The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (7 page)

Benz, a wide-smiling man with a buzz cut and a self-deprecating style, was confident the plan would work. Bridges of Faith had long run a missionary summer camp for orphans in Ukraine (as well as an unwed mothers’ home in Kentucky). For two years he had been mulling over plans for a sort of “hosting program” for Ukrainian orphans with the goal of getting Alabama Christians to adopt them. It was part of the reason he and his wife, Larissa, a Ukrainian evangelical, had bought the BridgeStone camp, at a bargain price of $450,000, from the local Assemblies of God Church.

When Benz met Larissa he had been regional director for the International Bible Society, traveling widely and distributing Bibles in former Soviet bloc countries and other countries he can’t name—missionary code for Muslim nations where evangelizing is forbidden. When he was assigned to visit an orphanage in Eastern Ukraine, he had planned to stop in quickly then hit the beaches of the Black Sea. Instead, he said, “within twenty-four hours those kids had crawled inside my heart and changed my life.” Larissa became a translator for Benz, and in time they married and Benz adopted her twelve-year-old son. He came to believe that the Bible charged him to do something for other children, like in James 1:27, a popular verse of scripture that calls caring for widows and orphans “pure religion,” or Matthew 25:40, when Jesus talks about helping “the least of these.” “We don’t want just to be Christians who sit in the church,” Benz explained to me. “Our faith needs to have legs and hands—that we actually do something with our faith.”

In 1995 Benz started his own ministry, Bridges of Faith, that would take hundreds of US Christians on short-term mission trips to Ukraine.
There they planted churches and worked with children who were aging out of Ukrainian orphanages. His goal is to change the statistics he repeats to all comers: that the majority of children who graduate from institutional care in Ukraine end up in trouble: the boys in organized crime, drug dealing, or prison, and the girls in prostitution, both at risk for substance abuse and suicide. In any group he assembles Benz always pauses for dramatic effect before he asks people to envision 60 percent of the girls in front of them growing up to be prostitutes. “But every child that is adopted,” he tells them, “gets snatched out of those statistics.”

Other adoption officials working in Ukraine say this is misleading, that the 60 percent figure only applies to a subset of orphanage children, those who opt out of government-sponsored education or job-training programs. But regardless of how many face the worst outcomes, all orphanage graduates contend with real, if more pedestrian challenges when they transition to independent lives, coming, as they do, out of institutions where they have never cooked for themselves, done laundry, or seen a functioning family.

After the earthquake Benz assumed that his familiarity with Ukraine’s bleak narrative would translate neatly to the Haitian orphan crisis. When the quake hit Haiti—“Hay-dee,” in Benz’s Kentucky-bred drawl—he and Larissa felt God calling them to reassess their plans. They began to imagine the beds at BridgeStone filled with Haitian children instead of Ukrainians.

Providence aside, initiating the BridgeStone retreat with Haitian children made good PR sense. After Benz announced the need for extensive renovations to ready BridgeStone for Haitian orphans, he was overwhelmed with volunteer support and donations. Miles of new plumbing and electrical wire were laid for the center’s twenty-two aging and weather-beaten cabins, and three new permanent staff buildings began construction, including one for Benz and his family to move into and another for his father—almost all with donated materials and labor. Volunteers made extensive capital improvements to the camp that benefited the ministry’s ability to generate income from rent-paying church groups. Understanding the volunteers’ motivations was easy: hard work on the grounds of BridgeStone seemed like a concrete way to do something for Haiti at a time when much of the country watched the nearby disaster with a sense of impotent despair. Benz’s “army of volunteers” came from as far as the Carolinas and Iowa and as near as the local Auburn University football team.

While BridgeStone was being transformed, Benz continued to talk up his plan and sign up parents who wanted to adopt a Haitian child, an ad-hoc campaign that is far afield from how international adoptions are actually processed. “We’ve got more parents than we’ve got kids,” Benz told me, predicting that “Most of the kids who come [to Alabama] will be returning.” After a few weeks, though, Benz downgraded his estimates for the first group of Haitian kids coming from 150 to 50.

Benz was conscious of the tensions in Haiti over Western adoption efforts, but he gave them little thought. Because he had a friend who had connections at the State Department, Benz told me—and anyone else willing to listen—he was confident that he could wrangle the system by passing off his adoption scheme as a cultural exchange, “a foreign studies program, more or less.” When I reminded him of the mission to “incubate adoptions,” Benz laughed. “Well, that’s absolutely part of our agenda, but you know, that’s not the thing we’re going to emphasize to the Haitian government! We’ll emphasize the exchange part of it, the English studies.”

It was hard to understand how Benz thought this plan—misleading the Haitian government about his intentions while he spoke openly about them to US journalists—would work. If the similarities between his plan and the Silsby scandal occurred to him, as both promised to Haitian officials a temporary trip for the children while simultaneously offering adoption opportunities to US parents, he didn’t reveal it. He spoke of the Silsby affair as a mere “stumbling block” thrown in the road by people whose “hearts were in the right place, but their documents weren’t.”

In response to criticism that the crisis was being used to secure more adoptions for prospective US parents, thus serving their needs more than Haiti’s or the children’s, Benz repeated his standard disclaimer: “What I shared with people, in Haiti or Ukraine, is that I really don’t care what nationality the adoptive family is. . . . My goal is not to get kids adopted in the US; my goal is to help orphans find great families in Christian homes.” With a good-natured, conspiratorial chuckle, he delivered the punch line: “It just so happens that the place I work is the US, and the families I know are primarily in Alabama.”

As time wore on and passports for the Haitian children were not forthcoming, BridgeStone’s improvements continued with donated money and supplies: more housing for volunteers, overhauling existing buildings for staff, central heating and air in the cabins, four trailer homes donated by the local Air Force base that Benz gladly accepted along with a seventy-two-passenger bus that a church gave as a love offering.

Progress was slower back in Haiti. The estimated number of Haitian children coming to Alabama dropped again, this time from fifty to twenty-six. A Haitian pastor was helping to find and identify adoptable children to send, but communications were an ongoing problem and paperwork often got lost. The ETA for the children’s arrival never seemed to change from three to four weeks out, but Benz remained optimistic, hinting at connections who could speed things along. “We made friends in Haiti—and in Haiti, a lot of things are based on friendships. Having a friend in the right place can make all the difference in the world,” Benz told me with the confidence and excitement that had become so common among postquake rescue missionaries. He seemed to share the sense that the crisis could propel everyday people into action-hero roles and the shiver of giddy anticipation at the prospect of engaging a shady system, none of it quite real, as though making a deal or slipping a bribe would feel natural in the moment and unfold as though scripted. “I think if we make the right connections, we might walk in one day and walk out the next with their passports,” he said. I could imagine the wink as he continued, “We might have to bless some people to make it happen!”

In May Benz announced that his primary partner in Haiti had “decided to bail out of the process” on the eve of submitting the group’s paperwork to the State Department. In what seemed a familiar Plan B, Benz began calling other people they had met in Haiti, including For His Glory Adoption Outreach and their Port-au-Prince orphanage, Maison des Enfants de Dieu. By late May the number of children Benz told a local Alabama TV station he was expecting had dropped to ten. Then in September a fundraising missive pled for continued patience as the group sought to “bring children out of darkness and suffering into faith and life in Jesus Christ” despite all the hurdles that had been put in their path.

That was the last time Benz’s newsletter mentioned Haiti. Soon thereafter “Haiti” dropped out of the title of the OrphansNoMore Project, and Benz began speaking about bringing children from other countries for adoption. In October his newsletter announced BridgeStone’s pending open house to mark the launch of Benz’s Ukrainian adoption program. At some point over the fall Benz’s Haiti blog came down. Then in December 2010, almost a year after the earthquake, Benz welcomed his first group of Ukrainian orphans, whom he would come to call “the Christmas group,” and announced his hopes that each one would find God’s love and a forever home.

To a cynical eye the entire enterprise could appear as a massive bait and switch. Under the promise of forthcoming Haitian orphans, Benz had
managed to elicit substantial donations and volunteer labor that transformed his BridgeStone property from a crumbling antique to a functioning, elaborate Christian retreat camp. But I can’t imagine this is what Benz intended. I imagine him first bewildered that his Scooby-Doo plan to slip Haitian orphans across the border on benevolent but false premises didn’t work out, then becoming depressed and then motivated to salvage the project with a return to the original plan: bringing Ukrainian kids to the Deep South.

This type of progression, leaping from one country to the next, has become a common spectacle in the international adoption world, where advocates lobby hard for the needs of children from a specific country, only to move swiftly to another nation when the hurdles of adopting from the first are too large. It’s a cavalier approach that helps make the idea of “orphans” a hazy category for Americans—interchangeable across the world, defined most of all by their status as charity objects for prospective US parents. But to an advocate like Benz, that’s just another way of saying there are always more children in need.

ALTHOUGH BENZ
shifted the country he was working with, his approach remained largely the same. When the first group of children arrived for Christmas 2010—“ten gorgeous orphans,” “ten beautiful orphans,” Benz wrote to his supporters, seeming triumphant after so many disappointments in Haiti—he and his team took them on a whirlwind American adventure: to church, to eat lunch at the Montgomery mall food court, to buy sneakers, to an ice rink, to view a Christmas light display, and then to eat pizza. Prospective adoptive parents were invited to a meeting at the BridgeStone chapel with the Ukrainian adoption coordinator who had accompanied the group. At the end of their three-week visit Benz announced that all ten of the children were now in process to be adopted by Christian families who had visited them at BridgeStone. He told a local paper, “We want them to become Christians, yes, but we need them to find families.”

A year later, in December 2011, BridgeStone welcomed its fourth group of Ukrainian children to Alabama. I came down to see it, entering BridgeStone through country roads flanked by salvage yards, trailer parks, and ranging fields of cotton, where short, brown stems anchored a delicate trail of fluff in the wan winter sun. As I arrived at the camp, half a dozen pale kids, who looked like they were between eight to twelve years old, ran over to my car, opening both front doors and shaking my hands
enthusiastically, jabbering introductions in Ukrainian and Russian. In all likelihood the children knew their trip was a chance at adoption and were eager to make a strong first impression on any visitors who came. From my first minutes on the grounds of BridgeStone, it was clear to me that the thin line Benz had attempted to tread in Haiti was still the ministry’s guiding principle: obscuring its ultimate adoption mission behind the façade of a cultural exchange.

In the visitor’s office a volunteer named Chuck, a heavyset seventy-two-year-old from Virginia, gave me a form to fill out—name, age, and relationship with Jesus—and told me Rule Number One: “We don’t use the ‘a’ word—adoption.” “Since we are not an adoption agency, we do not exist in any way to arrange adoptions,” the form read, warning that visitors must comply with the laws of the United States, Alabama, and Ukraine as well as common sense. “If someone even uses the ‘a’ word with a child, we must ask you to leave BridgeStone.” It awkwardly continued with the notice that, despite this rule, the kids at BridgeStone were adoptable, and interested parents should talk to Benz or BridgeStone’s project coordinator, Eric Carr, to find out how they could proceed. It was the same winking assurance that Benz had given not only to me but also to all of the local media he had spoken with about his plan to surreptitiously promote adoption of Haitian children while telling both the US and Haitian governments that it was only an English-language study exchange.

After Rule Number One, Chuck said, with the warm weariness of having repeated the same thing many times before, Bridges of Faith suggests visitors love on the orphans until it hurts, and then love them some more. It was a love-bombing approach, reflecting Benz’s wish to give the children in a few weeks a gonzo dose of indulgent American childhood, a honeymoon adventure wherein a childlike Benz, acting as Santa Claus or maybe Willy Wonka, arranged elaborate outings and surprises for the kids. Former coach of the Auburn University football team Gene Chizik and former Mets pitcher Mark Fuller hosted one group of children at a nearby sports center to talk to them about God’s plan for their lives; another group was invited into the bullpen of the Atlanta Braves; others rode in top model cars, racing at 120 mph; and in August a drop-in visit from the state police helicopter surprised one child with a birthday, Sasha, as he was playing in a field, lowering two troopers by rope to deliver the boy a birthday cake. In his newsletter updates Benz seemed overcome with wonderment. “We have no idea what eternal and indelible impact this gift had on young Sasha, a young man who daily feels the rejection and humiliation known only to orphans.”