Haitian Orphans Helped by American Humane Project Coordinator

Debbie Mixon Mitchell, Ph.D., Volunteered to Escort Haitian Children to Denver

Dr. Debbie Mixon Mitchell, project coordinator for the Colorado Disparities Resource Center -- a partnership between American Humane and the Colorado Department of Human Services -- was one of 35 volunteers who flew to Florida on Jan. 23, 2010, to escort Haitian orphans on their way to Denver to meet their new adoptive families. The children were in the final stages of adoption when the earthquake struck Haiti. The effort and the airlift were chronicled in The Denver Post.

The children had arrived in Florida on a U.S. military flight from Haiti, where they had been sleeping in tents since the walls of their orphanage crumbled during the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Mitchell was in charge of caring for a sibling group of three children, ages 10, 7 and 4. Mitchell was asked to volunteer due to her exceptional credentials and her past experience as a supervisor of a therapeutic foster care program.

“This experience really revealed so much about the human spirit,” said Mitchell. “The children had such an automatic willingness to care for each other -- offering each other food and making sure the others were okay. It was profound and beautiful. I was honored to be a part of it.”

All three siblings that Mitchell cared for during their trip to Denver have been able to stay together, and a family is caring for them.

The Children’s Division of American Humane, in partnership with the Colorado Department of Human Services Division of Child Welfare, recently launched the Colorado Disparities Resource Center to address longstanding issues of service disparities in child welfare based on race and ethnicity.

The Jan. 28 post on American Humane’s blog, The Humane Exchange, poses the question of whether a foreign adoption is the best answer for Haitian children who appear to have been left alone following the earthquake. Read the blog.