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

Are Adoptions Really Worse in Ethiopia?

 

 

For the past week, I've been trying to muster the energy to address the lastest stories about Ethiopia's adoption program. Investigative reporter and adoption critic E.J. Graff published an opinion piece in The American Prospect on May 3 that disturbed those who believe that Ethiopia still has many kids who could legitimately benefit from international adoption. Titled without subtlety as  Don't Adopt From Ethiopia, the piece discusses a recent case study in adoption published by The Wall Street Journal, Inside Ethiopia's Adoption Boom, in which journalist Miriam Jordan interviewed both the biological and adoptive families of a 7-year-old girl, Melesech Roth.

Where to start? How about with Graff's op-ed conclusion:

 

When absurdly large amounts of money are exchanged between a wealthy country and a devastatingly poor country, here's what happens: unscrupulous middlemen scour the countryside and defraud poor families out of their children.

 

Yes, this can and does happen. Melesech's father told The Wall Street Journal that a middleman persuaded him to send his daughter abroad for adoption, and it's clear he didn't fully understand exactly what that would mean. This type of criticism is leveled at international adoption all the time, and while the Journal article shows that this concern is real, there's an unrealistic assertion that goes along with this line of thinking, which maintains that cutting off a country's foreign adoption money will somehow curb the exploitation of poor families and their children. End international adoption and you end exploitation, so the thinking goes. If only it were that simple.

Sadly, the root of the problem in developing nations isn't international adoption, it's poverty. Children and bought and sold and trafficked for all kinds of nefarious purposes. According to a 2011 report by the UN Refugee Agency:

 

Ethiopia is a source country for men, women, and children who are subjected to conditions of forced labor and sex trafficking. Girls from Ethiopia's rural areas are forced into domestic servitude and, less frequently, commercial sexual exploitation within the country, while boys are subjected to forced labor in traditional weaving, herding, guarding, and street vending. In 2010, the Southern Nations/Nationalities Peoples Region (SNNPR) Tourism and Culture Bureau reported that brokers, tour operators, and hotel owners are increasingly facilitating child prostitution as tourism expands in the region. Small numbers of Ethiopian girls are forced into domestic servitude, agricultural labor, and prostitution outside of Ethiopia, primarily in Djibouti and Sudan, while Ethiopian boys are subjected to forced labor in Djibouti as shop assistants, errand boys, domestic workers, thieves, and street beggars...

The Government of Ethiopia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. The government made substantial progress over the past year in addressing human trafficking crimes through law enforcement efforts, which included the country's first convictions for both transnational sex trafficking and internal labor trafficking.

 

Poor families are too often misled with promises of education or honest employment for their children, and inadvertently send them into harm's way. Others may sell their children out of desperation. This is in no way a defense of dishonest adoption practices or an argument in favor of adoption as a lesser evil. It is, however,  a call for big-picture thinking. We need to address the roots of poverty so that we make it easier for biological families to stay together. If Melesech's father had been given the support he needed, it's unlikely he would have placed her for adoption. It's also possible that, leaving the adoption option aside but lacking community support, Melesech and her family  might have been exploited by a different sort of middleman.

 

So what about Graff's advice to prospective adoptive parents to avoid Ethiopia? She writes:

 

Here's the rule of thumb: If you can get a healthy infant or toddler within a year, don't adopt from that country. Adopt, instead, from American foster care, or from countries that send abroad very few children, and when they do, the children who are available are older, or disabled, or come in sibling groups, or otherwise have had trouble finding new local homes. Or if you're adopting for humanitarian reasons, donate that money an organization that helps children stay with their families, or brings clean water and mosquito nets and medicines to their villages. 

For all her talent as a journalist and her experience as the parent of domestically adopted child, Graff is misguided and ill-informed . Let's count the ways:

1. If you can get a healthy infant or toddler within a year, don't adopt from that country.  Adopt, instead... from countries that send abroad very few children, and when they do, the children who are available are older, or disabled, or come in sibling groups, or otherwise have had trouble finding new local homes.  

 It hasn't been possible to adopt a healthy infant or toddler from Ethiopia in less than a year since about 2007. Currently, Children's Home Society and Family Services, the agency highlighted in the Wall Street Journal article, is only accepting applications for boys 36 months or age and up, and for children of either sex over the age of 60 months. Wide Horizons for Children will only entertain applications for children over the age of 48 months or sibling groups in which one child is school aged. Gladney and Dove, two other big agencies with previously well established programs, are no longer taking applications for Ethiopia at all.

Only six or seven years ago, Ethiopia was the new, fast-moving adoption program, which helped draw prospective parents in droves. The Ethiopian government quickly allowed dozens and dozens of international agencies to set up shop; I believe this rapid expansion made effective oversight impossible. Now we are seeing the course correction, with the government de-licensing questionable organizations or agencies curtailing their own programs voluntarily. When Ethiopia was moving at its fastest, the it was a small program sending relatively few children abroad. Graff designates a program that sends fewer children abroad as more ethical, but Ethiopia's history shows us that it's not that simple.

I agree with Graff that if  a program or agency claims to have lots of infants available for fast adoption, prospective parents need to ask questions -- but that's not what's happening in Ethiopia now. The need is for families who can provide for older children and sibling groups, but Graff doesn't seem to recognize that in these respects, Ethiopia today meets her advisory criteria.

2. Adopt, instead, from American foster care.

Graff is right -- we have children in need  in our own system, and I would hope that families would consider this option. Still, I cringe when I hear Graff and others promoting fost-adopt as more ethical than international; you don't have to do much digging to find a devastated parent here in the US who feels that our system ripped away his or her beloved child in favor of adoption. Many of the children in the system are not legally free for placement.

3. If you're adopting for humanitarian reasons, donate that money an organization that helps children stay with their families, or brings clean water and mosquito nets and medicines to their villages.

A few years ago, a couple I know decided against international adoption for just this reason; they felt they could help more children by donating the money they'd spend in adoption fees. Fast forward to now: this couple has never pulled together $15,000 to bring clean drinking water to an African village, but they have birthed several biological kids who are benefiting from their family's financial and emotional resources.I don't think they're unusual.

The people I know who are heavily engaged in humanitarian work overseas are either missionaries/religious folks, families with internationally adopted kids who are engaged in projects for their child's birthland, or diaspora members who want to give back to their countries of origin. The reality is that connection to a place creates  a commitment to its people. And if E.J. Graff doesn't believe in adopting for humanitarian reasons, what reasons are right?  If infertility is the only justification, then why must the infertile be the only humanitarians among us, adopting, as Graff says, children who are "older, or disabled, or come in sibling groups, or otherwise have had trouble finding new local homes?"

Can you follow what I'm saying? Graff's argument is so tangled and contradictory it's hard to untangle it enough to critique! As someone who personally adopted siblings and older kids for humanitarian reasons, I honestly can't figure out what Graff believes is the right and ethical path. Maybe that's because adoption is far too complicated for simple rules of thumb. Every situation is specific; prospective parents need to think through the specifics presented before them and weigh the moral and ethical implications in each situation.

So, to get the the point, is it fair for Graff to say that Ethiopia at this time is an adoption option to avoid? Is Ethiopia really worse than other places?

In December 2011, Kathryn Joyce reported in The Atlantic that the picture in Ethiopia had improved. Even UNICEF, considered by some to be notoriously anti-adoption in its practices, noted that Ethiopia has cleaned up its program:

The adoption landscape is changing rapidly in Ethiopia. Amid mounting evidence of fraud and ethical problems, the Ethiopian government announced in March that it was putting the brakes on its international adoption program, slowing by 60 to 90 percent the rate at which it processes paperwork for children being internationally adopted. It also revoked the license of one adoption agency accused of creating fraudulent documents for adoptees. In July, the government began implementing a plan to close one third of the nation's orphanages, shuttering those it found were functioning more as transitional homes for the adoption industry rather than providing care for children in need; to date, 23 in the SNNPR region have been shut down. People with knowledge of the industry told me that agencies were firing staff in response to the slowdown and a number of agencies were expected to face closure without the revenue stream of steady Ethiopian adoptions. A UNICEF analysis of Ethiopian court data, however, indicates that the slowdown didn't last long and that this fall, the number of adoptions being processed has bounced back to normal levels.

Still, UNICEF's Doug Webb said that the environment in which these abuses took place has changed dramatically in the past year. "There are people in government who are very concerned about this, but we've turned a big corner here. The situation is over where alleged abuses were ignored, swept under the carpet; where nobody was listening and there was too much money involved."

"In many ways," Webb said, "that story is done. The climate has changed so much. Now it's discussed more openly. The government at the highest levels is speaking out against abuses in the system."

 

Adoptive Parents vs. UNICEF: the Latest Round

 

Earlier this week, Washington Times columnist Andrea Poe fired another round at UNICEF at The Red Thread blog. In "Why I Won't Buy UNICEF Holiday cards," she says:

UNICEF has been very successful in marketing its cards to unsuspecting Americans, who do not know about its stance against the world’s orphans finding permanent families in the U.S.  In fact, UNICEF rakes in about $16.8 million from sales of cards and related products, according to a United Nations report for 2010. 

In recent years, UNICEF has taken a radical position against orphans, insisting that life in the country of birth is always preferable than life with an adoptive family in another country even when that means children are condemned to orphanages.  So much for those handholding holiday cards.  Good-bye, one-ness.  Hello, border patrol.

 

Reader comments on the post are predictably divided, with many pointing out that UNICEF's policy papers support international adoption as a viable option for some children. Other readers insist we need look at UNICEF's actions, not its words.

One commenter in particular grabbed my attention. "An Adoptive Parent" wrote:

Most people don't realize that International adoptions to the US are down 60% over the last 6 years from about 23,000 children to 9,000.  However there are more and more children orphaned every year.  By Unicef's own estimate of the number of orphans grew from 132 Million in 2005 to 153 Million in 2009. 

I did a quick fact check (or, what counts a "quick" check, given how hard it is to navigate UNICEF's site) and I verified the 2009 statistic offered by the commenter here. I couldn't locate the 2005 statistic for comparison, even though I spent more than 30 minutes scanning UNICEF's 2005 report on the state of the world's children, which I downloaded as a PDF from this page. Yet I was struck by the 2005 report's warning of an explosive orphan crisis due to AIDS -- and found NO mention of domestic or international adoption as a solution for any children.

 

 

Carnegie Council for Ethics Looks at International Adoption

 

The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs has just released a thoughtful essay on international adoption policy by Alison M. S. Watson, Head of the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. The piece,titled, Love and Legislation: The International Politics of Inter-country Adoption, focuses on the ethical limitations of the Hague Convention and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child where adoption is concerned, as well as the negative and incoherent attitude many international stakeholders display toward ithe issue. Professor Watson writes:

The debate surrounding inter-country adoption is not made any clearer by the somewhat negative tone that some of the most powerful intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations (NGO's) that advocate for children assume in their views.

For example, UNICEF states that it supports inter-country adoption, when it is carried out in line with the standards and principles of the Hague Convention, but that it is a practice that can also pose significant problems and risks if children are unnecessarily denied the opportunity to live with their parents or relatives and/or are exposed to trauma and long-term emotional problems. UNICEF also states that the financial aspects of international adoption can encourage malpractice and accelerate the proliferation of poor quality orphanages, as well as diverting resources from the development of good quality alternative care for children in their own communities.

There is no doubt that there is truth in such statements—adoption does have a life-long impact on any child, and there are indeed financial incentives that can encourage malpractice. But many would argue that the amount of lip-service paid to these issues is out of proportion with the extent of these malpractices themselves. This is not to say that cases of corruption and child laundering do not take place—they absolutely do; however seeing inter-country adoption as somehow commensurate with such malpractice is to take a distorted view. Moreover, such sentiments take much away from the majority of bona fide adoptive parents who often spend significant time ensuring that their adoptions are ethical, and on trying to minimize the long-term ill effects on their child.

Read the entire piece if you can. It's well worth it.

 

 

Updated: A Virtual Look Inside a Christian Conference on Orphan Care and Adoption

This post has been updated from its original version.

Last month's critical  article in The Nation on the evangelical Christian orphan care/adoption movement provoked a lot of hand-wringing in the blogosphere, both among concerned skeptics and observers who fear the movement truly is a dangerous crusade, as well as among Christians within the movement who felt the article misrepresented the spirit and intent of their efforts.

International Law Professor Sara Dillon found The Nation piece to be profoundly disappointing. On her blog All the Social Orphans, she writes:

 

In “The Evangelical Adoption Crusade” Joyce seeks to associate international adoption with a radical Christian right plot to steal the children of the developing world from their rightful homes……Her piece is so profoundly flawed, so dismissive of the facts, that it is hard to know where to begin...

While seemingly “progressive”, Joyce attempts to taint international adoption as a whole by linking it with a scary subculture of orphan-obsessed evangelicals. She provides no investigative data on the actual lives of children living out of family care around the world; she completely misreads the UNICEF perspective on international adoption; she uses a couple of anecdotes about particular people in the Christian orphan advocacy movement to stereotype and demean the motives of a vast array of social orphan advocates.

Amen!

Since the words "Christian" and "adoption" make a lot of people apoplectic when they appear in the same sentence, let me tell you where I stand: I am a Christian. However, I attend an Episcopal Church that is emphatically not evangelical and not  part of the broad orphan care movement. (There's a reason they call Episcopalians "The Frozen Chosen.")  I am deeply passionate about international child welfare issues, and I'm sure that stems in part from my faith, but at the same time, I'm as nervous about adoption for conversion or salvation's sake as your average atheist.

I've been investigating and evaluating the Christian orphan care phenomenon for the past year, and here's the bottom line for me: the Christian orphan care movement is the only place where a critical mass of ordinary citizens are engaged in addressing international child welfare issues and the global orphan crisis, and the rest of us need to pay attention. Also, there are a lot of thoughtful, intelligent people involved. Rather than assuming we know what this movement is about, anybody who cares about child welfare needs to approach with an open mind and seek common ground with these folks in our concern for the world's destitute children.

Today and tomorrow, the Christian Alliance for Orphans is holding its seventh annual Summit in Louisville, Kentucky. I've been dying to attend one of these events to see firsthand what really goes on, but logistics haven't worked out for me so far (and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the prospect of attending in person freaks me out a little bit, especially given the threat of exposure to Christian rock music, which is so not my thing.) However, thanks to the miracle of the internet, anybody who's curious about these conferences can easily get a virtual look. Here are some links where you can get learn more about the Summit happening now:

• Dan Cruver, a leading pastor in the movement and founder of the Together for Adoption conference, is liveblogging from Summit here.
• Go here to find out what kinds of topics are being discussed.
• Read a blogpost from Kristen Howerton of Rage Against the Minivan, who is leading a panel discussion about how busy moms can advocate for orphans.
  
• You can also check out the bios of the conference presenters. One notable speaker who seems to be popular on the orphan care circuit is Dr. Karyn Purvis, whose guidebook for adoptive parents called The Connected Child is widely read and recommended by secular professionals as well.

 

The Nation Looks (Askance) at "The Evangelical Adoption Crusade"

The Nation has just released an article by Kathryn Joyce, "The Evanglical Adoption Crusade," that looks at the Christian adoption movement that has been building steadily for the past three to four years:

 

Adoption has long been the province of religious and secular agencies, but in the past two years evangelical advocacy has skyrocketed. In 2009 Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of the 2009 book Adopted for Life, shepherded through a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) resolution calling on all 16 million members of the denomination to become involved in adoption or “orphan care.” Last year at least five evangelical adoption conferences were held, and between 1,000 and 2,000 churches participated in an “Orphan Sunday” event in November. And in February, the mammoth evangelical adoption agency Bethany Christian Services announced that its adoption placements had increased 13 percent since 2009, in large part because of the mobilization of churches.

 

As with previous coverage of international adoption in The Nation, the piece skews subtly negative, pointing out genuine causes for concern around the evengelical movement, yet at the same time minimizing the scope of the global orphan crisis and the genuine need for response. Writes Joyce:

 

the central problem [is ] in how most evangelical adoption ministries define the scope of the worldwide “orphan crisis.” As with the misleading estimates of Haitian orphans, the global numbers most frequently mentioned—ranging from 132 million to 210 million—paint an inaccurate picture, willfully misconstruing UNICEF tallies of developing nations’ vulnerable children, a category that includes children who have lost only one parent or who live with extended family.

Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s chief of child protection, says no good estimate exists of the number of orphans worldwide, but a 2004 UNICEF report calculated that there were at least 16 million children worldwide who had lost both parents.

 

It seems unfair to accuse the evengelicals of intentionally misusing statistics when the real problem is that reliable statistics don't exist. Both the pro- and anti-adoption factions are working with the same "numbers," interpreted differently. While the media needs to address the serious issues and concerns in the international adoption world, wouldn't it also be great to see a magazine do an investigative piece uncovering the reasons why the international community can't come up with reliable child welfare statistics?  

The article also paints a picture of the evangelical community primarily driven to acquire children for Western conversion, giving short shrift to the many Christian orphan care initiatives working toward in-country solutions and family preservation.

Finally, Joyce predicts that with fewer stable adoption programs currently operating and the increased "demand" for children to adopt coming from the evangelical community, future crises in the adoption world are a given.

How do you feel about the Christian "adoption movement," and what  do you think of The Nation's reporting?

 

The "Orphan Doctor" Asks President Clinton to Step Into the Ethiopian Adoption Crisis

Dr. Jane Aronson, founder and CEO of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, has released an open letter to President Bill Clinton calling for his intervention in the emerging Ethiopian adoption crisis:

 

Once again, tragedy strikes orphans  – children who might have been adopted into a permanent home have had their hopes and dreams demolished.  This time it’s  Ethiopia, where international adoption has been growing rapidly over the last six years, beginning with a handful of older children in the 1980’s and 90’s.  By last year 2,500 children – sweet babies and toddlers - were adopted by American families.
Now, the Ethiopian government has announced that it is reducing the number of visas approved for adoption from 50 per work day to five. The outcry from those waiting to become parents, from adoption agencies and from for profit organizations advocating for children, is predictable and equally predictable, the world at large appears to be indifferent to the anguish this ruling is causing.  And so, the numbers of children adopted from Ethiopia will decrease, the time it takes to adopt will increase, and international adoption in general, and the children in particular, are the losers.

The destruction of international adoption has become the cure for a misdiagnosed disease.  Uninspired, bureaucratic, desperate decision-makers in governments, including our own, and in large child welfare organizations, raise the cry of “trafficking” and the rest is inevitable:  to protect the children and stop the trafficking – stop adoption.   

The real disease – the one not addressed - is much more complex.  It involves developing nations, communities without social welfare systems or resources to help families living in extreme poverty, suffering from illness, depression and hopelessness.    Without education, economic strengthening, and access to medical care, particularly HIV/AIDS care, families become desperate and relinquish their children to orphanages.  And when the numbers are too large and the government is too embarrassed and when those who believe a child is better off rotting by the side of the road than living in a different culture,  well, that’s when we start hearing “trafficking,”  and that’s when international adoption is slowed, then halted.  All in the name of the children.

In my 20 years as an adoption medicine specialist, this scenario has been played out in Georgia, Romania, Cambodia, Vietnam , Guatemala, Kyrgyztan, Kazakhstan, Nepal and now Ethiopia. Adoption is vilified, demonized and then (the children are) crucified. And every time this happens there are children and adoptive families trapped in the last steps of the adoption process or others almost there and some not able to fulfill their lifelong dream of  creating a family.  If you look historically at all the  countries that halted international adoption, you will find  thousands of children left to rot in institutions.   The trafficking stories never come close to even a small percentage of the children left to suffer for the rest of their lives. 

People close to adoption knew the decision in Ethiopia  was coming. There were murmurs everywhere that “irregularities, perhaps improprieties” were found in paperwork for children being referred for international adoption. New forms and more careful investigations were recommended by the US State Department,  and the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia worked diligently to ensure that the paperwork was prepared transparently.

But let’s get real.  The best paperwork in the world is not going to  fix a tragic social situation which is about the disintegration and dismantling of families due to poverty, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis,  malaria, natural disasters, conflict, and war.   Yes, there is trafficking, but with the Hague accords implemented, there just can’t be the same degree of trafficking, otherwise we have all just spent millions of dollars on an agreement to protect orphans which has in effect accomplished nothing.

I think that there is a place for adoption both domestic and international, but I am not so foolish as to think that adoption is the solution for millions of social orphans whose families were so poor  or ill that their desperate parents were driven to relinquish them to residential care facilities (also known as orphanages, institutions, children’s homes, hogars, leagans, dom rebyonka, mladost, crèches, etc.).

In the years that I’ve been helping parents prepare for adoption, I’ve always believed that we should have been investing in the social infrastructure of the “sending” countries.  If we had done this 20 years ago when I first entered this field, we would have had more permanency, family preservation, group homes, kinship and non-related foster care, family-based care, and community-based solutions for children without parental care. And if we had managed this social infrastructure as a capacity/community building endeavor, we could have continued international adoption for those children who were abandoned/relinquished and completely without any vestige of identifiable family.

In any case, here we are again….doesn’t anyone learn from the past? How childish of me to ask such a question! I can’t help myself because I have watched all of this unfold so many times in so many countries and here we are witnessing another disaster.  Thousands of kids will be left and parents will be stuck in limbo for months and even years…just look at each of the countries I noted above. You can go online and find the stories cached for years… as tragic as any earthquake or tsunami that leaves children stranded and alone.
No one wins. There is bitterness and anger and the orphaned children in institutions are nameless to most of us. There are families who know these children from pictures and visits and they all will suffer.  I am privy to many stories of parents waiting years to get their kids out of countries around the world…even herculean measures for some where parents visit their children several times a year in the orphanages watching their children become teenagers….

In fact, this is a hostage situation.  President Clinton, you secured the release of two young journalists a few years ago and I met them at the Glamour Woman of the Year Awards in 2009 when I was an award recipient.  Laura Ling and Euna Lee were freed because you thought their situation was grave enough to go to Korea and personally negotiate for their release. That’s what needs to be done now.   We need some diplomacy to pry open the lid for a moment.  The Ethiopian government’s concerns must be addressed, but so must the concerns of the waiting parents and most of all, of the children.  We need a strategic plan for de-institutionalization and community building. There are countless NGOs just like mine, Worldwide Orphans Foundation, prepared to sit down with government departments and other big NGOs to help come to the aid of the government to provide concurrent planning, adoption and social welfare infrastructure to fill in the gap  so that we don’t have yet another “Guatemala 900” and the continued bullying of adoption.

We need to use creative ways to help kids have permanency.

President Clinton, we need you…..

Dr. Jane Aronson
Founder and CEO, Worldwide Orphans Foundation

News Round Up: the Ethiopian Adoption Crisis

Here's a few links to some of the latest stories about the changes brewing in Ethiopia's adoption program.

Washington Times Columnist Andrea C. Poe writes on The Red Thread: An Adoptive Family Forum that "prospective parents should give great weight to a statement by Doug Webb, the chief of child protection at UNICEF in Addis Ababa, who in December said, 'The next 12 months are going to be crucial.'"

Interestingly, an Ethiopian news site has opted to reprint Poe's column on its pages; Poe is known as an international adoption advocate.

Journalist Melissa Fay Greene, the wise woman of Ethiopian adoption, has this to say about the slow down on her blog:

Clearly it’s in the interest of everyone — birth-families, institutionalized children, and adoptive parents — for the Ethiopian government to create an environment for fair, clean, responsible, transparent adoptions. Adoptive parents have been calling for oversight for years already. No adoptive parent wants to take in a child who has been wrongly whisked away from his or her first family. Unethical middlemen, unethical agencies, hoodwink not only birth-parents but adoptive parents; both sides suffer.

This clean-up HAD to happen. I worry about families and children who will be caught by this slow-down. For their sake I hope the overhaul happens briskly. Meanwhile, let us hope the government allows non-adoption programs for families and children impacted by poverty and disease to grow in strength and numbers.

 

Finally, here's a provacative video clip that is not new, but it has taken on a new resonance for me  in recent days as I ponder the fate of millions of Ethiopian children in genuine need. The Daily Beast held a conference in New York City last November called "Solutions for the Orphan Crisis," where Dr. Sophie Mengitsu, director of the Worldwide Orphans Foundation program in Ethiopia, made the startling claim that children are better off living in the streets than in institutions.

 

 

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

 

Adoptive Families Magazines Names the Top #Adoption Blogs...and Here's a Sample

Adoptive Families magazine came out with its list of the top 20 adoption blogs this week. Among the winners is Rage Against the Minivan, written by the amazing Kristen Howerton, who also founded Mama Manifesto, where I'm a contributor. Kristen and her husband Mark are the parents of four children: biological daughters India and Karis, and sons Jafta, adopted from foster care, and Kembe, adopted from Haiti. Today's post from Kristen on "Defining Orphan Culture" is a great example of why she's getting recognized:

I’m preparing to lead a workshop at the upcoming Idea Camp, and one of the aspects of my research is looking into the idea of “orphan culture”.   Culture is a huge topic of discussion in adoption circles: cultural loss, cultural heritage, cultural identity . . . and when we talk about it, we are invariably referring to a child’s racial or ethnic background.  As prospective adoptive parents we spend considerable energy educating ourselves on bridging the culture gap.  But as our Haitian son joined our family, what emerged as the greatest obstacle had very little to do with culture in the traditional sense.  It was the culture of family life that was most foreign to Kembe.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of a child’s cultural heritage and losses.  But I have to ask: does it really matter if we learn to make the perfect diri kole (or kimbap or injera) and remain oblivious to the ways our home environments and family systems are completely foreign?  Especially to a child who has spent most (or all) of his life in an orphanage or group home setting?

This is what I am really hoping to explore at Idea Camp.  We have a wealth of academic literature that tells us that institutionalized care is not best practice for the development of the psyche – but we live in a broken world and group care is an inevitable solution for the current orphan crisis.  It is also a solution in the US – though we substitute the word “group home” . . . perhaps to assuage our guilt, or perhaps as a positive reframe for the children, but the dynamics of institutionalized care are the same.  But I’ve seen very little research that talks about the culture that evolves in a group home setting, and how this shapes children as they either grow up in that setting, or eventually live in family environments.  It seems like everything I read focuses on the effects of deprivation of needs, which is related but perhaps not the whole picture for a child who is beyond the infancy period and has developed personality traits (both positive and negative) related to his or her environment.

We have such an idealized view of the orphan life – from Annie to Newsies to Oliver (in fact, is there a movie musical about children who are NOT motherless?)  We see orphans as the forlorn blank slate – the plucky yet sad child pining for family who embraces them with open and willing arms and lives happily ever after.   Parents who have adopted from hard places know that this is not how the story often goes.  On the other hand, I often hear of organizations who hope to raise children in orphanages to become the “future leaders of their country”.  And yet, we know from statistics of American foster care that children who age out are likely to have relational, occupational, and economic challenges.  Is it realistic to pose that children in 3rd world countries will have significantly different outcomes?

Head over to Rage Against the Minivan to read the rest of this post.

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: