为海地孤儿提供的收养计划

We're back and of all the tragic stories coming out of Haiti, one of the most wrentching is the thousands of children who were orphaned in an instant when that earthquake hit. We've been reporting on efforts by Americans to adopt some of them. Now our own Mark Potter reports on an idea that has worked before and somehow could work here again.

At the House of God’s Children Orphanage in Port-au-Prince, staffers are struggling to help more than 100 children. In dire conditions, many children must now live outdoors after the earthquake, awaiting the slow adoption process into the US and other countries.

"There is no future for the children there. If they're orphans, there is no family; there is no one to care for them."

To speed up the care of Haitian orphans, whose numbers have swelled into hundreds of thousands now, the Catholic Archdiocese in Miami is proposing to temporarily house large groups of Haitian children in the US. It would be patterned after Operation Pedro Pan from the 1960s, when 14,000 children from Cuba were flown to the US to escape the revolution there. 

Operation Pedro Pan obviously was named after the fairy tale hero Peter Pan. Some say the plan to bring in children from Creole and French speaking Haiti should be called Operation Pierre Pan.

Miami mayor Tomas Regalado was a Pedro Pan child in 1962. He now fully supports a similar plan for Haitians as long as it's well coordinated with US and international relief agencies.

I think it would give hope to the people of Haiti to see some of their children to have a better life.

Although the plan still lacks US government’s approval, it is being considered.

"We feel their pain. As a church, we feel it's the moral and humane thing to do. We must provide a future for these children."

And the church says it's been flooded with inquiries from American families offering to open their doors and their hearts.

Mark Potter, NBC news, Miami.