Story Published: Jan 14, 2010 at 11:09 AM PDT
This Jan. 12, 2010 photo shows an injured person being tended to at Hotel Villa Creole in Port-au-Prince, Haiti after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit the Caribbean nation.
EUGENE, Ore. -- Getting information out of Haiti is tough right now.
"We're getting conflicting reports," said Kim Brown, president of Holt International, which operates an orphange in Haiti. "Cell phone towers are down."
Brown knows this much: his agency's orphanage is OK.
"We're fortunate," Brown said. "Happy to say and grateful all 30 children are safe."
Holt is a worldwide adoption service headquartered in Eugene, Ore. Their orphanage in Haiti opened eight years ago.
"The problem is, survival in an environment like Haiti is very difficult," Brown said. "There are very little resources, and no one to take care of them."
The orphanage is 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince, away from the most severe damage. Even so, the earthquake could make getting adopted even more difficult. With government buildings flattened in Port-au-Prince, Brown said that could slow down an already lengthy adoption process.
Adopting a child from Haiti takes "two years in the best of times," Brown said. "So it could be beyond that -- 3, 4 years even.")
Brown said he wants the U.S. State Department to step in and clear the way for these kids to come to the U.S. soon. He said they've already endured enough.
"In a country like this, in fact every country, truly, the orphans are the ones, even under normal circumstances, when there's not an event like this, that suffer," Brown said.
Related Content