one of THEM... the kind of thinking that leads to stolen generations. So, yes, perhaps some of the people involved really wanted nothing more than to improve the lives of some children. They didn't approach that goal from a very pure place, though... and see also: what several thousand dollars a year can really do to improve the lives of children.

Also, whatever they believed about Silsby's plan and the legality of what they were doing, they were evidently lying to the parents, lying to the children... if your plan requires you to lie to children, Jesus may not approve of it as strongly as you think.

There have been other news stories done in the wake of this "scandal" crime with reporters talking to Haitian parents who explain how willing they are to give their children up to families overseas. I worry about this stirring up sympathy for people running schemes like Silsby's. The thing is, these parents are in an impossible situation where there are no good options available to them, and so some of them take the one that seems like the best for their children.

But the key is that this option is contingent on the idea that a foreigner with enough money to care for a child in the American fashion intervenes in their lives in the first place! I'm not going to sit here and condemn everybody who's ever taken part in a foreign adoption (though honestly there are people who will do that, and they have several good points), but I will point out again that this kind of money could be spent on the ground in countries like Haiti to help end the circumstances that will otherwise result in even more children being born and living in the conditions you might "rescue" one single child from.

I could keep going on this forever but I'd just end up repeating myself. Children aren't commodities, no matter how desperate the circumstances they're living in. Adopting a child doesn't "make a difference" in a statistically meaningful sense.

Please Note: The question of "Why should we...?" (spend the money to improve Haiti, get involved, feel any sense of guilt or responsibility) is a separate topic from the one I'm addressing here. It is, for the purposes of this post, The Conversation That Is Not Happening Here. The adoption scheme of Silsby hinged upon the idea that there are already people with money to spend on improving the lives of Haitian children.

---

Related reading:

Orphans???, a posting from Anthropology Now that partly inspired this.

Also worth reposting, since I know many people don't have money to spare:

The Hunger Site.
Free Rice

Comments

[meleth.livejournal.com]

And putting even a fraction of that money into, say, Haitian relief efforts could contribute to the child you would otherwise have adopted becoming, say, a doctor or a teacher or a business owner or somebody else who would be actually vital to Haiti's continued recovery and progress.

Also, I'm working on a post about the harm done to the communities of origin by international adoption, and the numbers you have here are dramatic. Mind if I link to this post?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Feel free!

[meleth.livejournal.com]

w00t! I'm hoping this will kick-start my writing mojo. I've been working on this post for days, but every draft seems to be flailing and failing. So hopefully I can use your post as a springboard to articulation.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

One thing I've found helpful... and I don't know if it will help you because your problems could certainly be different... is to try to keep on to a single main point or two, and a limited number of sub-points. On every post I've made in the past few days, there's a lot more to be said (and a lot of the posts started out as one big long post on what I felt were related topics). Restricting the subject matter helps keep the whole post coherent and also helps you reach something that feels like a stopping point.

[meleth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I scrapped a number of previous posts that dealt with way too much, because they were getting unmanageable.

[caret-mox.livejournal.com]

If her intent is to establish a legitimate orphanage of Haitian children in the Dominican Republic and she just cut corners on the legalities of international adoption and transportation to expedite the process, then I can understand the levity of her charge. She has good intentions, but didn't go through the right channels. She also didn't seem to care about the specific circumstances of the children she was transporting. Are they homeless orphans in need of care and an adoption service not available in Haiti, rendering a need to either establish one in Haiti, or transport the children to a nearby one in another country? Or are they just kids, sitting there, who don't live in America or some other wealthy country? The first premise is acceptable, the second is not.

This looks like an honest attempt to help Haitian children, not make money off of the selling of adoption papers for a foreign child to privileged white folks. But in her mind, Haiti = bad, elsewhere = good, so get children out of Haiti no matter what. You're right in that this way of thinking is damaging to these already impoverished countries. Almost half the children with her had parents. If the best "solution" for Haitian parents is to give up their children, then clearly the problem is larger than we first thought. Giving up your child should be the LAST option and when you only have your LAST option then you need help. Haiti needs help and that help is not to indiscriminately transport children out of the country.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

This looks like an honest attempt to help Haitian children, not make money off of the selling of adoption papers for a foreign child to privileged white folks.

How closely have you followed this? Serious question, not meant to be snarky.

[meleth.livejournal.com]

No, it looks like child trafficking.

[karnythia.livejournal.com]

You might want to read up on it before making the mistake of thinking this was an honest effort to do anything but steal children from a vulnerable population and sell them under the guise of saving them. They were told repeatedly by officials in the DR and in Haiti that their plan was a bad plan and would result in arrest. They then lied to the parents in order to get them to give up their children, didn't give the kids food or water, and tried to cross the border any way. The ringleader has a long history of fraudulent practices and is in fact facing multiple lawsuits here in the states over previous "nonprofits" that did not deliver or failed to pay employees. She's a con artist and this was her biggest scam to date.

[popelizbet.livejournal.com]

When you're making "honest attempts to help...children", that usually does not involve lying to them that they're going to summer camp instead of the orphanage, no?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

That, at a bare minimum, would seem to rule out the adjective "honest".

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of a news article I read recently that quoted a number of Haitians who wanted the US to take over their country. Not reform it, not rebuild it, they wanted to become a US territory. They insisted the US could afford to take over and make things better.

It got me wondering just how much it would cost to handle something like that- to effectively make Haiti a territory with an appointed governor, and put in enough cash to improve the livelihood of the population.

Doing a Google search for the cost of building roads, the first result was a pdf from Clark County, Michigan, that estimated a cost of $303,000 per mile on unsuitable terrain. And Wikipedia estimates the square miles of Haiti as 10,714. Let's assume that we pave one tenth of the country, and it costs as much per mile as in Michigan. That puts us at about $324 million for a system of roads.

This puts the cost for a 2-3 story hospital with 55000 square feet, a modern American style one, at $13 million. There's 113 communes in Haiti. One hospital per commune is 1.469 billion. Again, using costs based on US numbers.

I can't find anything for water or electricity in the US, but Iraq is roughly 10 times the size of Haiti, and the costs to rebuild their electrical grid is put at 12.2 billion. So let's go with 1.22 billion for that. We'll also use their numbers for water, sanitation, and solid waste- about $624 million. Education we'll go with $481 million, again, grabbing from Iraq. Telecommunications is about $184 million.

All together we're looking at a total of 4.3 billion dollars to build a quality system of roads, utilities, education, and health care for the entire country. That's roughly one half of the budget of the US Army Corps of Engineers, one of the cheapest federal agencies. It's 0.6% of the TARP funds, of which only about half have actually been allocated.

That also works out to roughly 608,000 children bought and paid for at $7,000 a head. As opposed to vastly improving the quality of life for a country of over nine million people.

[mafidufa.livejournal.com]

I think you are combining two separate points here. You are talking, at least as I understand it, about the costs of rebuilding, or new building in places where the particular facility had not been built before. This has nothing to do with Haiti ceding their sovereignty to the US, except that it may make the money more easily forthcoming.

I was going to add some other points here about 1st world privilege - to extend upon the prevalent theme in AE's blog of late - but I really don't have the knowledge of Haiti to make those points in this particular case.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's kind of where I am, in regards to the this comment... I've started to answer it and then stopped a bunch of times.

It is interesting to see how little (in relative terms) it would cost to do this sort of thing, and I have to wonder how much more effective this kind of "nation building" might work in a nation that isn't a war zone, but... I think it would be a mistake to put too much stock into what is a reaction from some people to an unimaginable disaster.

I think if we did annex Haiti... or try to remake it in our own image... then within a couple of years we would be dealing with "insurgents" there, as well as accusations from abroad that we took advantage of a crisis to exercise colonial impulses.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

I seem to have a habit of showing only part of what I'm thinking and then assuming the rest is all self-evident. My main idea was along AE's point that there's better ways we could invest money- ways that the Haitians are asking for. Rather than adopting/buying children at seven thousand dollars a head, people who want to make a real difference could instead invest it in a government program to rebuild the country from the ground up, and improve things for everyone there.

The quotes I referenced from the article were exactly along the lines you suggest: they wanted the US to take over because the Haitian government is more or less in absentia even when there's not some great calamity, and with the US in charge (in their minds) they'd see order and actual governance, with the latter largely in the form of meeting the people's needs. And, in their minds, the US could afford the costs associated with it.

Ultimately I was reminded of that plea for assistance and stewardship, and regardless of any questions about whether we should take over (which has a massive list of potential problems and issues on its own), I wondered whether we could do more or less what was being asked, and whether it would be more viable objectively than such ill-considered 'adoptions' that apparently some people think are a good idea.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

If you want to talk about that, it's worth remembering how close together the "stewardship" and "colonialism" keys are on these new ergonomic keyboards. It's really hard to aim for one and not hit the other.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Agreed- I'd prefer to avoid both if at all possible, personally, but at the same time I wonder if the various gangs and similar groups wouldn't cause any such rebuilding efforts to fail simply because a strong central government would erode their own authority and power. Which would mean that some sort of authority would have to be put into place in order to minimize or eliminate their influence.

While a strong native authority would be difficult to establish from the beginning, importing some sort of governance isn't going to bypass the issues of stewardship, particularly if this is happening as a solely US-backed effort. I don't have an answer to that one, as much as I'd like to.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

At the risk of still treating these children as commodities, what if the rich priviliged folks who think it's a good idea to swoop in and 'rescue' kids had to make mandatory contributions to the kid's country of origin? The way I see it, for some people it's always going to be much easier to adopt a specific child than to commit themselves to an abstract ideal of quality of life for lots of unknown people. Since they're already willing to pay fuckloads of money (I'm not sure how much adoption costs but I hear it's a fair bit) to make it happen, then if enough of that money could be funnelled back to those third world countries then pretty much everyone would benefit. Except that then orphans etc would still be being treated as cash cows. I dunno, there seems like there should be a way to make this work.

/ramble

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I think in the reading the preceded this, I read about some countries that do that, where prospective parents have to make contributions to the community. And certainly with so much interest in adoption, that can serve as a powerful incentive... but then we run into the crux of it, the children are being used as an incentive, as leverage by their country of origin. Ideally leverage to get them out of the situation where they need to use their children like this, but there's the danger for something like that to become even more exploitative.

I'm far from an expert on international adoption and all its effects. I wouldn't declare this a solution. It might be a better option in a situation that, again, has no great options.