The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce Page B

would “airlift 50 to 150 orphans” to the ministry’s 140-acre prayer and retreatcenter, BridgeStone, a sprawling campus of cabins and recreational amenities set among the cotton fields and Confederate graveyards between Montgomery and Birmingham. It would be the ministry’s pilot program, Haiti OrphansNoMore, hosting Haitian children for three months in Alabama to help them learn English, “immerse them in the gospel,” and “incubate adoptions” with the scores of local families Benz had signed up in the days after the earthquake. He appealed to donors to sponsor children at $200 each, the cost of processing their passports, which Benz, an excitable man easily stirred to poetry, called their “passport to the future.” “Think of how many orphans will find forever homes!!” he wrote. “Will you help a child receive their passport to the U.S. and to a new life in Christ?” According to Benz’s plan, after a ninety-day residency in Alabama, children picked for adoption would return to Haiti temporarily to live at a new transition home he would establish and then prepare to move to America.
    Benz, a wide-smiling man with a buzz cut and a self-deprecating style, was confident the plan would work. Bridges of Faith had long run a missionary summer camp for orphans in Ukraine (as well as an unwed mothers’ home in Kentucky). For two years he had been mulling over plans for a sort of “hosting program” for Ukrainian orphans with the goal of getting Alabama Christians to adopt them. It was part of the reason he and his wife, Larissa, a Ukrainian evangelical, had bought the BridgeStone camp, at a bargain price of $450,000, from the local Assemblies of God Church.
    When Benz met Larissa he had been regional director for the International Bible Society, traveling widely and distributing Bibles in former Soviet bloc countries and other countries he can’t name—missionary code for Muslim nations where evangelizing is forbidden. When he was assigned to visit an orphanage in Eastern Ukraine, he had planned to stop in quickly then hit the beaches of the Black Sea. Instead, he said, “within twenty-four hours those kids had crawled inside my heart and changed my life.” Larissa became a translator for Benz, and in time they married and Benz adopted her twelve-year-old son. He came to believe that the Bible charged him to do something for other children, like in James 1:27, a popular verse of scripture that calls caring for widows and orphans “pure religion,” or Matthew 25:40, when Jesus talks about helping “the least of these.” “We don’t want just to be Christians who sit in the church,” Benz explained to me. “Our faith needs to have legs and hands—that we actually do something with our faith.”
    In 1995 Benz started his own ministry, Bridges of Faith, that would take hundreds of US Christians on short-term mission trips to Ukraine.There they planted churches and worked with children who were aging out of Ukrainian orphanages. His goal is to change the statistics he repeats to all comers: that the majority of children who graduate from institutional care in Ukraine end up in trouble: the boys in organized crime, drug dealing, or prison, and the girls in prostitution, both at risk for substance abuse and suicide. In any group he assembles Benz always pauses for dramatic effect before he asks people to envision 60 percent of the girls in front of them growing up to be prostitutes. “But every child that is adopted,” he tells them, “gets snatched out of those statistics.”
    Other adoption officials working in Ukraine say this is misleading, that the 60 percent figure only applies to a subset of orphanage children, those who opt out of government-sponsored education or job-training programs. But regardless of how many face the worst outcomes, all orphanage graduates contend with real, if more pedestrian challenges when they transition to independent lives, coming, as they do, out of institutions