January 29, 2010
UPDATE: The paperwork has been found.
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They were photographed. Their names were written in indelible ink on their arms. Their paperwork was submitted and re-submitted in an effort to get to the states. But more than two weeks after after the Haiti earthquake, a number of children who’ve already been adopted by American families remain at a Port-au-Prince orphanage.
The organization who runs the Maison des Enfants de Dieu says that’s because the US Embassy has lost the paperwork for 11 of the 29 children still waiting to be flown to the U.S. The orphanage says it all now has to be re-submitted.
However, this is not the only hurdle facing the little boys and girls living at the orphanage damaged in the January 12th quake. The Haitian Government has put a halt to the transfer of the hundreds of children who qualify for humanitarian parole under U.S. guidelines. Fortunately, their parents have been told that order should be lifted in a matter of days, not weeks.
Haiti already had 380,000 thousand orphans before the quake hit. Now, that number could top one million as so many parents were killed in the quake and more succumb to their injuries.