The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption Read Online Free Page B

at the time of her arrest was on the wrong end of at least fourteen claims for unpaid wages. Silsby had been brought up as the daughter of a missionary minister in the Wesleyan Holiness Church, which prohibits dancing, television, and alcohol and expects women to wear long dresses and not cut their hair. She was a sharp student who graduated high school at fifteen and then earned a business administration degree from Washington State University.
    By late 2009, however, Silsby was a divorced mother of three, entangled in a custody battle with her ex-husband and facing the fallout of herfailed business. With her financial and personal life in collapse, she took several trips to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and started making plans to build an orphanage in the DR for Haitian children. She founded the New Life Children’s Refuge in November 2009, and then, just one month before the earthquake, Silsby and her children abruptly moved out of their house in Meridian, Idaho, to a rental home as the bank prepared to foreclose.
    Silsby belonged to Meridian’s 890-member Central Valley Baptist Church, a congregation in the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination wherein many churches in recent decades have promoted short-term mission trips among their flocks. Christians from these churches have traveled overseas in unprecedented numbers, paying thousands of dollars on “voluntourism” vacations to developing nations. * There they constructed buildings or wells or spent time at orphanages, playing with children and bringing back a taste for Ethiopian coffee at their church’s postservice fellowship hour. Voluntourism frequently amounts to a deprofessionalization of missionary work, a shift from career missionaries who learn the language, culture, and laws of the country to amateurs combining sightseeing and charity. The same sort of volunteer-centered agenda that is often present in short-term missions seems to have been a central component of the Silsby affair.
    Shortly after the earthquake Paul Thompson, an acquaintance of Silsby’s and the pastor of a neighboring Southern Baptist church, Eastside Baptist in Twin Falls, Idaho, sent an urgent e-mail to friends asking for fellow missionaries to join him and Silsby on a two- or three-week trip to Haiti. A group of ten missionaries assembled, mostly from the twochurches, and they collected emergency donations in plastic tubs to carry with them to the Dominican Republic.
    Silsby approached the earthquake with an entrepreneur’s optimism. She already had plans to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, so to her the earthquake seemed a sign to begin work early. “God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now vs. waiting until the permanent facility is built,” declared a planning document for New Life Children’s Refuge that was posted on the Eastside Baptist website. On her arrival in the Dominican Republic on January 22, Silsby leased a forty-five-room hotel from the Dominican Catholic diocese—presumably paid for with donation money—and launched New Life’s first project, the “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission.” The itinerary for the mission outlined a straightforward plan: “Drive bus from Santo Domingo into Port au Prince, Haiti and gather 100 orphans from the streets and collapsed orphanages, then return to the DR.” The planning document explained that ultimately the venture would “provide opportunities for adoption through partnership with New Life Adoption Foundation,” another as-yet-undeveloped arm of the operation that would work with US adoption agencies and provide grants “for loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford to adopt.”
    Though Silsby later claimed that she had never intended to put the children up for adoption, her plans for the orphanage included a beachfront cafe and seaside “villas for adopting parents to stay [in] while fulfilling requirement for [a] 60–90 day visit as well as [for] Christian