By Catholic News Service

At first glance, the plight of orphaned children in Haiti seems so easy to resolve.

People around the world look on, feeling helpless about Haiti’s struggles after the Jan. 12 earthquake left a third of the population homeless and killed perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.

Why not adopt the orphans?

The chance to adopt Haitian orphans may be available someday, but it’s not imminent. And the international agency tasked with reuniting children with their families and evaluating orphans’ needs is urging a halt to new adoptions until other possibilities are exhausted.

On Jan. 29, 10 U.S. Baptists were arrested near the country’s border with the Dominican Republic, accused of attempting to take 33 children across the border without proper documents. Haitian officials were concerned that some of the children may have parents.

Meanwhile, organizations with experience in resettling people after traumatic events began gearing up immediately after the earthquake for an expected influx of Haitians, whether orphaned children, adults or whole families.

A day after the quake, the Archdiocese of Miami offered to house Haitian children orphaned by the disaster and set up temporary custody arrangements with relatives they might have in the United States.

Thanks to international coordination, however, most of the children orphaned by Haiti’s magnitude 7 earthquake eventually will be put in the care of relatives in their home country, according to one expert. At least that will be the case if the experiences of recent natural disasters in Indonesia and Pakistan hold true.

There are carefully established international guidelines for exactly a situation such as Haiti’s, said Deana Myers, vice president of international programs for Save the Children, the international aid organization the United Nations has asked to coordinate efforts to reunite Haitian children and their families.

Those guidelines helped ensure that the majority of children orphaned by the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and the 2005 magnitude 7.6 earthquake in Pakistan were settled with relatives in their own countries.

Myers said many of those countries’ orphans were reunited with extended family. And in the case of tsunami victims, the aid that flowed into Indonesia meant many children are now far better off than they were before the giant wave that wiped out entire towns. "There’s better education, better health services," Myers said.

On Jan. 21, Save the Children released a statement explaining why there is no immediate large-scale effort to remove children from Haiti. It is almost always in the best interests of a child to remain with relatives and extended family when possible, and the current situation means the chances that a child may be mistakenly identified as an orphan are very high, the statement read.

Adoptions of Haitian orphans that were in progress before the earthquake should proceed, but with extreme caution and time taken to verify the situation of children before any mass movement to other countries, the statement continued.

Myers said there is a great risk of children having their rights ignored or being exploited by human traffickers and the child-sex trade. She added that keeping children in familiar surroundings, around food, language, customs and people they know goes a long way toward helping them come through such a traumatic experience in good physical and emotional shape.

Planeloads of orphans whose adoptions were in the works before the earthquake have already arrived in the U.S., eased by orders from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that cut through the red tape for those children to be admitted.

Matt Chandler, a homeland security department spokesman, said the agency remains "focused on family reunification and must be vigilant not to separate children from relatives in Haiti who are still alive but displaced, or to unknowingly assist criminals who traffic in children in such desperate times."

At the same time, officials at the Archdiocese of Miami say they are planning and anticipating the arrival of children, though details are still unknown.

(c) 2010 The Texas Catholic