Expecting Help From Us Embassy Staff?

Any US citizen still expecting the US Embassy to help you out of a jam should take this opportunity to disabuse themselves of that notion. Yes, this story is from last year and concerns the US Embassy in Nigeria. (And yes *sigh* the kids are black.) But all these Embassy folks are cut from the same cloth, and who knows, maybe these folks got transferred to new posts in Thailand.

U.S. knew about abandoned kids. More here, and here.

U.S. knew about abandoned kids

But a week after being told, officials had not gone to Nigeria orphanage

When a missionary found seven malnourished, diseased and abandoned Texas children in a Nigerian orphanage, U.S. State Department officials had known about the children's plight but had not gone to the orphanage to check on them.

No American official visited the government-run orphanage, which reportedly houses orphaned children and juveniles convicted of violent crimes such as rape, for more than a week after a tipster told the U.S. consulate in Nigeria about the children, according to the State Department.

The city where the orphanage is located, Ibadan, is about 60 miles northeast of Lagos, Nigeria's largest city and site of the consulate. The trip by taxi takes just over an hour and costs 75 cents, according to Lonely Planet's West Africa travel guide.

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