http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11012/1117264-455.stm

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Davidson Ketchum, aka “Rocky,” finally went home last week.

And how was he feeling?

Alison McMutrie, left, and her sister, Jamie McMutrie Heckman, speaking at a news conference at Children's Hospital of UPMC in Lawrenceville last January (John Heller/Post-Gazette).

“Better,” announced the energetic 6-year-old Haitian orphan who, along with his 9-year-old brother Edens, left Holy Family Institute in Emsworth last Wednesday after nearly a year’s stay to become a member of Steve and Mardi Ketchum’s family in Aspen, Colo.

A better life may indeed be ahead for Rocky, his brother and the 1,100 other children who, in the four months after Haiti’s brutal earthquake one year ago today, were brought to the United States under a temporary humanitarian parole program to be placed with adoptive families.

The boys were part of the airlift of 54 orphans Jan. 18, led by Gov. Ed Rendell and U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire, D-McCandless, after appeals by two Ben Avon sisters, Jamie and Ali McMutrie.

The sisters were caregivers at the BRESMA orphanage near Port-au-Prince, which was partially destroyed in the quake, leaving them and the children in their care with dwindling supplies of food and water.

The sisters’ plight and the governor’s subsequent airlift attracted media coverage worldwide — one small piece of hopeful news amid the wreckage and despair of Haiti.

One year later, much has changed — and not much at all.

One year later, Mr. Rendell remains unapologetic about the airlift, which some said smacked of political grandstanding, given the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to lead the rescue between two opponents in an upcoming Pittsburgh-area congressional race, Mr. Altmire, the Democratic incumbent, and Mary Beth Buchanan, who was seeking the Republican nomination.

“It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” Mr. Rendell said recently.

One year later, the McMutrie sisters have returned to Haiti — but have severed their ties with the BRESMA orphanage and have declined repeated requests by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for an interview.

And one year later, many international adoption experts and child welfare officials are trying to work with the Haitian government, with limited success, to ensure that this type of hastily planned evacuation doesn’t happen again.

“People always respond in a crisis out of the kindness of their hearts, but this was misguided kindness,” said Julie Rosicky, executive director of International Social Service-USA.

The 12 children who ended up at Holy Family, she noted, were not in the midst of adoption proceedings, even though their parents had signed relinquishment papers. They were included because the McMutrie sisters refused to leave Haiti with Mr. Rendell unless those children came, too.

“It broke all the principles we’ve established as an international adoption community to keep children with their families and in their countries of origin above all else, with inter-country adoption a last resort,” said Ms. Rosicky.

Indeed, the mother of 11-year-old Fekkens Souffrant, one of the 12 BRESMA children who came to Holy Family, told The New York Times earlier this month that she had not known, when she signed relinquishment papers, that she would not be able to see her child again and didn’t discover he had been taken to the U.S. until she visited the orphanage several days afterward.

Federal officials declined to comment specifically about Fekkens’ case, although the Red Cross had conducted a trace to locate the 12 biological families of those children at Holy Family, and Haitian and U.S. officials met with each biological family to determine whether the family wanted the child to be adopted by a U.S. family.

It’s not unusual for children placed in orphanages in Haiti to continue to have contact with their parents, and many children are placed in orphanages because their families can’t care for them, not because the parents have died or are neglectful or abusive. Many birth families continue to have contact with their children after adoption, and some of the families in these cases, including Fekkens’ mother, have requested continued contact.

Nonetheless, “if you act too precipitously, you make mistakes,” noted Adam Pertman, executive director for the New York-based Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. Mr. Pertman is the author of “Adoption Nation,” to be published this spring.

Officials want to find ways to resist the impulse to remove children during disasters.

“The widely accepted position for pretty much everybody is that after a disaster is not a time to start airlifting,” said Kathleen Strottman, executive director of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, which has been working on developing a new child welfare system in Haiti.

The pressure to bring them to the U.S. was intense, and members of Congress felt that pressure acutely, she said, noting that many members received letters from anxious would-be adoptive parents complaining “that Governor Rendell flew down there, why can’t you?”

Mr. Rendell, of course, had a powerful reason to act — when the McMutrie sisters sounded an alarm, there was a public outcry and scrambling by officials and private citizens to pick up the children.

Today, though, Leslie Merrill, a senior consultant to UPMC who coordinated the airlift for Mr. Rendell, says she is no longer in contact with the McMutrie sisters even as she continues her own work with the Haitian government to help children with medical issues get the care they need.

It’s not clear why the sisters severed ties with the BRESMA orphanage, either.

“We are continuing to help families and children in Haiti and spending quite a bit of time in the field,” the sisters said in an e-mailed response to questions. Asked about plans for a new orphanage, they said that construction “is still in the planning phases.”

For those Haitian children who were in the final stages of adoption when the earthquake hit, “it made sense to get them out of harm’s way” and take them to the U.S. where their families were ready to meet them, said Ms. Strottman.

The children eligible for humanitarian parole were divided into two categories, said Sharon Parrott, counselor to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

About 40 percent of the cases already had a complete adoption, and these children were immediately placed in the care of their adoptive parents. Nearly all the rest had been matched prior to the earthquake with families who had undergone criminal background checks and home studies, but had not completed the adoption process. The vast majority of these children were released to their prospective adoptive families within days of their arrival in the U.S. In April, the humanitarian parole program shut down.

Of the roughly 1,100 children placed, fewer than a dozen cases have been “disrupted,” adoption parlance for what happens when an adoptive family feels unable to keep a child.

The children were returned to HHS care “because the adoptive families were no longer able to care for them for a variety of reasons,” said Ms. Parrott. “Those children are placed in residential care facilities until we can find appropriate foster placements with families who would be interested in adopting them.”

Ms. Strottman said that pledges of change and cooperation in developing a new child welfare model for Haiti were made at a forum convened in May. “It was a great session.”

But after Haiti’s minister of social affairs and labor, Yves Cristalin, promised the group that he would soon provide them with a list of Haiti’s needs and priorities, he quit to run for president.

“So I guess we’re back at square one,” Ms. Strottman said ruefully, adding that she was still trying to figure out who, in the current chaotic Haitian political bureaucracy, would pick up where Mr. Cristalin left off.

It took nearly a year for the government of Haiti to agree to proceed with the U.S. adoptions of the children who didn’t have adoptive families, and it finally came just before Thanksgiving.

“When these children came to the United States, the wishes of the birth families were unclear, and thus we needed to work with the government of Haiti to reach an agreement on how to proceed in these cases,” said Ms. Parrott. “When it was established that the birth families wanted the children matched with adoptive families in the U.S., HHS worked with the Holy Family Institute to identify families that could best meet the needs of each individual child.”

Four Haitian children remain at Holy Family, including Fekkens, and their adoptions are expected to be finalized soon, said Sister Linda Yankoski, president and CEO of Holy Family. After a year, the Haitian orphan tale has had a mostly happy ending.

But the question is, “what happens next time?” said Mr. Pertman. “What have we learned for better or worse that we should apply here?”

Staff writer Dennis Roddy contributed. Mackenzie Carpenter: mcarpenter@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1949.

First published on January 12, 2011 at 12:00 am