WASHINGTON — A
10-member Baptist team being detained in Haiti remained in custody as of
mid-afternoon Feb. 2.
There were no reports
whether the Baptist volunteers appeared before a Haitian judge Feb. 1 as had
been expected over accusations of unlawfully attempting to transport 33
children from the earthquake-ravaged country into neighboring Dominican
Republic.
The leader of the
volunteer team, Laura Silsby from Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian,
Idaho, was quoted in video reports posted on CNN and The New York Times
websites Feb. 1 as describing their Christian motives in traveling to Haiti to
aid orphans after the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Silsby told a CNN
reporter, “We believe that we have been charged very falsely with trafficking,
which of course that is the furthest possible extreme, because, I mean, our
hearts here — we literally all gave up, you know, everything we had, I mean,
income, used of our own funds to come here and help these children and by no
means are any part of that horrendous practice.”
The reporter said authorities
had permitted the team to be interviewed.
Of the 33 children the
team was seeking to aid, Silsby said, “They really didn’t have any paperwork.
This is, again, probably a misunderstanding on my part, but I did not really
understand that that would really need to be required.”
A Haitian officer accompanies Baptist detainee Laura Silsby as she speaks with a reporter in a video shown on KTVB in Boise, Idaho. |
Told by the CNN
reporter that at least 10 of the children had a mother or father and a
telephone number, Silsby said, “I can tell you our heart and our intent was to
help only those children that needed us most, that they had lost either both
mother and father, or had lost one of their parents and the other parent had
abandoned them.”
Regarding the team’s
encounter with a Haitian pastor who directed them to the children, Silsby said,
“We felt like it was a very God-appointed meeting.”
In the video posted at
The Times website, Silsby said, “The entire team deeply fell in love with these
children. They are very, very precious kids that have lost their homes and
their families and are so, so deeply in need of, most of all, God’s love and
His compassion and a very nurturing setting.”
A video with comments
by Silsby also was posted at the website of KTVB in Boise, Idaho, on Jan. 31.
“We have been told by a
number of people, officials, that it was OK for the pastor to sign that he was
entrusting them into our care,” Silsby said, “and the Dominican Republic had
already approved that we would be able to care for those children in the
Dominican Republic.”
In addition to Silsby,
four other members of Central Valley Baptist Church were being detained:
Charisa Coulter, Carla Thompson and Nicole and Corinna Lankford. The team also
included three members from Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho,
pastor Paul Thompson, his son Silas and church member Steve McMullen. Media in
Topeka, Kan., have reported that one of the detainees is Drew Culbert, a
firefighter who also is an assistant youth pastor at Bethel Baptist Church. The
10th detainee is Jim Allen, a businessman from Amarillo, Texas, according to
media reports there.
Coulter, in a video
posted by the Associated Press, was briefly interviewed while on a stretcher. A
diabetic, Coulter was described by the AP reporter as having suffered from
severe dehydration or the flu.
Coulter told the
reporter, “I’m really praying that we’ll be able to take these kids out and we’ll
be able to provide a safe and loving home for these kids who have nothing and
that all charges will be dropped and that they will see our hearts.”
Thompson was briefly
quoted in the CNN report as saying, “God is the one who called us to come here
and we just really believe this was His purpose.”
At Central Valley
Baptist Church’s website, the following announcement from Jan. 29 continued to
be displayed Feb. 2: “A ten member church team traveled to Haiti to help rescue
children from one or more orphanages that had been devastated in the earthquake
on January 12. The children were being taken to an orphanage in the Dominican
Republic where they could be cared for and have their medical and emotional
needs attended to. Our team was falsely arrested today and we are doing
everything we can from this end to clear up the misunderstanding that has
occurred in Port au Prince.”
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