PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Ten American missionaries who tried to take Haitian children out of the country faced a prosecutor on Thursday to learn if they will face child smuggling charges that could put them in prison on the impoverished Caribbean island.
As she entered the closed-door session, mission organizer Laura Silsby told reporters, "We expect God's will be done. And we will be released."
The Idaho-based church group says it was trying to rescue orphaned and abandoned child victims of the Jan. 12 earthquake, taking them to a better life at an orphanage in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
And parents in the badly damaged village of Callebas said they willingly had handed over children because they were unable to feed or clothe the youngsters.
In a testament to the misery of a nation that was the western hemisphere's poorest even before the quake, many Callebas parents say they wouldn't know what to do if they had to take the children back.
"I am living in a tent with a friend," said Laurentius Lelly, a 27-year-old computer technician who gave up his two children, ages 4 and 6. "My main concern is that if the kids come back I'm not going to be able to feed them."
The stories the parents told The Associated Press on Wednesday contradict claims by the Baptist group's leader that the children came from orphanages or were handed over by distant relatives.
The 10 Baptists, most from Idaho, were arrested last week trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border without the required documents, according to Haitian authorities.
Standing amid piles of debris that used to be their homes and the makeshift shelters of tin and plastic sheeting that have replaced them, the people of Callebas told how they came to surrender their children.
It all began last week when a local orphanage worker, fluent in English and acting on behalf of the Baptists, convened nearly the entire village of 500 people on a dirt soccer field to present the Americans' offer.
Isaac Adrien, 20, told his neighbors the missionaries would educate their children in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the villagers said, adding that they were also assured they would be free to visit their children there.
Many parents jumped at the offer.
"It's only because the bus was full that more children didn't go," said Melanie Augustin, a 58-year-old who gave her 10-year-old daughter, Jovin, to the Americans.
Adrien said he met the Baptists' leader, Laura Silsby of Meridian, Idaho, in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 26. She told him she was looking for homeless children, he said, and he knew exactly where to find them.
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