Looking for the most recent details or links for further reading?
My twitter tends to include articles for further reading, retweets of others' interesting bits and pieces, links relating to posts found here, or late breaking details that have not made it into my blog posts. The Baby Love Child blog and Baby_Love_Child twitter are best read in tandem.
Finally gave in to the “dark side” (and the requests) and have set up a BLC twitter stream. (Note the new “follow me” button in the left hand column.)
I’ll be using it to announce new BLC posts and provide links to articles, webpages, and other blog posts of note. Some will likely be well written and worthy of serious contemplation. Other times I may post the purely lunatic, worthy of absolute contempt.
There is always more material to read and pass along than there is time to blog about it, so I’ll be adding a few select bits and pieces without much commentary. Bear in mind that merely because I post something, that often does NOT mean I agree with it or in any way endorse what it is saying.
I’m hoping it will serve as a resource, or “for further reading” compliment to the Baby Love Child blog.
Just bear in mind, twitter is the antithesis of analysis.
As the Haitian child exports are receiving a great deal of attention at the moment I’d like to welcome new readers and recommend a visit to my about page and my WTF page. They answer many basic questions and lay out my comments policy.
I am an adult adoptee, writing from an explicitly Bastard perspective on these matters.
Acting on persistent fears that homeless and orphaned children will be victimized by human traffickers, the Haitian government in Port-au-Prince has put the brakes on the large-scale migration of orphans destined for adoptive families in the U.S.
Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told The Miami Herald his government had considerable fears that children may be scooped up in the streets of Port-au-Prince by nongovernmental organizations. The government also has concerns that children may be trafficked into prostitution or slavery.
Bellerive said his country would not release children for adoption without his personal approval, and ordered nongovernmental organizations working in Port-au-Prince to stop collecting children found on the street.
It appears the Prime Minister signed off on three authorizations of kids for export, but other kids have been removed as quickly as possible before circumstances on the ground could change and thewindow of opportunity for those demanding children shuts.
“I, personally, Jean-Max Bellerive, the prime minister of the Republic of Haiti, signed three specific authorizations of adoption lists that were in the adoption process with people who are known for their services with children who are clearly identified as orphans,” Bellerive told The Herald.
As Bellerive’s order began to take effect, adoption workers, alerted by U.S. Embassy officials, scrambled over the weekend to move as many prospective adoptive children to the U.S. as possible.
“Orphanage” directors made a mad dash to get kids on planes:
LAST FLIGHTS?
A U.S. military cargo plane flew about 50 Haitian orphans to Sanford, near Orlando, at 1:30 a.m. Monday after leaders of the His Home for Children orphanage in Port-au-Prince were told such flights would likely be suspended later that day, said Chris Nungester, the orphanage director.
“We were advised to get the children out of their beds, get them dressed and load them into trucks to get them to the airport, so they could immediately be placed on the next available flight,” Nungester said. The U.S. Embassy, she said, had told her such flights were coming “to a screeching halt.”
Another large Port-au-Prince orphanage, His Glory Adoption Outreach, flew 79 orphans to Florida last week, but was forced to leave another 27 children behind, as Haitian social service workers were concerned that they had not completed their adoption paperwork.
The first ministry/”orphanage” mentioned here, His Home for Children, is perfectly up front about the fact that some of the kids at the facility have living relatives, claiming that the kids were “abandoned” (see the “Facilities” page,)
While some of the children are orphans, many have been abandoned to the home by a single parent who is unable to provide for them due to extreme poverty
In my series pertaining to the Haitian adoptions, I have repeatedly underscored the cultural and legal differences between Haitian and American style ‘adoptions’ and how informed consent under these circumstances is sketchy at best. Also, here on my blog, I’ve mentioned again and again how “orphanages” utilize “temporary care” as a means to pry loose kids who are immediately made available for adoption, simply due to having been labeled or mislabled “abandoned.”
The creche, Maison des Enfants de Dieu, is home to approximately 125-130 children that have been abandoned either by loss of parents or by birth parents that cannot care for them.
“Mission work in Haiti faces enemy onslaught as this is a country that is yearly dedicated to Satan in a contractual form. There are voodoo practices and worship of the dark.”
While some may find that statement rather stunning, it is sadly a more common attitude within the evangelical and “missions” subculture than many would care to think. Pat Robertson’s comments along these lines were merely a reflection of a commonly held belief across numbers of people within his subculture.
An historic explaination of the role of Voudou symbolism, language, and drumming is beyond the scope of this post, suffice it to say, all played a role in Haiti’s revolution, a fact that was not lost on slave owners in the United States and elsewhere.
The deliberate suppression of Voudou thus became important politically and culturally as a means of maintaining control. After centuries of “demonizing” indigenous African religious practices brought to the west, few should be surprised when people in for example, Texas begin using such as a basis for “saving” children from countries and culture they are religiously unwilling to coexist with.
The flight of For His Glory’s kids out of Haiti must be understood within this missionary context – they are not merely removing children from Haiti and placing them with American would-be-adopters, they view their adoption ministry work as removing children from a “Satanic” and “dark” land.
Ever the fans of “nuture” over “nature,” core to the evangelical mindset is that people can change if placed in the “right” context with the “right” influences.
Importing these children, who at least before the quake had living relatives, from Haiti to the United States, then is viewed as both great commission work, and “saving” the kids from life within a “Satanically” controlled and dedicated country.
As a Christian international adoption ministry, FHG seeks to place orphaned children in Christian homes and fulfill the Great Commission by offering the good news of the Gospel to those individuals with whom we come in contact.
For HIS Glory is unique in that our goal is to fulfill the Great Commission, reaching out to a physically and spiritually starving nation and giving God all glory as He works in and through us.
For HIS Glory is dedicated to offering the good news of the Gospel to birth parents of voluntarily orphaned children and those living in the surrounding areas, providing education and discipleship and preparing them for eternity.
Gotta love that phrasing, “voluntarily orphaned.” Apparently placing a child at (or losing a child to) the FHG “orphanage” is enough to become “orphaned.”
Clearly with definitions of “orphan” being flung around like this, the word can mean whatever missionaries want it to.
FHG accepts adoptive families that agree with the basic Biblical truths for salvation presented in this Statement of Faith, although they may differ on other points.
Above and beyond most of the other so called “orphanages” (or mission projects) Maison des Enfants de Dieu has been used as a central visual ‘justification’ throughout the last week or so for those advocating child exports.
Perhaps because it is a religious institution, perhaps because it is so central to and emblematic of what evangelicals are doing in Haiti, it has been featured repeatedly in media reports, both secular, christian, and LDS/Mormon (as some of the kids ended up in Utah.)
Throughout the last week numbers of kids both at the “orphanage” and in transit continued to fluctuate report to report, webpage to webpage.
The 79 who had received humanitarian parole status came into the United States on a flight Saturday, January 23.
Here is a typical example of coverage from earlier in the week from Faux news:
January 17, 2009 6:24 PM We just received word this evening from Frankise that the orphanage has 30 UN soldiers issuing medical care to our sick babies! Praise the Lord! We have also received aid today from the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien did a number of stories, some more propagandistic than others, about the “For His Glory” kids.
American would-be-adopters twitters and blogs went crazy, demanding the U.S. remove kids from the “orphanages” to the States after pieces of footage like this ran, in which the “orphanage” director alleges men with guns came to the “orphanage” twice, supposedly leaving each time without taking anything.
Would-be-adopters became convinced kids would be “looted” away from their clutches. Phones on Capitol Hill rang.
Soon enough, O’Brien’s own story over time morphed into “orphanages” being “robbed”. Capitol Hill got yet another another earful as would-be-adopter hysteria ramped up further by late last week. The “orphanage” itself added to such by posting this on their website:
Others are beginning to rob them of what supplies they do have.
Not long thereafter we began seeing pieces such as this featuring ‘justifications’ without overt and direct calls to remove the kids from the Joint Council on International Children’s Services (or JCICS), an industry trade group/adoption industry lobby.
Both the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) and the Joint Council have made desperate attempts to appear “reasonable” and “cautious” even as their member agencies clamor for and engage in the child exports.
False distinctions between agencies and their industry representatives in Washington are insincere at best.
I have been unable to find the report below on the CNN webpage but it’s from the 12pm hour on Thursday January 21 on CNN.
The “For His Glory” kids were being kept in the back of trucks at the Maison des Enfants de Dieu. Some were already dehydrated and sick. The kids were placed on buses in the 90+ degree heat and driven towards the U.S. Embassy before getting caught in traffic and eventually turned back. (Over the course of the week several trips were made.)
According to O’Brien’s account from the 21, the kids were vomiting on the bus and dehydrated even before they set out. She does not go into great detail, but makes brief mention of the anger of medical professionals working with the kids, describing them as “furious” that the kids had been moved in their conditions.
This is the video clip of that segment, my partner, Mike and I have uploaded.
It is vital to understand what these people did to these kids, and what those here in America put these kids through.
After living in the compound, the children were eventually dressed in clean clothes and taken towards their flight to the United States.
As the kids were being removed from the Maison des Enfants de Dieu, they were each marked with a magic marker on the arm “FHG” (For “For His Glory”.)
Naturally, this is only what CNN cared to show. More details of the rest of the send off can be found described here, in the Deseret News, a newspaper owned by the Mormon Church.
Each child who left Saturday had “FHG” written in Sharpie marker on the underside of his or her arm. The acronym stands for For His Glory, the nonprofit outreach program that supports the orphanage. Greg Constantino is the organization’s secretary and treasurer. He worked the phones from Salt Lake City.
Only kids with those letters on their arms were allowed on the bus going to the airport. And Kurt Tanner, a member of the Washington County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team, made sure of that. He checked each arm and rewrote on those whose letters had faded.
As each child stepped onto the bus, Rick Yeomans, chief chaplain for California-based Emergency Ministry Services, anointed each child’s head with oil from the Holy Land. He also led relief workers in a hand-holding prayer, asking God to bless this new chapter in the children’s lives. At the same time, a dozen nannies from the orphanage were rhythmically singing and dancing to send off the children.
We also learn of the “orphanage” attempts to ensure the kids would arrive stateside in clean clothes:
Nannies at the orphanage made sure the children who left Saturday traveled in clean clothing. Clothes have been strewn across the orphanage to dry all week. Each time it appeared the kids would be leaving, the nannies hand-washed their clothes in metal tubs.
“We are organized and ready to travel,” Tawnya Constantino said before getting the green light to head to the airport. “We’re just waiting for flight confirmation.”
Meantime, some 200 children played, cried and laughed in the Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage as several dozen nannies tended to their needs the best they could.
Several women mixed baby formula and cuddled newborns under a tent. Youngsters in fresh clothes lined up for a spoonful of cold cereal with milk. Seven toddlers clung to the rail of a crib. A dozen others played in a tent filled with mattresses.
But mostly the children wanted to be held. By anyone.
They walked up to strangers with arms outstretched and longing in their eyes.
Yeah, showing up in vomit encrusted dirty clothing and filth probably wasn’t going to go over so well with their soon-to-be-adopters. Might raise some unpleasant questions, that.
The answer to such basic human needs is not putting dehydrated and vomiting kids on 90+ degree buses to wait for hours, attempting multiple trips and facing long delays before putting them on an airplane for the flight to Florida.
The real answer is organized and effective distribution of humanitarian aid coupled with genuine access to medical care to the people of Haiti, all of them, kids and adults.
Not needlessly risking medically “compromised” kids lives further by shipping them to another country.
After the first flight out, the Maison des Enfants de Dieu remained the poster child for the American media. Faux news also ran a number of pieces most of them along these lines.
Meanwhile stateside, there is at least some further examination being done on some of the would-be-adopters:
“One of the things we’re concerned about is making sure all the groups that are claiming the children here are actually vetted,” said Jacqui Colyer, regional administrator for Miami-Dade and Monroe counties for the state Department of Children & Families. “We have ramped up our diligence and vigilance in looking at who these people are.”
In South Florida and Sanford, meanwhile, child welfare administrators bolstered their efforts to screen adoptive parents as well, requiring last-minute criminal background checks, for example, for families whose screenings were done years ago.
Among the concerns of child welfare workers: ensuring that none of the arriving children end up in the hands of human traffickers, Colyer said.
Once again, we see kids brought into the states and be brought directly into “faith based” infrastructures, essentially the outsourced and privitized child welfare system of Florida:
The 50 children who arrived Monday spent the day at His House Children’s Home in Miami Gardens, where they were treated to a traditional Haitian dinner of black rice with mushrooms, chicken or turkey and a large sheet cake decorated with fruit in the shape of an American flag, said His House’s spokeswoman, Iris Marrero.
“Welcome to America,” the cake proclaimed.
His House’s Mission:
His House Children’s Home is a faith-based social services agency fulfilling God’s directive to “defend the cause of the weak and the fatherless” by providing excellent care and a safe place to call home.
Without a hint of irony, His House Children’s Home includes within its welcome statement on its webpage the following (emphasis mine):
His House Children’s Home is a healing place giving wounded children a warm, loving home and renewed hope for a brighter future. We are coloring away the darkness in little hearts all over South Florida.
The article also makes mention of Florida’s first foster case from the kids being brought in with medical needs, emphasis added is mine:
Meanwhile, a severely injured infant of uncertain parentage became on Tuesday the first survivor of Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake to enter foster care in Florida. A Miami judge ordered the baby — who is being claimed by a family in Port-au-Prince — into the custody of state child welfare administrators.
The baby girl, whose case was heard in court Tuesday, believed to be between 2 and 3 months old, was airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital on Jan. 16 after she was discovered amid rubble with a fractured skull and two crushed arms, a DCF caseworker said in court.
DCF, which has been heavily involved in the repatriation of Haitian-American families as well as the processing of adoptive children from the island, asked Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jeri Beth Cohen to place the infant under the state’s care while investigators try to determine whether she has family in Haiti.
Cohen asked the agency to look “diligently” for the girl’s family, while at the same time beginning efforts to place the girl up for adoption in Miami should no family be found.
“We want to help,” Cohen said in court. “We don’t want to further traumatize this family. We must make sure we work very diligently to find her family. That is very, very important.”
The baby girl, whose name remains unknown, is believed to be the first child brought from Haiti to enter foster care in Florida. Another child may have been sheltered by federal immigration workers last week, Colyer said.
While the infant was recovering at JMH last week, her identity a mystery, a man and woman who thought their baby daughter had died in the rubble got word that their child had been found and flown to Miami.
A journalist working for ABC News who was passing by the rescue took the baby to a field hospital in Port-au-Prince and later returned to the crumbled home to find the family.
There, a relative gave her contact information for Junior Alexis and Nadine Devilme, who believe the baby in Miami is their daughter Jenny. Alexis, 24, had searched for the baby for days after the quake, which knocked Devilme, 23, unconscious.
The couple moved to a camp in front of the Canapé Vert Hospital.
Last week, they told a Miami Herald reporter that they had no proof that the baby in Miami was theirs. But Alexis said he was prepared to take any test necessary to prove fatherhood.
The International Committee of the Red Cross was contacted by officials at the hospital as well as the journalists who brought the baby to the triage center in Haiti.
Workers with the organization in Haiti have been trying to get in touch with the couple, according to the Red Cross.
So in Miami at least, they’re dual tracking those kids coming in under medical necessity; search for family, BUT AT THE SAME TIME begin adoption proceedings.
Yet another tale of yet another kid not in any adoption mechanism pre-quake undergoing at least the preliminary steps towards an American adoption now that they’re on American soil.
***
Finally, I strongly urge new readers to see my Haiti Series Introduction for a series of posts I have written as well as a number of links to pieces both here on the site and to what others have written in relation to the these Haitian adoptions and the ongoing human rights violations still unfolding.
Please read and share this Statement on Haiti released by the Adoptees of Color Roundtable of which AFAAD is a main collaborator: (Official AFAAD statement Wednesday, January 27th, 2010)
and this, with emphasis added by me,
Please contact the Adoptees of Color Roundtable by leaving a comment on the statement page if you would like to endorse this statement, and keep checking back as the site will soon be expanded.
Again, I strongly encourage all readers who have not already done so to spend some time reading over the Adoptees of Color Roundtable statement.
All adoptions from Haiti must be stopped and all efforts to help children be refocused on giving aid to organizations working toward family reunification and caring for children in their own communities.
I absolutely support and personally endorse their statement.
It must be read in full, and needs to be heard around the world.
This statement reflects the position of an international community of adoptees of color who wish to pose a critical intervention in the discourse and actions affecting the child victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We are domestic and international adoptees with many years of research and both personal and professional experience in adoption studies and activism. We are a community of scholars, activists, professors, artists, lawyers, social workers and health care workers who speak with the knowledge that North Americans and Europeans are lining up to adopt the “orphaned children” of the Haitian earthquake, and who feel compelled to voice our opinion about what it means to be “saved” or “rescued” through adoption.
We understand that in a time of crisis there is a tendency to want to act quickly to support those considered the most vulnerable and directly affected, including children. However, we urge caution in determining how best to help. We have arrived at a time when the licenses of adoption agencies in various countries are being reviewed for the widespread practice of misrepresenting the social histories of children. There is evidence of the production of documents stating that a child is “available for adoption” based on a legal “paper” and not literal orphaning as seen in recent cases of intercountry adoption of children from Malawi, Guatemala, South Korea and China. We bear testimony to the ways in which the intercountry adoption industry has profited from and reinforced neo-liberal structural adjustment policies, aid dependency, population control policies, unsustainable development, corruption, and child trafficking.
For more than fifty years “orphaned children” have been shipped from areas of war, natural disasters, and poverty to supposedly better lives in Europe and North America. Our adoptions from Vietnam, South Korea, Guatemala and many other countries are no different from what is happening to the children of Haiti today. Like us, these “disaster orphans” will grow into adulthood and begin to grasp the magnitude of the abuse, fraud, negligence, suffering, and deprivation of human rights involved in their displacements.
We uphold that Haitian children have a right to a family and a history that is their own and that Haitians themselves have a right to determine what happens to their own children. We resist the racist, colonialist mentality that positions the Western nuclear family as superior to other conceptions of family, and we seek to challenge those who abuse the phrase “Every child deserves a family” to rethink how this phrase is used to justify the removal of children from Haiti for the fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Western and Northern desire for ownership of Haitian children directly contributes to the destruction of existing family and community structures in Haiti. This individualistic desire is supported by the historical and global anti-African sentiment which negates the validity of black mothers and fathers and condones the separation of black children from their families, cultures, and countries of origin.
As adoptees of color many of us have inherited a history of dubious adoptions. We are dismayed to hear that Haitian adoptions may be “fast-tracked” due to the massive destruction of buildings in Haiti that hold important records and documents. We oppose this plan and argue that the loss of records requires slowing down of the processes of adoption while important information is gathered and re-documented for these children. Removing children from Haiti without proper documentation and without proper reunification efforts is a violation of their basic human rights and leaves any family members who may be searching for them with no recourse. We insist on the absolute necessity of taking the time required to conduct a thorough search, and we support an expanded set of methods for creating these records, including recording oral histories.
We urge the international community to remember that the children in question have suffered the overwhelming trauma of the earthquake and separation from their loved ones. We have learned first-hand that adoption (domestic or intercountry) itself as a process forces children to negate their true feelings of grief, anger, pain or loss, and to assimilate to meet the desires and expectations of strangers. Immediate removal of traumatized children for adoption—including children whose adoptions were finalized prior to the quake— compounds their trauma, and denies their right to mourn and heal with the support of their community.
We affirm the spirit of Cultural Sovereignty, Sovereignty and Self-determination embodied as rights for all peoples to determine their own economic, social and cultural development included in the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the Charter of the United Nations; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The mobilization of European and North American courts, legislative bodies, and social work practices to implement forced removal through intercountry adoption is a direct challenge to cultural sovereignty. We support the legal and policy application of cultural rights such as rights to language, rights to ways of being/religion, collective existence, and a representation of Haiti’s histories and existence using Haiti’s own terms.
We offer this statement in solidarity with the people of Haiti and with all those who are seeking ways to intentionally support the long-term sustainability and self-determination of the Haitian people. As adoptees of color we bear a unique understanding of the trauma, and the sense of loss and abandonment that are part of the adoptee experience, and we demand that our voices be heard. All adoptions from Haiti must be stopped and all efforts to help children be refocused on giving aid to organizations working toward family reunification and caring for children in their own communities. We urge you to join us in supporting Haitian children’s rights to life, survival, and development within their own families and communities.
I am publishing part 7 out of chronological order so as to be timely (this piece was published on Monday the 25th.) We’ll come back for parts 5 and 6 soon enough.
At the European Union foreign ministers meeting January 25th, a decision was made concerning whether or not additional EU countries will be “fast-tracking” child removals from Haiti.
Please see the comment below for the update to this piece.
***
As the Haitian child exports are receiving a great deal of attention at the moment I’d like to welcome new readers and recommend a visit to my about page and my WTF page. They answer many basic questions and lay out my comments policy.
If you are new to this series please backtrack and read the previous articles on my Haiti tag as this series relies upon definitions of words such as “orphanage” that I’ve already discussed in my previous Haitian posts.
Without at minimum reading the short Introduction, you will miss the context these parts or chapters were written in.
I am an adult adoptee, writing from an explicitly Bastard perspective on these matters.
***
Part 7: France and the European Union
The article makes several brief mentions of the French removal of children and the Unicef objections to their removal, rooted it attempts to preserve what shards of family history and identity the Haitian children have left now that the government held records, birth certificates and the like, have been destroyed in the quake ( a loss to Haitians and these uprooted children that stretches far beyond what words can express. Again, there’s an entire post to do right there, as well. So once again, I note the importance thereof, but try to continue on.)
Mayi Garneadia-Pierre, a Unicef child protection volunteer, at the orphanage of Our Lady of the Nativity, in Port-au-Prince, from where children were sent to France for adoption on Friday, is concerned about their future.
“We wouldn’t stop any child from being saved,” she said. “But when a child grows to 15-years-old he has an enormous need of signposts of his identity. It’s not abuse in the sense of mistreatment, but it’s abusive in the sense of making a permanent break. You need to keep links.”
Monday, at the European Union foreign ministers meeting, a decision was be made (see comment below) concerning whether or not the EU would fully join in on the adoption gold-rush (though note that Haiti *MAY* be acting to protect its children from export.)
The issue is expected to deeply divide a meeting of European Union foreign ministers on Monday after Spain proposed “speeding up procedures for adoption cases” across Europe.
Roelie Post, of Against Child Trafficking, a Brussels-based group, said: “It is madness. It is insane. If the EU supports this it will lend its power and credibility to an adoption industry driven by greed and money.”
The Spanish presidency of the European Union will next week urge the bloc to forge a common position on fast-track adoptions from Haiti, Madrid said Friday.
and
Several countries are fast-tracking adoption procedures already under way, including Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States.
Finally, the following chart represents United Adoptees International’s attempt to document some of the numbers on the kids being exported. It comes from the UAI news blog’s lefthand sidebar.
EXPEDITION LIST HAITIAN CHILDREN
In order to have an overview of numbers, the UAI herewith tries to collect the numbers of Haitian adoptions or airlifts since the earthquake:
TOTAL NO 24.01.2010 : 300 (between 18.01.-24.01.2010) 4450 awaiting.
The American numbers are low, I’ve documented more via news accounts of the flights, but this at least gives a starting place to understand what’s happening.
***
Read the comment below for the outcome of Monday’s meeting
***
Back to read part 4, (perhaps the most important piece of the series.)
As the Haitian child exports are receiving a great deal of attention at the moment I’d like to welcome new readers and recommend a visit to my about page and my WTF page. They answer many basic questions and lay out my comments policy.
If you are new to this series please backtrack and read the previous articles on my Haiti tag as this series relies upon definitions of words such as “orphanage” that I’ve already discussed in my previous Haitian posts.
Without at minimum reading the short Introduction, you will miss the context these parts or chapters were written in.
I am an adult adoptee, writing from an explicitly Bastard perspective on these matters.
***
Again, let me reiterate, there are more examples than I could possibly blog at this point. Part 4 is going to focus in on SOME examples, these are far from the only examples out there.
*** Part 4: Kids not in an adoption process being exported, bullies and bribes & the Rendells’ Raid
There have been a number of child export flights out at this point, some private or donated, others on American military flights returning after dropping off supplies.
The Dutch and Americans were among some of the earliest countries extracting kids, both of which have taken kids living in the so called “orphanages” (see my earlier posts for a discussion of what “orphanages” mean in the Haitian context) that were not in adoption processes at the time.
Here’s an AP story on the flight chartered by the Dutch Government. Some of the kids both finalized and non-finalized on the Dutch flight went to Luxembourg.
Nine of the children, who arrived in the Netherlands, were sent to foster homes because the rushed airlift meant that children had not yet been matched to parents.
Which means we’re talking about nine kids who were not in any adoption process prior to getting on the plane from Haiti. They were residents at orphanages, but there are a number of explanations for such, as I’ve been saying all along. Take this from the United States Department of State (by way of Ethica), again, emphasis mine:
In addition, some children who had been residing in orphanages before the earthquake were placed there temporarily by parents who could not care for them. In most of these cases the parents did not intend to permanently give up their parental rights. Even when it can be demonstrated that children have indeed lost their parents or have been abandoned, reunification with other relatives in the extended family should be the first option.
Against Child Trafficking expands beyond that, discussing both the pre-existing corruption in the Haitian system and what adoption means in cultural context to the Haitian people, emphasis mine:
Neal’s position is taken a step further by Roelie Post, of Against Child Trafficking, an NGO based in Brussels opposed to international adoption.
She said a report by Unicef in 2005 found the Haitian adoption system to be “untransparent”.”The issue at stake is that Haiti has for a long time been known as a country with not a good adoption procedure,” Post said.
“Orphanages are clearing houses in Haiti. As soon as the children enter the home, they are signed up to an international adoption agency. This means that the parents, if they are alive and they want them back, cannot get them back.”
Post said there was a different understanding in Haiti of what adoption really means.
“In the Western world you get a new birth certificate, with the names of the adoptive parents. There’s no legal link with the [biological] family,” she said.
“The system in Haiti is more like foster care and the family link remains. And the people in Haiti in do not know what international adoption really means.”
Parents believe they will still be able to be reunited with their children, Post said.
The differing cultural and legal understandings of the word “adoption” has been something I’ve pointed out before. To people in many parts of the rest of the world placing a child in an orphanage, or even saying the kid will be placed for adoption does not mean a state reassigned identity, a reissued birth certificate erasing the names of one’s blood relations and replacing such with one’s new adopter’s name in a re-writing of history. For people in many parts of the world, adoption means the familial history remains intact, that the child is still part of the parents lives, and that everything that came before is not cut off from both the child and the family of origin.
Even in gaining a Haitian parent’s “consent to adoption” it remains highly questionable whether or not they have been genuinely informed to the full legal ramifications of what that can mean: removing the child from the country, rewriting their history, and potentially never seeing their blood relations again.
The Haitian government has had reason to be cautious; there are about 200 orphanages in Haiti, but United Nations officials say not all are legitimate. Some are fronts for traffickers who buy children from their parents and sell them to couples in other countries. “In orphanages in Haiti there are an awful lot of children who are not orphans,” said Christopher de Bono, a Unicef spokesman.
This important article from United Adoptees International describes how the 109 Haitian kids taken to the Netherlands have been divided into three categories, resulting in 53 of the kids having left the country without any form of Haitian finalization. Of the kids who went to Luxembourg, some of them are considered “category 2” or not finalized by Haitian authorities as well.
Under this classification America has kids from all three groups as well, despite the government’s statements saying no class 3, or completely unmatched kids would be accepted.
On the American end, after the Department of Homeland Security announced the Humanitarian Parole policy, the flights began almost immediately.
Extending Humanitarian Parole status like this is completely unprecedented in inter-country adoptions, we’re off the edge of any map.
Once that status had been conferred, someone had to test the limits of the policy. While the American government was insisting that only kids already in an adoption process would be accepted, many questioned what would happen if a child not in process landed on American soil. Would they be sent back? Or would they be kept and slid into the American adoption process?
Enter Ed Rendell and a cast of cronies.
I’m not going to do full coverage on this story, as it’s simply too large and won’t fit within the scope of what I’m trying to accomplish here. Instead I’ll provide merely an overview and encourage readers to do some research on their own.
Bear in mind that all of this was taking place against the backdrop of a political context of heavy lobbying to let the Haitian kids in and to expedite the adoptions. Take the Jan. 19th letter to Secretary of State Clinton (link opens a PDF) and the letter from the 20th (link opens a PDF) by way of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute as just two tangible examples.
The ‘Rendell Raid’ taking place over the 18th and 19th was the first flight bringing the Haitian children to the United States, the test case.
In, a heavily publicized set of flights Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell headed off to Haiti to extract kids from the BRESMA “orphanage” in a privately donated plane .
The airport of course, has been non-stop and so to up the chances of actually getting in country, pure political clout was used to muscle their way into the queue, making other planes loaded with humanitarian relief supplies wait in the pattern.
Mr. Rendell and Representative Jason Altmire flew Monday to Haiti on a chartered plane carrying medical supplies and 20 doctors and nurses. The plan was to drop off the supplies and pick up children from an orphanage run by two sisters, Jamie and Alison McMutrie from a Pittsburgh suburb, Ben Avon, Pa..
Having lobbied the White House for several days, the Pennsylvania delegation had obtained United States visas for the children and had expected to be on the ground one hour.
But Haitian officials would let only 28 of the 54 orphans the sisters had brought to the airport to leave; the rest had not cleared all the hurdles for adoption. Seven had yet to be matched with adoptive parents, the Haitians said.
Then the sisters dug in their heels. “They just said no, they wouldn’t leave without all of them,” Mr. Altmire said.
For five hours, the delegation worked furiously to get the Haitian government to agree to let all the children go. The governor’s wife, Judge Marjorie O. Rendell of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, went to Port-au-Prince to meet with American diplomats. Mr. Rendell and Mr. Altmire lobbied the White House, which pressured Haitian officials.
The chartered plane was forced to return to Miami before a deal was reached, Mr. Rendell said, but the delegation stayed in Haiti. But at 11 p.m., the Haitian officials relented and the children were evacuated on a United States military cargo plane to Orlando, Fla., where they transferred to the jet to Pennsylvania. One child was found to be missing at the last minute in Haiti, and Jamie McMutrie stayed behind to find her. They were expected to arrive here Wednesday.
Where do I even begin? The White House was pressuring Haitian officials despite the American policy to supposedly only bring back kids already “in-process” at the very moment Haiti is in the position of in some ways Governing without Government:
However, Haitian lawyer and activist Ezili Danto said after the January 12 earthquake, “The palace collapsed, the police headquarters collapsed, the parliamentary building collapsed with legislators inside it. No one knows how many policemen, municipal workers, legislators were there, how many escaped, who is injured”. Many ministers are still missing but the president and prime minister are alive.
Meanwhile, Gov. Rendell, the “orphanage” workers, and their cast of characters were so busy ‘caring for the orphans’ that apparently they couldn’t even count to 54. (The missing 54th child was later retrieved by Jamie McMutrie from the U.S. Embassy, where she had be left behind.)
The last of the orphans arrived in Pittsburgh Wednesday morning with her caretaker, Ben Avon native Jamie McMutrie.
Two-year-old Emma had gone missing Monday just as a group of Pennsylvania officials and medical personnel were leaving the earthquake-ravaged country with the orphans and the two Ben Avon sisters who had been caring for them and arranging their adoptions.
Emma was found shortly after the jet left with the remaining orphans and McMutrie’s sister, Alison. Jamie got off the flight to look for Emma. She was found at the U.S. Embassy. Jamie and Emma left Port-au-Prince for Miami late Tuesday.
Now, here’s the crucial piece, this flight back to the States is the first flight with kids being exported from Haiti, it’s the test case, and it’s transporting 7 kids who are not in any way shape or form already in an adoption process.
The private plane leaves (convenient that, it certainly sidestepped several potential liability issues there) and the group ends up hitching a ride on a U.S. military transport plane.
Which is to say the U.S. Military ended up doing the actual exporting of the kids.
See photos of the kids on the Military plane here.
Once the group was on the ground in Florida, they rejoined their donated plane and flew on to Pennsylvania.
According to Rendell, adoption cases are under way for 47 of the children. Of these, 40 will be U.S. adoptions, four children will go to Spain and three to Canada. Adoptive parents will be sought for the remaining seven children.
Here, in the NYT piece we also see the Haitian intent, they are not only fighting that the 7 not in process remain, but the 19 others who were supposedly “in-process” (for all that’s worth) but not finalized by the Haitian Government. Once again emphasis added is mine:
But Haitian officials would let only 28 of the 54 orphans the sisters had brought to the airport to leave; the rest had not cleared all the hurdles for adoption. Seven had yet to be matched with adoptive parents, the Haitians said.
Which is to say the U.S. may be fine with removing kids “in-process” but Haitian officials were not.
None-the-less, the Rendells’ party strong-armed and bullied their way through to removing the kids.
Sadly when it comes to the redistribution of children in the wake of natural disasters (as well as wars and other such) the industry has learned that getting in quick, getting the kids out, and then forcing their country of origin, or individual family members to mount legal battles to reclaim children can be an effective strategy.
In adoption, as in many other such extra-legal grabs in the wake of catastrophes, disgustingly, the mere act of possession (and relocation) can end up being 9/10ths of the ‘law’.
Lest anyone think that the US would ever contemplate returning the stolen kids not in process see this Baltimore Sun article for this little ‘gem’, emphasis still mine:
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler said that as of Thursday morning, 96 Haitian orphans had received humanitarian parole. Some of the orphans were already in the adoption process with families here, while others will meet prospective parents. None of the children will be sent back to Haiti, he said.
All of which makes for a climate wherein if they’re landed, they stay.
A number of us adopted people have deeply questioned putting aspects of adoption under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, this export flight test case, which I’ve labled nothing more than an outright raid, may go a long way towards explaining aspects of our fundamental objections.
No matter what the American Government’s rhetoric, the actions themselves, and the Homeland Security pronouncements in the wake of such, amounting to “ends justifies the means” evidence the emptiness of the words.
Currently, the federal government has taken the lead role in responding to the arrival of children from Haiti.
Only children with valid adoption papers or in the process of being adopted by a U.S. family before the earthquake struck Haiti are being allowed to enter the United States, federal officials said. Those orphans are receiving humanitarian visas.
That will remain the U.S. government’s policy, officials said, and there are no immediate plans to expand it.
Were the outright raid not bad enough, we also have the various versions of evangelically based freelancers, who now that the gates are open, make no bones about their tactics.
In the rich tradition of Catholic social teaching and rooted in the heritage of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, we empower children and families to lead responsible lives and develop healthy relationships built on faith, hope, and love.
Images of the skinny, shell-shocked little survivors of the earthquake being carried off a plane in Pittsburgh compelled hundreds of people to reach for their phones or send an e-mail with the same question: How can I adopt one of the Haitian orphans?
Gov. Rendell, and the 53 homeless children whose rescue he orchestrated amid the disaster, had barely touched down in Pennsylvania Tuesday morning when phones began humming at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services.
Over the last two days, the agency has logged 430 phone calls from people who said they wanted to become adoptive or foster parents for Haitian orphans, said Karen L. Blumen, deputy director of the Office of Community Relations.
But social service providers – and the Rendell administration – have a message for the families willing to open their homes and hearts: Don’t forget the 3,000 Pennsylvania children waiting for permanent homes.
“While the plight of the Haitian orphans has attracted much attention, it is important to recognize the many other children for whom we are always working to find a supportive family and safe home environment,” said Harriet Dichter, acting secretary of the state Department of Public Welfare.
Child advocate Cathleen Palm said that when she heard about the rush to adopt the Haitian children, she wished there was a way to assemble all the needy Pennsylvania children in a stadium and have the governor rescue them.
“We want to make sure people aren’t losing sight of the fact that kids are in crisis in Pennsylvania, too,” said Palm.
(We’ll delve more into the Do-It-Yourself-ers in part 5, but the following example belongs firmly in the “bribes” section.)
Finally, there are wink-and-a-nod stories mentioning or hinting at American ministries using bribes as part of the child export process such as this from the Tennessean, once again, emphasis mine:
(Brent ) Gambrell, 44, has made more than 50 trips to Haiti. He’s made connections there with churches, schools and orphanages. He said he’s also made an impression on the people who can get things done.
“In Haiti, it’s always been if you know somebody,” Gambrell said. “Everything is about crossing people’s palms with money to get stuff. That’s how the guards at the airport remember who I am. I tip big.”
The article continues:
They delivered medical supplies and food, and brought Tia and a boy who was being adopted by a family in Kentucky back to the airport. But even after showing U.S. officials adoption paperwork and photos of the children, they were not authorized to leave.
“I got fired up,” Wilson said. “I said, ‘I’m not leaving until I leave with them.’ We were in the process of getting Tia a passport, but all that is down in the rubble. I knew if I left it would be months, maybe years, before we would get her.”
Finally the U.S. authorities relented. With Gambrell’s help, Wilson secured two seats on a private plane that took him and the two children to Fort Lauderdale, where they caught another plane to Nashville and touched down around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday.
So what is this child export all about to this particular set of people?
“Our mission really is evangelism,” said Steven Boo, who was on the flight with Gambrell to Haiti. “We do not want Haiti to be a better place to go to hell from.”
But Gambrell said the current project is different. The focus is purely on getting as many orphans out of the country as the team can.
Ah, how very “diplomatic” of him.
***
Forward to part 7 (published out of order, due to trying to be timely for Jan 25th, we’ll come back to 5 and 6)
Not surprisingly, events are unfolding more rapidly than I can blog. I’m breaking from my series to bring readers this potentially massive shift in policy.
Today an adoption industry trade group, the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, (link goes to Pound Pup’s profile page) or JCICS, announced on its blog that the Haitian Government appears to have changed the exit requirements for children leaving the country. See:
I’ll spare readers the industry rhetoric and cut to the parts that are most pertinent:
It is Joint Council’s understanding that the government of Haiti, in protecting against the inappropriate movement of children to the U.S. and other countries, has announced that the Haiti government must approve the international movement of each individual child. This includes children that are bound for the U.S., whether through the visa process or humanitarian parole.
It is also our understanding that the U.S. government is actively engaged on this issue with the Haitian government. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which authorizes humanitarian parole for each child, continues to process cases at the US Embassy in Port au Prince.
The new requirement of the Haitian government may cause a delay in the travel of children who qualify for a U.S. visa or humanitarian parole.
The change appears to have been sparked by the removal of kids not in any adoption process being taken to among other places the United States.
It is Joint Council’s understanding that this new requirement is in response to concerns that children who were not in the process of adoption, leaving Haiti for the U.S. and other countries.
I’m still working to verify the change in policy from other sources.
We have consulted with DHS to get proper advice to families in process. In order to ensure the most timely and effective processing of adopted children from Haiti, prospective and adoptive parents need to be aware of the following:
1. Do not attempt to bring your child or have your child escorted to the US Embassy until you have received word from DHS that your child’s application for immigration or humanitarian parole has been approved AND you have been in contact with DHS concerning how and when your child will arrive at the Embassy. Bringing children to the embassy prior to a determination or without the fore knowledge of the Embassy may be placing your child and his or her caretaker at risk. Conditions around the Embassy are chaotic and unsafe for children. In addition, the time that Embassy personnel takes to deal with unexpected children is less time they have to process applications. In the first few week post-earthquake, the Embassy had only one person able to process applications and it was understandably frustrating and stressful for families. However, the Embassy is now working with additional staff and families are being notified about their applications for immigration visas and humanitarian parole.
2. Do not attempt to bypass or impede UNICEF’s work of document verification at the airport in Port au Prince. UNICEF is carefully checking the documents of all minors at the PaP airport to ensure that children are leaving the country legally and appropriately. Despite rumors to the contrary, UNICEF is not attempting to interfere or impede with the departure of children with legitimate immigration visas or humanitarian parole visas. UNICEF is safeguarding Haitian children from exploitation and trafficking by providing document checking services with the cooperation and full agreement of the Haitian and US governments as well as many foreign governments receiving children from Haiti. Attempts to bypass or impede the document check may result in delays and stricter processes. Please place the welfare of all Haitian children first, a few moments of inconvenience may protect Haitian children from landing in the hands of child predators and traffickers.
PEAR has been essentially reduced to begging would-be-adopters to stop trying to sidestep or interfere with UNICEF’s efforts to monitor the outflow of children.
***
Naturally next post in the series is on the removal of kids not in process to the United States and other countries. Barring the unforeseen, I hope to have it up later tonight.
As the Haitian child exports are receiving a great deal of attention at the moment I’d like to welcome new readers and recommend a visit to my about page and my WTF page. They answer many basic questions and lay out my comments policy.
If you are new to this series please backtrack and read the previous articles on my Haiti tag as this series relies upon definitions of words such as “orphanage” that I’ve already discussed in my previous Haitian posts. Then read my Introduction to this Series.
Without at minimum reading the short Introduction, you will miss the context these parts or chapters were written in.
I am an adult adoptee, writing from an explicitly Bastard perspective on these matters.
***
Part 1: Basic Haiti to the U.S. adoption statistics
By way of gaining or regaining perspective, let’s start with some very basic statistics pertaining to the US importation of kids from Haiti.
Here are the United States Department of State’s figures on the number of Haitian children brought to the United States via inter-country adoption since 1998.
I’m going to copy the table in full, as I think it’s vital readers understand what we’re talking about here:
Fiscal Year
Total Adoptions
1998
120
1999
96
2000
130
2001
192
2002
187
2003
248
2004
355
2005
234
2006
310
2007
191
2008
301
This would come out to a total of 2694 over the course of the 12 years. The top of the State Department page, however, states
The total number of Adoptions from HAITI to the United States is : 2712.
Perhaps they are aware of numbers not included in their table (or someone has a problem with basic math,) but even taking their higher number, dividing it by the 12 years the table covers to get an annual average, we come out to a whopping total of 226 kids per year.
Yes, you read that correctly. Pre-quake Haitian adoptions numbers to the US on average were BARELY OVER 225 KIDS A YEAR!
As adoption is so central to American policy, both foreign and domestic, it seems every newspaper and TV network has turned into the ‘all Haitian adoption all time’ channels, to the exclusion of oh say, actual relief to the roughly 2.5 million to 3 million Haitians who lived in the Port-au-Prince region pre-earthquake.
Expert estimates suggest that 46 per cent of Haiti’s nearly 10 million people are under 18 years of age.
Yes, the table above only represents the American piece of the Haitian child export pie, but my point is simply this, the numbers of children who will be affected even by all the child importing countries combined pale in comparison to the sheer numbers of children left in Haiti who in the aftermath of the earthquake have a variety of very basic needs: water, food, shelter, a safe place where they will not be simply grabbed and taken, etc.
If one genuinely cares about Haitian children, real humanitarian aid, firmly grounded in these basic needs must take precedence over the demand driven wants of both adopters and would-be-adopters in receiving countries.
Instead of policies firmly rooted in trying to help as many children as possible with real aid, countries are now instead fixated on ramming through years worth of importations and hoped-for eventual adoptions in just over a week.
Likewise, agencies are suddenly empowered to ram through any kid they had ‘well into the process’ (and apparently those in no process what-so-ever see part 4) without Haitian finalization. While the floodgates are open, they’re racking up the numbers and pulling in the dollars just as fast as they can.
Part 2: A snapshot of the Haitian Government reaction to the exports
All of this against the basic backdrop of international groups calling for various forms of moratoriums on the outflow.
As for Haiti’s stance on its own children/it’s own citizens? This, by way of the U.S. Department of Children and Families Secretary provides a snapshot in time by way of example:
Said Department of Children & Families Secretary George Sheldon, who has been meeting with state and federal authorities: “I don’t think the Haitian government, at this point, is wanting to give up their children.”
I know, I know. ‘Astounding’ isn’t it? A country actually unwilling to give up their children. Perhaps even upset that other countries’ citizens would be trying to make off with kids, (some of whom were clearly NOT in an adoption process) in the wake of a natural disaster. Simply ‘Astounding!’ I mean whoever would have imagined such a thing? [Yes folks, this paragraph is pure contemptuous sarcasm.]
Next time there’s flooding along the Mississippi should the United States likewise, welcome other nations looting of our child welfare system, whether parental consent to relinquishment and state approval had been given or not?
Somehow I just don’t see that as a marketable project anytime soon.
Yet this basic empathy, this shoe on the other foot, seems simply beyond the comprehension of many.
Part 3: The Article I’m using as my framework for this series
Obviously, this unfolding human rights disaster is far beyond the scope of any one post I could possibly make, so I’m going to attempt to cut down the size by building the rest of this series primarily around the framework of a single article. This will hopefully provide at least a basic structure, and help get an overview written.
I’ll add in a vast number of links by way of supporting evidence and for further reading, but I’m going to try to stick to referencing aspects of the basic structure of this article, Haiti earthquake: charities warn against rush to speed adoptions, from Friday evening.
The heart of the series then, can be cut to two lines representative of broader themes I want to elaborate upon:
Countries including France and Spain have streamlined the process in the hope of getting young people to safety as soon as possible.
But Unicef and other welfare groups, led by British charities, have warned orphans risked being separated from their families and the well-meaning moves by Westerners could be considered “abuse”.
The crux of the problem lies in the way the international receiving countries are cutting away restraints and ignoring requirements of Haitian finalizations/approvals. Gutting such protections is a tactic a wide variety of NGOs have warned against repeatedly in the wake of wars and natural disasters. Time and again, in the aftermath of such raw child-grabs, evidence of children taken without consent have surfaced.
Time and again families demanding their children back have been ignored. Therein lies the genuine heart of injustice.
As the Haitian child exports are receiving a great deal of attention at the moment I’d like to welcome new readers and recommend a visit to my about page and my WTF page. They answer many basic questions and lay out my comments policy.
Prior to reading through this series, first look at the earlier articles on my Haiti tag for my posts to date as this series relies upon definitions of words such as “orphanage” that I’ve already discussed in my previous Haitian posts.
I am an adult adoptee, writing from an explicitly Bastard perspective on these matters.
***
This Introduction is the first installment of what will eventually be an extended series broken into several parts.
Due to the pure scale of what I’m trying to write here (and let’s face it, the raw vileness of the subject matter), this may at times seem a bit disjointed. I apologize in advance.
The various parts are interdependent, consider each a vignette of sorts that builds into a larger picture:
Part 8: The Bethany Christian Services/ God’s Littlest Angels planeload of human cargo
Part 9: Kids disappearing and the “orphan” trade
Part 10: As if “being in process” alone makes Haitian adoptions somehow “ethical”
Part 11: Those that remain in Haiti- the race to protect the kids vs. “You don’t work, you don’t eat”
Endnotes
There are other theoretical pieces, and detailed backgrounders that underlie my understanding of everything I’m trying to say in this series. In time, others and I may get to expanding on some of those ‘building blocks’, but it won’t happen within the context of this series. It’s simply too large, there’s too much video to upload, and there are simply too many rabbit trails of detail to follow down.
When I began this blog I wrote about coming in in the middle. How sometimes one simply has to start where they are and move forward and back, writing and backtracking, forecasting and yet still writing from the here and now as best one could.
Without a doubt, this series will reflect that, writing what one can from where they are, starting-in-the-middle-ness.
This entire series was begun before the arrests of the American missionaries. In short, events overtook the writing. I will eventually come back to complete the series as most of it is already written, just in need of some updating due to how quickly everything is moving.
Of the following posts, some were written just after the earthquake before I began the series, but the bulk of them were written later, after the arrests and detail the way the story has unfolded, only to fold back in on itself time and time again. They provide a context to the series and are still being added to at this point:
…a resource page for media, researchers, and the public interested looking for material and opinion on the ethics and legality of fast track adoption, babylifting, “humanitarian aid,”identity, historical and cultural erasure, and corrupt practices in international adoption, especially in the current Haitian earthquake crisis. It includes links to blogs, news articles, reports, and Haitian sources that are not available on The Daily Bastardette. We will publish occasional guest blogger
As a final note before I begin, I also want to take a moment here in the introduction to thank those who are doing such a fantastic job of digging out links and helping me cull through to find what’s actually important here, examples and details. A number of friends, including Bastardette, her commenter AnonGuy, and most of all, my partner Mike, who when he’s not playing the role of incredible tech support, is busy supporting me through all this.
I’d end up quoting the whole post, so just go read it instead.
…
Nope, on second thought, here’s just a taste:
I mean, take a step back, white people! Maybe I’m the one being melodramatic now, but why is the world of international adoption so completely effed that the significance of someone’s death can be reduced to the obstacle it poses to white adoptive parents getting what they want; and why is the collapse of buildings where important adoption documents are kept considered a tragedy, not for the city or its people, specifically the adoptees, or most especially the people who were actually inside the building when it fell, but for the hundreds of “waiting” parents who will have to wait longer now?
And just what is all this focus on the tragic plight of white adoptive parents covering up? What it usually does: a history of U.S. military invasion and occupation, U.S.-backed dictatorships, and neoliberal policies, to name a few. In other words, the very same economic, political, and military interventions that adoptees of color everywhere are intimately familiar with, because they are what created us.
These are the words I think a lot of us, in our anger and frustration have been trying to find, and unable to get to.
(My skin’s some version of pinkish-“white” so clearly, barring further knowledge of my State-confiscated ancestry, some of this is pretty obviously not for me to say in “first person voice”.)
The scope of not only what’s happened and is happening to Haiti and the disgust we feel relating to what that context is being utilized for now is simply more than we can express.
But these two paragraphs are some of the closest I’ve seen yet.
***
I also wanted to point readers across to United Adoptees International- news they’ve been doing some excellent coverage, just read back through their Haitian coverage.
Naturally there are plenty of other Bastards and adoptee speaking out from their own perspctives about the Haitian baby export schemes, wander through my blogroll, looking over the past week’s posts and you’ll find a number of us have somehow managed to get at least the beginnings of words around our outrage and sorrow.
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