Laura Silsby - Last Baptist

Laura Silsby who dropped everything in the middle of a personal financial meltdown to do God’s work and pick up and save “33” Haitian orphans is still in jail.

All Haiti 'orphan' children reunited with parents

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The 33 Haitian children at the center of a US abduction row have finally been reunited with their families, but the fact that not one of them turned out to be an orphan raised fresh concern.

SOS Children's Villages, the international aid group caring for the children since the drama erupted seven weeks ago, said Wednesday it was only right for them to be handed back to their families.

"It has turned out that all of the 33 children have parents. SOS Children's Villages is convinced that in most cases, the best place for a child to be cared for and protected is within the family," the group said in a statement…

The national director of SOS Children's Villages, Celigny Darius, suggested the high-profile case, which diverted valuable media spotlight off the massive relief effort in Haiti, had raised serious questions…

SOS Children's Villages, which has looked after the 33 since January 30, is now free to focus solely on almost 500 other children in its care, many of whom were simply handed to aid workers at the gates of the compound.

Ms. Silsby is the last of ten Baptist Missionaries in Haitian custody who arrived on a wing and a prayer to do missionary work on the natives whether they needed it or not - whether the children abducted were orphans or not.

Last Baptist held in Haiti faces new charge

Laura Silsby, a businesswoman from Boise, Idaho, and leader of the mission volunteers drawn from members of four Southern Baptist churches in Idaho, Kansas and Texas, faces a new charge of "organization of irregular trips" under a 1980 law restricting travel out of Haiti…

She already could stand trial on charges of kidnapping and criminal association in the Jan. 29 attempt to take 33 Haitian children to a temporary orphanage in the Dominican Republic without proper paperwork. According to the Associated Press, Judge Bernard Saint-Vil said he has until early May to decide whether to release Silsby or to order a trial.

This is on a more secular level where people think that “God’s law”, made up or real, trumps the laws of men and nations.

The same idea on another level is at work with the Vatican and its institutions that are currently in hot water over child abuse.

It would seem that in Christianity, that crimes against children are discounted when you put God into the equation of Charity. And at the same time, you take children and or the laws of nations and people out of the same social equation.

Christianity in theory and in practice sometimes does not appear to be uniform or the same across the board. Or at least that is how an outsider might look at it?

Child Trafficking for Christ? Alleluia?

The new global equation as it now stands is not so crude to state that people, collectively or individually, are commodities to be bought and sold for profit. But in truth we are all grist for somebody else’s mill these days. Capitalism and its workings are the secret, sacred words of GOD that only a few rich people truly understand (natural law).

Case in point, Laura Silsby, a good Baptist Christian businesswoman with a long trail of stiffing employees out of their wages, civil lawsuits with customers on her online shopping service and even lawsuits with her own lawyers for non-payment of legal bills. They recently foreclosed on her home and official address of her charity for the poor children of Haiti. On her Facebook Page, she is a fan of “Politicians”: Sarah Palin – “Products”: Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.

Last year she gets a vision of starting an orphanage in the Dominican Republic for the children of Haiti before the recent earthquake. She gets this vision not from her God but from her children’s nanny who is from Haiti. Cash flow was a problem in getting the orphanage off the ground. But the competition for bodies, I mean children, went ballistic with the likes of Bill Clinton and W started getting in on the Haiti charity thing etc. Onward and upward for “God’s holy work”.

You get some of your fellow Christians in the local Baptist church in Idaho all stirred up, who volunteer, and you start picking up small bodies in the devastated streets of Haiti. If you are the anointed of God like so many losers lately like, Governor Sanford, Senator Ensign, Sen.“Ricky Ricardo” Coburn and Sen.“Waterloo” DeMint, the laws of mankind and or Haiti do not matter. “We’re on a mission for God” as Joe Belushi said in his great movie “The Blues Brothers”.

Laura calls around, no confidentially is adhered to, gets hold of a couple in Kentucky already in the process of adopting some Haitian kids from a legitimate orphanage there when the Earthquake hit, and they tell her to bugger off – but oh no, she puts that particular orphanage on your hit list. You pose as the friend of a woman you have never met when you get to that orphanage to pick up their kids to save or ransom or whatnot.

The kids are already evacuated and then you ask the orphanage if they have any extras. Then you get parents to accept your spiel about a better life in the white world and they hand over their kids to the rich white lady and off you go - ten very odd “missionaries” and thirty three kids in a school bus - off to the border only to be arrested and rightfully so for “child trafficking”.

The rest of this grisly tale of faith, greed and insanity are illustrated in an excellent article from the Guardian by Ed Pilkington in New York and Inigo Gilmore in Callabasse.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name

What was it about the 10 Baptists that gave them the hubris to believe they would provide better care for Haitian children than those children's parents? The acknowledged leader of the group was Laura Silsby, 40, who since the arrest has maintained the line that "we simply wanted to help these children. We did not understand [Haitian] rules."

Richard and Malinda Pickett, to offer them help in extracting three children they were already in the process of adopting. She phoned three times, and on each occasion was told by the Picketts that on no condition should she try to move the children. Remarkably, she didn't stop then. Once in Haiti, Silsby turned up at the orphanage where the children were and asked to collect them. Richard Pickett told Associated Press that she had claimed to be his wife's friend. The three children had by then already been moved, so Silsby asked the orphanage managers if they had any other children she could have.

So what exactly were the Baptists up to? Were they guilty, as charged, of entering a disaster zone, when people, particularly children, are at their most vulnerable, only to exploit them? Or were they, as they have insisted, simply out to help Haiti's traumatised orphans?...

The first puzzling fact is that of the 20 children who boarded the bus at Callabasse that day, many were not orphans. They had loving, albeit desperately poor and struggling, parents. Maggie Moise, standing outside her home, described the moment she handed over her nine-year-old twin sons, Volmy and Kimley. She had been approached by Adrien, who told her some white people wanted to help her family.

"They said they wanted to go with our children. They put the names of the children on a piece of paper and asked me to sign it. A white woman told me, 'Don't worry, you will be able to access your children.' They showed me a ¬brochure of where the children would be going to live. I signed the paper."

Whether you are a giant hedge fund ponzi scheme or a lunatic entrepreneur, running around, kidnapping children for the purpose of trafficking them for charity cash flow or profit for the glory of yourself and of course for the God thing, you are still exploiting them. There are laws. There are nations. There are limits to what individuals and groups and governments can do to help the people of Haiti during this period of recovery after a disastrous earthquake.

Crazies, stay home!