Whatever Things Are True: the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful in the World of International Adoption

Mixed Roots Foundation Adoptee Comedy Show May 21st « Alice@97.3

If you happen to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you may want to check out an upcoming Adoptee Comedy Show/fundraiser at The Punchline for the Mixed Roots Foundation, which provides support to the adoptee community. Mixed Roots was founded by Holly Choon Hyang Bachman, who was adopted as a young child from South Korea and raised in the Midwest. Check out the link below for details about the event.

Mixed Roots Foundation Adoptee Comedy Show May 21st « Alice@97.3.

Adult Adoptee from Russia Nominated for ESPY Award

Wheelchair racing champion and adult adoptee  Tatyana McFadden has been nominated for an ESPY Award in the catagory of Best Female Athlete with a Disability. Here'e more about  McFadden, from the bio posted on her website:

By all accounts Tatyana should not be one of the top female athletes in the world. She probably should not be alive. She was born in 1988 in St. Petersburg, Russia, with an underdeveloped spinal cord resulting in paralyzation below the waist and a hole in her spine, a condition know as spina bifida. When operated on immediately, spina bifida is rarely life threatening. Tatyana was left for 21 days before doctors operated. Only her innate strength of will kept her alive.

As an unwanted disabled child, Tatyana was immediately sent to an orphanage after her surgery. She grew up in a place so poor they could not buy crayons for the children to color with let alone a wheelchair for Tatyana to get around in. Unfazed, she spent the first six years of her life using her arms as legs and walking on her hands as if the were feet.

In 1994, Debbie McFadden, working as the commissioner of disabilities for the U.S. Health Department, visited Tatyana’s orphanage on a business trip. When she met Tatyana, she immediately felt a connection with the young girl and decided to adopt her and bring her to the United States.

For Tatyana the adoption meant freedom, it meant a real family, and it meant her first wheelchair, but the excitement was short lived. When she arrived in the US she grew very sick. She was severely anemic and grossly under weight and doctors thought she would only survive a few more months. For a second time in her short life Tatyana’s innate strength would defy the odds.

To aid in her recovery Debbie began to enroll Tatyana in various youth sports groups. Tatyana began taking swimming lessons at the local pool and, a year after she arrived in the US, began participating with the Bennet Blazers, a Baltimore, Maryland area wheelchair sports organization.

No longer having to use her strength for survival, Tatyana quickly found she could use that strength to excel in athletics. She tried every sport she could find from archery, to ping-pong to basketball, but from the start she fell in love with wheelchair racing.

It did not take long for Tatyana’s racing career to take off. In 2004, at the age of 15, she was the youngest member of the USA track and field team at the Athens Paralympic Games, her first international competition. She shocked the world in the process, winning a silver medal in the 100 meters and a bronze in the 200m.

Two short years later, Tatyana etched her name in the record books, winning the gold medal in the 100m in world record time at the 2006 IPC World Championships in Assen, Netherlands. She followed that performance with two silver medal performances in the 200m and 400m, securing a spot as a “Beast” in international wheelchair racing heading in the 2008 Beijing Parlaympic Games.

Tatyana did not disappoint in Beijing, coming home with four medals, winning silver in the 200m, 400m and 800m and a bronze in the 4x100m relay.

The ESPY winner will be chosen by online poll, and voting closes July 9. You can vote for McFadden via a link on her homepage.

Writer Jillian Lauren to Debut One-Woman Show in Hollywood

 

When I picked up Jillian Lauren's memoir SOME GIRLS in the bookstore last fall, I had no expectations. I love reading memoirs, and I'm trying to write one too, so I simply consume as many as I can. The book's subtitle, MY LIFE IN A HAREM, promised that Lauren would answer an unusual question: How does a nice young girl from New Jersey end up a courtesan in the harem of the Sultan of Brunei? Frankly, I was surprised that what I got from her book was much more: a moving, coming-of-age tale about family, identity, femininity, and guess what? Adoption.

Lauren was adopted domestically as an infant, and her complicated feelings around adoption, identity and family are woven throughout her story. SOME GIRLS offers a glimpse into the world of high-class prostitution, but far more compelling for me was the author's eventual journey of healing that encompassed reuniting with her birth mother and later adopting a son of her own from Ethiopia.

These days, Lauren writes and blogs about the challenges that come with the "happy ending" of marriage and motherhood. If you happen to live in the LA area, you can be among the first to check out her latest creative project, an upcoming  one-woman show  at The Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood July 12 and 13. MOTHER TONGUE is described as a:

"new multi-character performance piece about blood, tribe and identity...Lauren explores the quest for a sense of belonging amidst various and often fractured cultural influences."

 

Sounds like  MOTHER TONGUE should be just as provocative and honest as her book.

The Blind Men, the Elephant and the Way We Talk About Adoption

Do you remember the East Indian fable about the blind men and the elephant? You probably heard it as a child.

 

 

Six blind men lived in a village. One day, they learned that an elephant had wandered nearby. The men were curious and wanted to find out more about the elephant, but since they couldn't see it, they all agreed that to touch a different part of the animal, and then compare notes:

 

"Hey, the elephant is a pillar," said the first man who touched his leg.

"Oh, no! it is like a rope," said the second man who touched the tail.

"Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree," said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

"It is like a big hand fan," said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

"It is like a huge wall," said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

"It is like a solid pipe," Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone (sic) of them insisted that he was right. It looked like they were getting agitated. A wise man was passing by and he saw this. He stopped and asked them, "What is the matter?"

They said, "We cannot agree to what the elephant is like." Each one of them told what he thought the elephant was like.

The wise man calmly explained to them, "All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all those features what you all said."

"Oh!" everyone said. There was no more fight. They felt happy that they were all right.

 

And so it goes with adoption:

If you are a birthmother who placed a child for adoption under duress, you "see" the elephant one way.

If you're a Korean adoptee raised by a white family in an all-white community, you see it another.

If you are the new parent of a beautiful baby boy after years of infertility, you may believe that you cradle the entire elephant in your arms.

You see where I'm going with this. Adoption is an emotional, complex issue. The deep feelings that each of us hold around it are intimately tied to our own personal experience; every adoption story is simultaneaously unique and reflective of the whole. As in the tale of the Blind Men and the Elephant, the arguing in the adoption world over who understands the truth is incessant. It's exhausting.

I started this blog nearly three years ago to share my own experiences and perspectives, which boils down to this:

I am right about adoption. And you are right. And you over there. And you, too. There is good. There is bad. There is beautiful.

If we are willing to listen to one another, to honor the experience and information that each of us brings to the table, maybe together we can reach a deeper understanding of the big picture. Maybe we can stop arguing and do some good for children in need. Maybe we can even feel happy about working together.

 

 

 

 

Ethiopian Adoptee Singing His Heart Out to Win Belgian Idool 2011

Meet Kevin Kayirangwa, an Ethiopian adoptee currently competing on Idool 2011, Belgium's version of American Idol. As of this writing, Kevin  is in the top 6. Here he is bravely tackling some classic Michael Jackson.

 

 

Adoption Writing Workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area with Lisa Marie Rollins

If you happen to live in the San Francisco Bay area, you might want to check out these upcoming summer writing workshops with writer, performer and scholar Lisa Marie Rollins.

Lisa developed the one-woman show Ungrateful Daughter: One Black Girl's Story of Being Adopted by a White Family...That Aren't Celebrities, which takes a comedic but intense look at her adoption experience in the 1970s. She's also pursuing a Ph.D. at Berkeley in African Diaspora Studies, where her work focuses on the phenomenon of white parents adopting black children.

Lisa is offering a series of workshops designed for adopted people, adoptive parents and birth parents:

“Adoption, My Voice, My Body: A Writing Workshop”
Oakland, CA

Do you have a story related to adoption and family you have been wanting to tell? Something to celebrate? Something you have been struggling with? Do you have a memory you would like to start writing down? A memoir you want to begin or keep writing on? This is an excellent workshop for both those who will for the first time be trying to consider how adoption has impacted their life and for those who have spent a lot of time considering their relationship to adoption. This workshop is for both experienced writers and those who have no writing experience. We will work from “where you are” to explore your stories, thoughts and ideas.

Week 1: For Adopted People (10 seats) – Sunday June 5th
This week welcomes all adopted people – same race, transracial / inter-country and kinship adoptees. We will spend time reading, discussing and writing our memories, our voices and our stories as adopted people and time focusing on our bodies as holding memory and histories that need to be spoken.

Week 2: For Adoptive Parents (10 seats) – Saturday June 11th
This week welcomes adoptive parents to spend time exploring your stories. We will spend time reading, discussing and writing your memories, your voices and time with the concepts of family, mothering and fathering in a way that will focus on your own specific stories of the challenges and joys of adoptive parenting.

Week 3: For Birth Parents (10 seats) – Saturday June 18th
This week welcomes all Birth Parents, both mothers and fathers together to write. We will spend time reading, discussing and writing your stories, thoughts and ideas about your connection or disconnection to the children in your life who are also impacted by adoption and your body as it remembers the past.

 

For more information, visit Lisa's website.

Gotcha Day Adoption Celebrations Provoke an Incredible Range of Responses

 

My latest post on my blog, Be Bold or Go Home, for Adoptive Families Circle, is called Why Our Family Doesn't Celebrate Gotcha Day -- and a lively debate is kicking up in the comments section over there.

If you're new to the adoption world, you may not be familiar with this term that refers to the day that the adoptive parents take custody of their new child. Some find "gotcha" offensive, and prefer to say "Adoption Day" or "Family Day," and some, like me, choose to skip it altogether. In this post, I wanted to take a quick tour around the 'Net for a few more Gotcha Day perspectives.

WikiPedia reports that Primary Care Pediatrics, a 2001 guidebook for family practitioners by Carol Green-Hernandez, Joanne K. Singleton, and Daniel Z. Aronzon, advises doctors to encourage adoptive families to celebrate the day:

The provider who encourages the adoptive family to commemorate the anniversary of their child's homecoming supports them in their celebration of family, strengths, and bonds."^[5] The "'Gotcha Day' is distinguished from the day of birth, perhaps marking the rupture of the child's biological family and her social rebirth into an adopted family."^[4]

 

Describing Gotcha Day as a "social rebirth" would be understandably upsetting to a lot of adoptees, given the implicit message of "death" with regards to the birth family. Whether an adoption is open or closed, whether the first parents are living or dead, a child always retains ties to her biological parents in some form. "Marking the rupture" on an annual basis doesn't sound like a great recipe for  bonding -- and of course, that's not the intention of most adoptive parents.

The pro-Gotcha Day commenters on my AF blog describe the anniversary as a chance to make their child feel special, sometimes with a party, a favorite meal, or a fun family outing. Many use Gotcha Day as an opportunity to retell the child's adoption story and look at home movies and photos taken on the pick up trip to the child's country. One woman even reported that she's taking her daughter to swim with the dolphins at Disney World to mark the child's third Gotcha Day -- and she strongly feels that ignoring this day sends a message of shame about adoption that will leave kids in need of "therapy" down the road!

 

On the other hand, Judy M. Miller, the adoption writer and educator aka The International Mom, raises some provocative questions about Gotcha Day on her blog:

Adoption always has more than one aspect to it. Within this great joy of claiming, there has been profound loss. And by joining together, something priceless has been given up. An identity has been altered forever.

• While their intentions are noble, do adoptive parents actually create more issues for their children as they grow older?
• Do adoptive parents focus too much on how their children came to them? On how they became a family?
• By celebrating such a day, are are adoptive parents making adoption an issue for their child?

 

Adult Adoptee  and adoptive parent Dr. John W. Raible takes the critique a step further:

The separation of a mother and child is painful and heart-breaking. It should be remembered and honored in a deeply serious way. People need to recognize that what we know as adoption is built on this painful, heart-breaking scene, multiplied a million times, over and over and over, all around the world.

 

This piece at Beliefnet, a website devoted to inspiration, spirituality and faith, offers parents a guide to creating a Gotcha Day ritual "marking a child's entry into a community of loved ones" that comes from Barbara Biziou's book, The Joy of Family Rituals. Clearly, the intention of this ceremony is to honor the child's adoption in  a serious and thoughful way, yet again, the ties to the first family are ignored. If you were a child, how would you feel about this?

Close relatives and friends gather in a circle, and a pink candle is lit to symbolize the group's love for the child. Each person talks about the importance of having the child in the family and community. Then the parents explain in age-appropriate terms why they wanted a child, what they had to go through, and what happened on the day they first saw their child.

"Be as descriptive as possible about the circumstances -- going to a hospital, a home, or a lawyer's office, or perhaps making a trip to another country to pick up the child," Biziou writes. "Talk about what it felt like to hold him, what you did first when you got home, how strange and wonderful it was to have this new life in the house. This story is part of a family legend. Even if the child has heard it a hundred times before, most children delight in the repetition."

To close the ritual, ask the child to stand in the middle of the circle while a blessing is recited. Group members can place their hands on the child. "End with a ceremonial buffet of all your child's favorite foods and music," Biziou advises. She adds that if a child was adopted from another culture, it is important to incorporate their traditional food and music into the annual celebration.

Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/2011/Parenting/2000/06/Gotcha-Day.aspx#ixzz1G2BSptsC

 

Personally, I think this ritual could be positive beautiful if it incorporated a remembrance of the birth family in some way -- but I could only imagine doing it once. Repeating such a ritual annually feels like it would overemphasize the weight of the child's adoptive status in the family. The goal of any Adoption Day tradition should be to make the child feel especially loved, not to make her feel especially different.

How do you feel about Gotcha Day?

 

How to Help the Orphans of Cambodia?

Everywhere I turn lately, it seems I find a story about the challenges of assisting Cambodia's poor and orphaned population.

Aljazeera English recently ran a report on the apparent trend of volunteer tourism in Cambodia. According to the network, Cambodia has more than 600,000 orphans. Young Western volunteers are paying thousands of dollars to tour companies to arrange volunteer gigs, but frequently none of that money is passed on to the orphanages where the volunteers serve. The story raises concerns about the qualifications of the volunteers, and the safety and emotional well being of the children, who grow attached to the visitors who will ultimately leave them behind.

 

Over at  Huffington Post, Ken Wong, director of the Face-to-Face AIDS Project, asks, "Is Charity Doing More Harm than Good in Cambodia?" He describes a repeating scenario there that's reminiscent of the cycle of urban gentrification here in the US: the government forces a poor community to relocate. NGOs come in and improve the new slum with schools, sanitation, etc. These improvements make the adjacent areas more attractive to commercial development, and soon government and commercial interests push the poor out again to take over the improved land, and the cycle repeats. Says Wong:

We go in to places like Samron Meanchey, help improve the quality of life of its people, make the area look better... And then someone sees profit in the area and in come the bulldozers and out goes our people. Better today, gone tomorrow -- and gone without a trace... 

 
That leads us to question if our charity is doing more harm than good -- are we supporting an environment where charities like SCC and Face-to-Face are helping others make profits, while they leave us to support their own peoples?

In other words, shouldn't Cambodia be striving to develop itself so that it's able to help its own? And shouldn't nonprofits like us be working toward a future where we're no longer needed?

Yes, yes, and well, definitely yes.

Now that's settled, the question is how to go about doing this. I'm thinking that Face-to-Face and SCC should place more emphasis on nurturing a culture of charity in the places we work. Take our poorest of the poor, and as we raise their quality of life just a bit, we also nurture them to develop into future role models who help their own.

Some might say this is capacity building. Others might say that it's not holding the reins of charity mission so tightly.

I say it's about changing our charity attitudes. Better today, gone tomorrow. Well, we might just be able to turn that into a good thing.

Finally, from the Poverty New Blog, I learned that the Cambodian government has drafted a strict law to regulate NGOs, giving authorities the power to shut down any NGO without appeal. Critics say the bill is an attempt to restrict public freedom.

As I sift through these various articles, it seems clear to me that:

-Cambodia has a population of children who would benefit from the resumption of the country's international adoption program

-It's unclear if the government has the capacity and/or will to create a program that won't be plagued by allegations of misconduct, as it has in the past -- even though Cambodia has long been expected to begin accepting new adoption dossiers as early as next month.

According to the US State Department website:

On December 3, 2009, new legislation on intercountry adoption was signed into law in Cambodia.  The new law seeks to create a country-wide comprehensive child welfare system and an intercountry adoption process in compliance with the Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention (the Convention) to which Cambodia is a party.  This is an important first step in Cambodia's expressed commitment to reform its child welfare system and meet its treaty obligations under the Convention.  In order to be able to establish necessary regulations and standard procedures to implement the new Law on Intercountry Adoption, the Cambodian Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation has announced a temporary suspension of the receipt of all new intercountry adoption dossiers until March 2011.  This will not adversely affect any U.S cases since no new cases have been submitted in the last several years.

At this time, it is not possible to estimate when adoptions will resume between the United States and Cambodia.  In order to implement the new law in full, Cambodia will first need to establish the necessary government structures to support it, draft and finalize prakas (Ministerial orders/regulations), and determine and fill staffing and training needs.  Issues related to transparency in fees, procedural safeguards, determination of a child's eligibility for intercountry adoption, criminal penalties and the creation of a strategy to formalize and strengthen the domestic adoption system will all need to be addressed effectively.

The United States continues to support Cambodia's desire to create a child welfare system and an intercountry adoption process that fulfills its obligations under the Hague Intercountry Adoption Con

 

Adult Adoptee from Korea Asks Oprah to Give Orphans a Voice on Her New Network

Korean adult adoptee Mee Sun has created a You Tube video that she hopes will persuade Oprah Winfrey to create a program on the new Oprah Winfrey Network exploring the plight of orphans around the world. Mee Sun, who came to the US at the age of 8, has also launched a website as part of her campaign. She says:

My HOPE is that if/when Oprah should see this, that she will create a show DEDICATED to helping to educate the masses about all the various issues and complexities surrounding Orphans: Adopted, Foster and Homeless kids around the world. My DREAM would be that she would hire me to work on this project with her and her team. I realize I probably have a better chance of winning the lotto, but I am FINALLY following my heart and putting faith in God, that if this is my Purpose – maybe my Dream will come true!

Meantime, I hope those who see the video (especially others who are orphans, adopted, foster and homeless kids like me), will find a glimmer of HOPE for their lives, and that you will take ACTION and perform even one act of kindness and compassion to a child less fortunate – You will be AMAZED at how your heart is FILLED when you do!

Here is her video:

 

Terminally ill Korean Adoptee Working to Help Other Orphans Find Homes

Amy Saxon of the Associated Press has written a story about California businessman Sam Han, a 65-year-old terminally ill cancer patient who is dedicating the rest of his life  to helping orphans.

Han was separated from his parents during the Korean war, was taken in by a farming family for a time, and then survived on the streets of Seoul. A chance encounter with an American working in Korea after the war led to his eventual adoption:

[Han] ... dreamed of becoming a doctor to help the sick he saw lying in the fields he crossed when his family fled.

A church official helped him find a place to stay in a piping hot room above a bread oven and a job cleaning the bakery below.

That left the 12-year-old little time to sleep - let alone study.

He needed a way out.

Han went to a local hospital, hoping to learn about medicine. A receptionist tried to shoo him away, but two American officials who overheard his dogged conversation with the receptionist asked to speak with him.

One of them was Arthur Schneider, a forestry expert and University of Minnesota professor in Korea to help rebuild Seoul National University after the war. After listening to the boy for two hours, Schneider offered to pay for his education.

Over the next four years, the two became close. When Schneider's contract was running out, he petitioned to adopt Han and bring him to the United States.

Schneider had to prove Han's parents, missing for a decade, were no longer alive. They learned Han's father had died. They tracked down his mother, who had remarried, and she agreed to let her son go to America.

Schneider then had to persuade U.S. lawmakers to let him bring the 16-year-old across the Pacific. U.S. law did not let single parents bring adopted children from overseas, and Schneider lobbied hard for an exception.

Copies of letters sent to lawmakers by Schneider's friends and family touted his character, Han's potential as a future American and the positive effects the pair's travel could have on diplomatic relations with Korea.

In 1961, Congress passed the bill on Han's behalf.

Han remembers scores of reporters waited for them to arrive at the airport in New York.

"I have been very fortunate. I have been much loved by so many people," Han said, recalling his first trip to America.

Han grew up to be a highly successful businessman, but when he was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago, he sold off most of his assets to clear debts from a struggling venture. He then moved in with his daughter and sunk his last $50,000 into founding the  Han-Schneider International Children's Foundation, an all-volunteer organization that sends meals to two state-run North Korean orphanages and help support orphanages in Cambodia and Tanzania.

He is also lobbying for a bill to encourage Congress to let Americans adopt North Korean orphans. Opponents say the proposal could prevent families from reuniting and prompt trafficking of North Korean children.

Han, however, believes the bill will help children, like the destitute boy he once was, make a new life.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/28/MNLS1H0K0L.DTL&ao=2#ixzz19WV6xqDi