Eugene (KMTR) - A Eugene-based adoption agency is keeping a close eye on what is happening in Haiti.
Holt International Services works to find homes for orphaned children from countries all over the world, including Haiti, and the quake is affecting their adoption efforts.
The Holt orphanage is 30 miles north of Port-Au-Prince. There are 30 children in their care and all of them are okay. However, the safety of more than 120 children living outside the orphanage in a special program is unclear. Those kids are in a program called Family Preservation. They are children who have been reunited with their birth families by Holt.
No American families who are going through the adoption process are in the country, which is a good thing, since the hotel used to house those families collapsed in the quake.
An adoption usually takes several months to complete. With so much chaos, Holt International’s president, Kim Brown, says he expects the process to slow even further.
"There's a great deal of paperwork that has probably been lost forever," Brown says. “But many of these families are very dedicated to these children. And so, we will deal with those issues as we hear from the government."
