That’s about all I need to read about the 10 Americans jailed in Haiti for trying to sneak “orphans” out of the country without any kind of legitimate paperwork or really any plan beyond trafficking them into the neighboring Dominican Republic. They didn’t even bother confirming all of these kids were orphans.

On the one hand, you’d be a cold bastard not to feel a little sympathy:

American officials have said they intend to let the Haitian justice system take its course.

They obviously didn’t know what they were doing and one must wonder if their thinking was clouded by a sense of divine entitlement, given their surprise at the outcome of, as stated, trying to traffic unidentified children across international borders with no paperwork whatever.

But for those same reasons, I’m inclined not to feel sorry for them at all, becuase that last sentence is written just as well in the pejorative:

These people obviously didn’t know what the fuck they were doing and, frankly, one must wonder if their odd-duck of a preacher instilled in them a sense of divine entitlement, given their surprise at the repurcussions of child trafficking, committed knowingly or not.

Full disclosure: I’ve had some experience with American missionaries in the developing world, and to say I’m left unimpressed by their world view is something of an understatement. My experience has been — and forgive me for the generalization, but it seems to hold up most of the time — that their breed of humanitarianism easily forgets the “human” part of it. Put differently, spend a little time among missionaries and you’ll find pretty quickly that within them the notion of cultural supremacy is alive and well. I suspect a situation like that in Haiti would accelerate that phenomenon.

Given that as a backdrop, you can (sort of) understand the thought process of these folks, which more or less boils down to “we know best”.

That obviously didn’t hold up this time. It really doesn’t hold up ever, except most of the time, nobody notices because nothing drastic is happening.

So forgive me when I say, with the deepest of sympathies to these peoples and their worried families*, if you go to a place with the intention of deploying “your way” with no respect given to local (and in this case, international) practices, customs, laws, governments, etc., you kind of deserve to get pinched for it. Can a guy from Amsterdam roll into East Bumfuck, Wisconsin, roll up a spliff and start puffin’ away? Certainly not. Yet these sorts of Americans run all over the world as if the rules were theirs to write. Sorry guys, it just doesn’t work that way.

*or whatever