Moroccan authorities close Christian orphanage

(Staff)  ON MARCH 8, Moroccan authorities raided Village of Hope (VoH), a private children’s home in Ain Leuh located in the Middle Atlas Mountains, south of Fez. It was founded as a home for children abandoned by their parents. The authorities arrived during the school day, entered the classrooms and told the adopted children their foster parents would be leaving the country with no guarantee of ever seeing their Moroccan children again.

In the ensuing chaos, officials told the foster parents that they were being deported because they have been proselytizing. Under Moroccan law, it is illegal for anyone to talk about their Christian faith without first being asked.

In 2002, VoH registered with the government as an official Christian organization and received permission to talk about Christianity to the children in their care.

In Morocco, it is only legal for Muslims to adopt children so the staff were acting as “foster parents,” but in actuality the children considered them to be their adoptive parents.

The children had been raised in several family units with a “mother” and “father” rather than the more traditional dormitory-style orphanage.

All 16 overseas workers, including 10 parents and 13 natural-born dependents, were deported. As the police raided VoH, children cried out hysterically for their foster parents who were being forced to board a bus to the airport 30 minutes after receiving the order. The authorities would not allow any of the Moroccan children to travel with them.

The staff was told this directive came from the new Minister of Justice for Morocco, Mohammed Naciri. It is expected that the abandoned children will now be placed in large state-run orphanages. There are fears that the family groups will be split up in the government orphanages.

Chris Broadbent of New Zealand, who had managed the orphanage’s office, was one of the expelled workers. He wrote in an email: “Thirty-three children have just been abandoned again by the actions of the Moroccan state….These 33 children have never known another mother. Some of them have been here for ten years, since the start of VoH. Watching the children be told by their parents that they had to leave, that they would maybe never see them again, is the most painful thing I have ever witnessed.”

“The fact of the matter is we weren’t proselytizing,” Broadbent told the Christian Science Monitor. “We understood the rules.”

At the orphanage school, the children spoke Moroccan Arabic, studied the Koran, and learned Muslim prayers as stipulated by Moroccan law, Broadbent said. Outside of the classroom, Christians were raising the children in Christian households, but Broadbent says this was a fact known to the authorities.

“It was a clear, open, discussed, confirmed agreement with local authorities. We were looking after these children because no one else would.”

Another older orphanage called The Children’s Haven near the town of Azrou is also under investigation.

“For the most part, the authorities think of us as doing a charitable service for Morocco,” says Jim Pitts, an American who’s been working with The Children’s Haven for 51 years. At the orphanage, 10 foreigners are currently caring for 30 Moroccan children.  He and his staff came here to do charitable work, not to proselytize, he maintains, adding that so far police have found nothing to contradict this claim.

Since early March about 35 foreign Christian aid workers have been deported from cities all over the country, calling into question an unspoken but long-standing truce between missionaries and their Muslim hosts.

“This is a change in policy from the top of the government,” says Jack Wald, who has spent 10 years as pastor of Rabat International Church, a protestant congregation in the capital. “It’s like going to sleep, waking up, and all of a sudden you’re in a different country.”