International Adoption News from Adoptive Families Magazine

Haiti    Six days after the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Department of State began expediting pending adoption cases and allowing children to join their prospective families, in a process known as humanitarian parole. At press time, at least several hundred orphans had joined families in the U.S. Learn more about the current situation at http://www.adoption.state.gov/.

Cambodia    The government of Cambodia has a new law on intercountry adoption. The law aims to create a countrywide child welfare system and a Hague-compliant adoption process. This is seen as an important first step in reform that could eventually lay the groundwork for a resumption of intercountry adoptions from Cambodia to the U.S.

Mexico   Mexico City’s legislative assembly voted to legalize adoption by same-sex couples on Dec. 21. The same day, the assembly also approved gay marriage, making it the second major Latin-American city to do so.

Canada    According to a report released recently by Ontario’s Ministry of Children and Youth Services, families in Canada who are interested in adoption face a number of barriers that may prevent them from ever adopting. Among the findings, objective information about adoption options isn’t readily available, and adoptive families of children with special needs don’t usually get the support they need after the adoption, the report says. Read the report at www.children.gov.on.ca/htdocs/English/infertility/index.aspx.

http://www.adoptivefamilies.com/news.php

Residential Center for Children in the Philippines In Need of a Vehicle

Safe Harbor International Philippines Foundation, Inc. helps abandoned, neglected, abused and orphaned children in the Philippines.  For their accreditation evaluation they need to purchase a vehicle.  They've found one that meets their needs that costs $5,000.  So far $4,200 has been donated for this purchase.  They now need less than $1,000!  Can you help?  If you can or for more information - http://www.shipfoundation.org/index.cfm

Teacher Takes In A Teen, And Gains A Family

This is a great story from NPR about a teacher who becomes the legal guardian of one of his former students and how it changes both their lives.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124321674&ps=cprs

Just before he became a father, Colbert Williams left home because his family was too poor to take care of him. As he remembers it, "My mother didn't have a place for me to go."

Williams and his son discussed their strong bond at StoryCorps in Michigan. But in a "prequel" of sorts, Williams also spoke with the man who took him in as a teenager — his fifth-grade math teacher, Ralph Catania.

Catania, 69, was divorced and had no children of his own. He became Williams' legal guardian when his former student turned 16.

"Was there anything that you feared about moving in with me?" Catania asked.

"Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?" Williams said. "Everything."
And he really does mean everything — from what kind food Catania kept in the house to his culture and background. All Williams really knew about the man he was moving in with was that he was a nice teacher.

"I'm a young black man and you're a white man," Williams said. "And I'm like, 'I don't know anything about white people.' "

Then Williams asked Catania about his thoughts after learning that Williams, then 16, was going to become a father.
"My first reaction was, there isn't too much I can do about it."

But he was impressed with something Williams said: "My son is going to know who his father is."
It wasn't easy, of course. There's the night Williams was up late studying for an exam, and his son was sick and hungry. As he started to give the baby some milk, fatigue got the better of Williams.
"I forget to put the top on top of the bottle, and I just hand him milk — and milk just spills," he said.
The arrival of Williams' son, Nathan, was perhaps the most emphatic sign that Catania's previous life, in which he lived alone, had been changed for good.
"I have truly been blessed. There's no other way to explain it," Catania said.

"What you see in me is a reflection of what you put in me. So today I say, thank you."

Catania said that he's heard that from other people that he did a great job helping raise Williams. But still, he doesn't fully agree.

"I truly believe that a lot of this comes from within you, and within your soul, my friend," he told Williams.
"Any parent would be extremely proud of a child that has accomplished what you have accomplished."

Produced for Morning Edition by Vanara Taing. The senior producer for StoryCorps is Michael Garofalo. Recorded in partnership with WUOM.

Registration is now open for the Christian Alliance for Orphans’ Summit VI in Minneapolis, MN!

Featured speakers will include John Piper, Mary Beth and Steven Curtis Chapman, Al Mohler, Patricia Arzu, Tom Davis, Stephanie Fast, Doug Sauder, and others!

For more information and to register:
http://www.christian-alliance-for-orphans.org/summit/

The Case For International Adoption

An article from Newsweek Magazine
Despite sensational headlines about Haitian orphans, children adopted from developing nations can thrive in the United States. I know, from personal experience.

By Jeneen Interlandi
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Earthquakes in Haiti and Chile have left thousands of children orphaned and revived debates over the value of international adoption. In the weeks since a group of American missionaries were arrested on charges of child-trafficking, Haiti's orphans have continued to trickle across her borders. More than 300 Haitian children have been adopted by families in France, and the State Department estimates that nearly 2,000 will have been placed with U.S. families by month's end. Thanks to enhanced scrutiny by both Haitian and U.S. officials in the wake of the missionary debacle, it appears that the vast majority of those adoptions will be of legitimate orphans and not child-trafficking victims.

That won't silence critics, who argue that taking orphaned children from their birth countries and raising them elsewhere robs those nations of their most valuable resource and leaves the adoptees with a hopelessly fractured ethnic identity, only to satisfy the capricious whims of wealthy Westerners. (The contentious term cultural genocide is sometimes employed.) Opponents of international adoption routinely point to the abundance of orphans here in the U.S. where they claim it is both easier and cheaper to adopt. From there, they typically question the motives of "eager white Americans" who would endeavor "to adopt children that look nothing like them,"—as if every would-be parent who sought to adopt overseas were somehow trying to be Angelina Jolie. There are some persistent myths behind that argument that need dispelling. But first, a quick story:

My own parents suffered through a string of miscarriages and failed attempts to adopt in the U.S. before fetching my older sister, twin brother, and I from a dilapidated orphanage in Medellín, Colombia. It was the late 1970s, and we were infants—two of us premature and very sick. They nursed us back to health, brought us to a working-class suburb of New Jersey and promptly went about the business of raising us. Among the many things they took pains to instill (like work ethic, faith in God, and a healthy appreciation for good lasagna), a sense of Colombian-ness was not included. Nor was it to be acquired elsewhere: together my siblings and I made up about half the town's Colombian population.

But if we lacked a clear blueprint for our ethnic identities, we still had plenty of other parameters from which to forge our sense of selves: we were blue-collar kids from Jersey. We grew up amongst the mostly Irish- and Italian-American children of nurses, plumbers, and store clerks. Like them, we indulged in all the rituals of our particular American upbringing. And like most internationally adopted children, we turned out just fine.

To be sure, there are some significant and seemingly unclosable gaps in our cultural identities. I remember eagerly befriending two Colombian kids that moved to our town in junior high, only to find out that we had nothing special in common. "I'm Colombian too," I exclaimed to one of them, a girl the same age as me. She smiled and started speaking in Spanish. I furrowed my brow to show that I didn't understand. "Where are you from?" she asked in English. "Medellín," I said. "No," she said, laughing. "You definitely aren't."

In later years my twin brother (who is darker than my sister and I) would occasionally be subject to racial profiling. And, as we belatedly discovered, all three of us would have to go through the complicated and lengthy process of naturalization before we could obtain driver's licenses (or register to vote or apply for financial aid for college). We were immigrants and minorities—but only sometimes. The same was true of our Italian experience. I know more about Palermo and my father's upbringing in 1950s Bensonhurst than I ever will about Medellín, but I feel as dishonest calling myself Italian or Italian-American as I do calling myself Colombian. That's OK by me. My loss of ethnic heritage has been more than compensated for in the multitude of opportunities afforded by my adoption. Besides, I kind of like being a cultural chameleon (Colombian by birth, Sicilian by adoption, and American by upbringing). It makes me unique.
I won't pretend my experience is the same as it would be if I were black or Asian, or even a darker shade of Hispanic, and I'm not trying to say that race doesn't matter at all. But race and ethnicity shouldn't be the foremost concerns of adoptive parents, foreign governments, or society at large. The primary consideration should be the welfare of the children in question. Where will they have the best chance at happy, fulfilling lives? How best can the global community ensure their health and safety?

Within the U.S., the federal government has long since determined that while race and ethnicity merit consideration, they should not be the deciding factors in any adoption. That's because numerous studies show that transracial and transcultural adoptees don't face any higher risks of psychological problems or identity issues than domestic, same-ethnicity adoptees. As uncomfortable as it makes some people to acknowledge, white parents are capable of raising emotionally healthy black, Asian, and Hispanic children. And that's no less true when the child comes from another country.
Those who argue that prospective parents should "just adopt in the U.S." don't understand the motivations of most adoptive parents. If would-be adopters were acting out of some profound sense of charity, then reasonable people could debate the merits of alleviating greater suffering abroad vs. considerably less suffering closer to home. (In Colombia in 1977, children who weren't adopted by the age of 9 or 10 were turned out onto the street: girls mostly became prostitutes, boys joined the guerrilla armies or found work in the coca fields. By contrast, American orphans of the same generation were guaranteed food, shelter, and some form of education until they turned 18.)
But the fact is, most adoptive parents are like mine: they are unable to conceive but desperately want to experience parenthood—in all its permutations. That means they want babies. In the U.S., 60 percent of eligible orphans are more than 5 years old. Several critics have argued that the supply of Third-World infants is not a natural occurrence but a response to the demand of adoption markets in the West. This is only partly true: yes, Western demand motivates child-traffickers. But even after child trafficking is taken out of the equation, there are still many more infants to adopt abroad than there are in the U.S. (6.6 million compared with less than 60,000, based on an analysis of data from Unicef and the United States Department of Health and Human Services). International adoption is expensive (up to $40,000 in many cases) and takes a long time (one to three years on average)—long enough to consider all of the challenges and complexities that raising a child of different cultural or ethnic heritage will entail. It's not a process one enters into lightly.

In fact, most parents choose international adoption only after being repeatedly stymied by U.S. adoption protocols—from birth parents that change their minds at the last minute, to stringent and sometimes arbitrary requirements on the part of domestic adoption agencies. Speaking of which, it is patently false that the high-profile choices of a few celebrities have triggered an international adoption boom. In fact, in the U.S. especially, international adoption rates have plummeted—from about 25,000 in 2004 to less than 13,000 in 2009. Today, they are at an all time low, thanks to the greater availability of contraception, a global crackdown on child-trafficking, and better economic conditions in places like Russia and China, the birthplace of many internationally adopted orphans.

These days, internationally adoptive parents often go to great lengths to preserve their adoptive children's sense of cultural heritage—a big change since I was adopted from Colombia. According to one Harvard survey, 15 percent of transracially adoptive parents move to more ethnically diverse neighborhoods after adopting, to enhance their child's exposure to other people of the same ethnicity. Many parents take corresponding language and cooking lessons and many more immerse themselves in the diaspora communities of their children's birth countries. Some also participate, with their children, in "homeland tours" offered by international adoption agencies.

At the same time, adult adoptees from Korea, China, and elsewhere have formed national organizations to facilitate homeland visits and lobby for dual citizenship, among other things. There is no reason to think that Haitian orphans won't do the same. To be sure, they will face barriers to forging coherent racial and ethnic identities—almost all internationally and interracially adopted children do. But those barriers won't be insurmountable and they won't necessarily be devastating. In the end, what matters most is not where a child is from, but whether or not that child is well loved and well cared for by a responsible family—regardless of race or nationality.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/234343

Orphan Care Groups Come Together to Help Haiti

An article from Yahoo news:
Disaster Response Experts Team With Orphan Care Organizations to Create Long-Term Solutions in Haiti
Unique team to deploy Valentine's Day

RALEIGH, N.C., Feb. 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A volunteer team of U.S. disaster response experts and orphan care providers is coming together to provide strategic help to Haitian churches. The team will equip and train Haitian church leaders to provide local, long-term care for orphaned Haitian children in the aftermath of the January earthquake.

The Haiti Orphan Relief Team (HORT) is a cooperative volunteer effort of disaster response experts and orphan-care professionals from many U.S.-based ministries that have joined forces to respond to the crisis in Haiti. An initial HORT on-the-ground team will deploy for a two week period beginning on February 14, 2010. The team will work to identify churches in Haiti that can be paired with U.S. churches for ongoing partnerships in caring for orphaned children, so that local resources can sustain this effort beyond the HORT team's deployment.
"We know that this disaster is not going to be fixed overnight, but by putting in place key pieces of infrastructure, efforts can be sustained and strengthened long after the HORT team has returned to the United States," said John E. Roberts, past Director of the Federal Government's National Interagency Training Center, and Incident Command System (ICS) team commander for HORT. "We are looking to build a long-term solution to the immediate crisis."

Recognizing that many Haitian church facilities were destroyed, HORT will use advanced mapping techniques developed by the U.S. government to physically identify the church facilities that are best able to provide long-term solutions to children now and in the future.

"We are looking for churches that want to become part of the long-term solution to the orphan need in Haiti. Â We encourage U.S. churches to come alongside the churches of Haiti to address this catastrophe," said Paul Myhill, President, World Orphans, and a member of the deployment team.

A Valentine's Day fund-raising drive is under way to help HORT deploy. Donors can personalize an eCard with a Valentine message and for every eCard sent, the team will personally deliver a Valentine to a Haitian orphan.

"Outside help alone won't reach Haiti's deepest need. If we're serious about helping Haiti's orphans toward a bright future, it'll be absolutely vital to equip and support committed local Haitian churches to care for the orphans in their communities," said Jedd Medefind, President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans.
More about HORT can be found at: http://www.haitiorphanrelief.org/

Collaborators in this effort include:
Christian Alliance for Orphans, http://www.christianalliancefororphans.org/
Global Aid Network, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ International, http://www.gainusa.org/
Hope for Orphans, a ministry of FamilyLife, http://www.hopefororphans.org/
Lifesong for Orphans, http://www.lifesongfororphans.org/
Love Haiti, http://www.lovehaitimissions.com/
Loving Shepherd Ministries, http://www.loving-shepherd.org/
Sweet Sleep, http://www.sweetsleep.org/
Together for Adoption, http://www.togetherforadoption.org/
University of North Carolina, School of Public Health, http://www.sph.unc.edu/
World Orphans, http://www.worldorphans.org/


(http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20100209/pl_usnw/DC52297)

State Department: Now's Not the Time for Haitian Adoptions

"Official says first priority should be placing Haitian children with Haitian families."
An article from Christianity Today: 
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/februaryweb-only/16-32.0.html

Haiti Suspends Adoptions

Annoucement from JCICS:
"Since the earthquake Joint Council has received thousands of calls and emails from families wanting to help, wanting to start new adoptions from Haiti. It is for this reason we take a moment and remind everyone of the importance of speedy family reunification in times of crises.
As of January 12, 2010, the day of the devastating Haitian earthquake, governmental and legal procedures to process an adoption in Haiti have been impossible to carry out. Until further notice the best way to support the needs of the children in Haiti is to donate money to international aid organizations dealing with the disaster. Adoptions in Haiti cannot be processed according to Haitian or US law during the current emergency. Please consult Joint Council's Haiti Information page at www.jcics.org/haiti  and http://www.adoption.state.gov/ for up to date information about adoption from Haiti.
Joint Council is working with the U.S. government to determine the impact of the devastation on the adoption process. The coming days and months will be rightly focused on rescue and reunification efforts. It will take months to fully assess the impact on new adoptions from Haiti."

From CCAI:
"At this time the earthquake has put a stop to Haiti adoptions. No new adoptions are being accepted or processed by the Haitian government at this moment. We strongly support UNICEF, Saving the Children and World Vision’s position on focusing on the reunification of the homeless children with their families in the days and weeks ahead."
http://www.haitiadoption.org/

Opportunity for You to Go On a Mission Trip to Ethiopia

HopeChest is planning a mission trip to Ethiopia this April 18th-28th. Cost will be around $1,000 (PLUS airfare) depending on size of the group.

Ginia Hairston, HopeChest's program services director, will lead this trip to visit several of our orphanages in and around Addis Ababa. (You'll get to meet many of the children helped in our Shirts for Shoes campaign too!) The deadline for application and first deposit: February 21st.
Email nicole@hopechest.org  to reserve your spot.
http://www.hopechest.org/

Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages Raises Fears

From the New York Times:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The floors were concrete and the windows were broken.

There was no electricity or running water. Lunch looked like watery grits. Beds were fashioned from sheets of cardboard. And the only toilet did not work.

But the Foyer of Patience here is like hundreds of places that pass as orphanages for thousands of children in the poorest country in the hemisphere. Many are barely habitable, much less licensed. They have no means to provide real schooling or basic medical care, so children spend their days engaged in mindless activities, and many die from treatable illnesses.

Haiti’s child welfare system was broken before the earthquake struck. But as the quake shattered homes and drove hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, the number of children needing care grew exponentially.

Chronic problems — like inadequate services, overwhelming poverty and shady orphanages — have only intensified, while the authorities fear that some of the less scrupulous orphanages are taking advantage of the chaos to round up children in crisis and offer them for sale as servants and sex slaves.

continue story - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/world/americas/07trafficking.html?ref=world