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Silsby spends Easter in Haiti prison
Baptist Press
April 06, 2010
2 MIN READ TIME

Silsby spends Easter in Haiti prison

Silsby spends Easter in Haiti prison
Baptist Press
April 06, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The

last remaining Baptist volunteer still in a Haiti prison spent Easter Sunday in

jail but remains confident she will be released.

Laura Silsby, in prison for more than nine weeks after she and nine others were

arrested in late January on charges of child kidnapping, told NBC News her

faith has sustained her. The nine other Americans have been released and are

back in the United States. Silsby was considered the group leader.

“God will release me. I’m confident that God will overcome all of this and

ultimately enable me to be released,” Silsby said during the interview that was

taped several days before Easter.

Silsby faces a new charge — “organizing irregular travel” — that the other nine

Baptists did not face. It is not known how much longer she will be in jail. The

10 originally were charged with child kidnapping and allegedly did not have the

proper documents to take kids from the earthquake-ravaged country to an

orphanage Silsby was starting in the Dominican Republic.

Silsby and the others

say they simply were trying to help children.

“It was one week after the earthquake when we left home,” Silsby said. “The

news at that point was absolute devastation. People dying everywhere in this

country. Our desire was to help, was to go into those tent communities, into

those collapsed orphanages and bring children out.”

She added, “We were lied to by people who brought children to us and claimed to

be either a neighbor, a distant family member. They did not honestly tell us

who they were.”

Members of Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, say they are

standing behind Silsby.

“We all still stand right beside Laura and support her in everything that she

did and everything that’s happening now,” Corinna Lankford, a member of the

church who was one of the 10 team members arrested, told KTVB-TV in Idaho. “We’re

all right with you, Laura.”

Nine of the 10 team members are members of Southern Baptist churches.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Compiled by Michael Foust, an assistant editor of Baptist

Press.)