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Haiti earthquake: Making sure children find the right home

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Farrah Leolo, a 9-year-old with a charming smile, was dressed for an important journey.

Her hair was braided and she wore a crisp white blouse and pink slacks. In her pocket, she had cookies and passport-sized photos.

A few minutes after Farrah left the Horizon of Hope child-care center with French Embassy officials this week, her adoptive mother called the center’s owner, Kathelen Douyon, from Paris.

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‘She looked so beautiful,’ Douyon told the mother. Then, choking back tears, she silently handed the phone to an aide and put her face in her hands. ‘She was one of my favorites,’ Douyon said.

The earthquake that ravaged Haiti two weeks ago has the Haitian government and foreign embassies scrambling to speed up adoption paperwork in cases like Farrah’s, and joyous scenes of new parents in the United States and elsewhere greeting their Haitian children at airports suggest the system is working.

The earthquake’s aftermath, though, has created a dangerous situation for children in a country that, even before the disaster, had some of the world’s weakest adoption regulations.

Continue reading ‘Haiti adoptions: Keeping youths in the right hands.’

-- Scott Kraft in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

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