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Edited on Thu Feb-04-10 11:40 PM by Art_from_Ark
If these 10 people actually are "fundies", it would seem to me that some, most, or even all of them may actually have been trying to help the children escape from a miserable situation in their homeland, if they believed so strongly in the tenets of their religion. Also, it appears that none of them spoke the local language, so they had to rely on locals to give them information which may have been faulty. Parents have said that they willingly gave up their children because there was no life for them at home, and their interpreter may have called these children "orphans" because apparently, conditions in that country are so wretched even without an earthquake that children like that are often sent to orphanages anyway, even if the parents are living.
The leader may have had other intentions, but it sounds to me like others in the group may have been suckered into going along. I'm thinking about, for example, that 18-year-old girl, who, I would bet, did not sign up for child trafficking. At 18, I was pretty naive, and if I had nothing to do and someone from my church that I respected had said, Let's go help those poor kids, I might have gone along, with the full intention of helping poor kids, without any suspicion that there might be a dark side to the project. And once there, and enlisting the aid of a Jesuit priest to find destitute kids, and hearing my leader telling me that the paperwork was in order to take the kids to a better place that was still within visiting distance of whatever remaining family members there may be, why would I, as a naive, trusting 18-year-old, have any reason to be suspicious?
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