An orphanage where the director was accused by US missionaries of not feeding children and selling donated goods was closed on Friday in a rare crackdown by Haitian authorities.
Police officers and child welfare officials sealed off the unpaved street in front of the Son of God orphanage and 46 children who lived there were loaded into a UNICEF bus and taken to new homes. Police also took the daughter of the orphanage’s founder in for questioning.
Diem Pierre, general coordinator of the Institute of Welfare and Research, said the government closed the orphanage permanently because inspectors found children living in unsanitary conditions. He said the inspection was prompted by complaints from US missionaries.
“We found kids with health problems,” Pierre said. “They looked as though they hadn’t eaten. They looked malnourished.”
Such enforcement actions are rare in Haiti. Officials complain that child welfare workers lack the resources and training to investigate the several hundred orphanages and group homes in a country in which many parents are forced to abandon their children because of poverty or as they seek work abroad.
Haiti has an estimated 50,000 children in orphanages, though many have at least one parent still alive. Tens of thousands of Haitian children are also forced to work as domestic servants or prostitutes, particularly over the border in the Dominican Republic.
The government shut down a group home in the Port-au-Prince area in May only after US federal prosecutors indicted the director, Matthew Andrew Carter of Brighton, Michigan, on charges of child sexual abuse. He was extradited to Miami, Florida, to face charges.
Pierre said only one other orphanage had been closed by the Haitian government in recent years.
The Son of God orphanage is a three-story building in Carrefour, a densely packed and dusty city along the edge of the sea to the west of downtown Port-au-Prince. The director, Maccene Hypolitte, was arrested in July on suspicion of involvement in child trafficking based on allegations presented by US missionaries. Under the Haitian legal system he has been jailed pending a judicial investigation and has not been charged.
The report compiled by a coalition of five US Christian missions and the aid group Catholic Relief Services alleges that Hypolitte had offered to let a missionary take a child away to receive medical care in exchange for a payment of US$1,250, a figure that was later raised to US$2,000. The missionary, working with Haitian authorities, returned later with part of the payment and Hypolitte was arrested.
His wife, Marie Andree Hypolitte, has been running the orphanage with the couple’s 30-year-old daughter and she denied any wrongdoing. She said the US missionaries have accused them of trafficking and abuse because they want to take over the business.
The wife said that the poor conditions of the orphanage, including dirty mattresses on the floor, holes in the concrete walls and the smell of urine, were proof that the family was not involved in any criminal activity.
“If I were selling kids, would this institution look like this?” she said.
As she spoke, half a dozen toddlers with sunken eyes and patchy hair, signs of apparent malnutrition, wandered around the home.
The US missionaries who raised the original complaints welcomed the closure.
Seth Barnes, executive director of one of the groups, Adventures in Missions, based in Gainesville, Georgia, said he and workers at six other organizations learned of the problems after visiting Son of God last year to check on donations of clothes and other goods and to see if the children needed any help.
Barnes said they found that donated clothes had gone missing and donated food disappeared from storerooms even as the children appeared to be going hungry. He said some kids simply vanished without any records or adequate explanation from staff at the orphanage.
Barnes described conditions as “horrific” and said they began complaining to local authorities.
“We knew as of a year ago that there was a serious problem,” he said.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
RSS