PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—In a closed courtroom in one of the few government buildings still standing here, Laura Silsby and nine other American missionaries were charged Thursday with abducting children from this earthquake-ravaged capital.

When the proceeding was done, the 40-year-old from a mountain valley in Idaho walked out of Le Tribunal de Paix, past a scrum of microphones, cameras and seething Haitians and into a government minivan with a co-defendant. As they waited to return to a fetid cell with mattresses on a concrete floor, they appeared to pray.

Their lawyer, Edwin F. Coq Jr., said they had been charged with child abduction and criminal association and not the more-serious charges of kidnapping and child trafficking in connection with trying to take 33 children into the neighboring Dominican Republic. The charges could carry sentences of up to nine years and up to three years, respectively, Mr. Coq said.

"No trafficking? What is wrong with this country?" one man in the crowd yelled in English afterward.