They are children without homes, without families. And now, in many cases, they are almost without food. They are the tens of thousands of orphans of Haiti, caught in the center of a life-or-death struggle.
Only the children who started the adoption process before Jan. 12 can qualify to leave the country. The rest will stay behind.
For 200 babies, toddlers and older children, many with families in Utah hoping to adopt them, time, safety and shelter are of the essence. The children from two orphanages are gathered on the grounds of a meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
For now, they are sleeping on the ground. What little they had at their orphanages is destroyed. Two children have been missing since the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Hurricane resident Teresa Adams, who adopted a daughter from the Foyer de Sion adoption center in Petion-ville before the disaster, has been frantically trying to get supplies to the starving children at the meetinghouse.
Wednesday, with the help of Utah Haiti Relief, they were lucky. Supplies were flown in from Florida, unloaded onto trucks and taken to a helicopter-staging base in the Dominican Republic, then flown in several trips to the Port-au-Prince airport. It took all day, but finally, the food arrived at the church.
"Each step has required unusual, amazing things to work out, and they have," said Melissa Goodwin, whose husband is involved with the relief effort.
But Adams is worried about the future.
"If they let civilians back in, I'm collecting donations and baby formula and milk and I have a stockpile going that we just always have, and when we can get in we hand-carry it in," Adams said. "But I don't know what they're going to do as far as living, because now they're living in tents, tents that (Utah Haiti Relief) took to them."
Even before the quake, food at the Hope for Little Angels of Haiti orphanage in Port-au-Prince was scarce. There was no furniture, no toys. Adams used to visit every three or four months and bring bags of rice. But often, the food was gone "well before we got there," Adams said.
"The children were all sick and malnourished," Adams said. "After we started taking in the rice, their health improved drastically. We took vitamins and the things that made a huge difference in their health. Now their orphanage is destroyed."
The ordeal might be nearly over for 107 other orphans at another Port-au-Prince orphanage known as Maison des Enfants de Dieu. They've been camping in an exposed, crumbling courtyard as food, formula and water dwindle. Efforts to bring them to Utah for asylum seem over, but only because they now appear headed to Florida, closer to the parents who long have been working to adopt them.
Applications for "humanitarian parole" for these children were being processed Thursday by the State Department in Washington, D.C.
That hard-won good news is bittersweet, said Greg Constantino, a Utah attorney who is helping them, because another 27 of the orphans from Maison des Enfants are not matched to Americans. A handful are matched with parents in other countries and will follow their rules. About 20 are not yet pledged at all. They are in a sense trapped and are also among the most vulnerable.
Constantino is secretary-treasurer of For His Glory Outreach, a nonprofit group that raises money for Maison des Enfants. His wife, Utah neurologist Dr. Tawnya Constantino, is the orphanage's volunteer medical director and has been in Haiti trying to arrange things for days.
The orphanage now has something it lacked: written instructions from the U.S. lieutenant-colonel who will oversee the transport of the children by military jet to Florida, where they'll meet up with their adoptive parents.
Utah had offered to serve as an interim stop for the children, all of whom are headed to new homes in other states. Constantino believes parents will bring their needed paperwork to Florida and meet their soon-to-be-adopted children there. Most will "do what it takes to get there."
While the news for the children headed to Florida from Maison des Enfants sounded good — it has yo-yoed all week — Constantino is somber as he talks about those who will be left behind.
One boy was found face down in the mud in a nearby ravine in November. They don't know how old he is. They called him Wilson, the name of the mayor, in hopes it would win some official favor. They were nursing him back to health, so he had not yet been matched with a potential family. A girl, Valencia, was ill and had just started to gain weight before the earthquake, so she had not been placed, either. Those left behind are among the most fragile.
"I could get them matched today," said Kim Harmon, president of For His Glory Outreach, with some frustration in her voice. "It's not because we don't have families that could take them that are qualified to adopt and have been vetted in the adoption process — but they haven't been matched prior to Jan. 12."
Meanwhile, a nearby orphanage that lost its staff asked Dr. Constantino if Maison des Enfants could take 70 more orphans who had run out of food and supplies and had only one care provider. Many of the orphanages will have to rebuild to do their work in a country that already needed them desperately before the disaster, said Constantino.
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