The other day, one of the local stations here in Haiti (96.5 FM) had a show where they were discussing the situation of children in Haiti and this discussion included international adoption.
On June 14th (or thereabout that date) is the "Day of the Child" and that is what prompted the topic of the show. The current IBESR Director, Madam Pierre, was supposed to have participated in the show, but she was a "no show". The show hosts did not take kindly to that.
During the discussion, the participants pointed out that there are homeless and parentless children living on the street (in the ravines and gutters) on their own, they get murdered and nobody seems to care about what happens to them.
Participants reiterated that children deserve a loving family where they are educated and taken care of. That brought up international adoption and the consent on the show was that it is in the best interest of the children especially since there are no families in Haiti that can, want or will adopt the children who need homes.
The consent seemed to be that if there is a willing family, not matter where, as long as they will properly love and care for the child, then that family should be able to adopt the child.
I was so glad that this was the opinion of the participants of the radio show and the VIP guests that participated in the discussion. With UNICEF meddling in adoptions, and with their anti-adoption stance, often you hear that the children should stay in their home countries and that there really should not be international adoption.
UNICEF has been heavily involved with IBESR and the result that I have observed is that now the IBESR employees have fancy SUV vehicles that they can utitilize, but that has not improved the lot of the children here. There is no government financing of child welfare that is making any sort of observable impact.
Most people cannot imagine the circumstances so many of the Haitian children have to live in. We just had an adoptive mom visit and she said that she could never have imagined it without having seen it first hand just how horrible many of the conditions are for the children.
Haitians love their children, but when one person has limited resources for their own family, how can they step up and help the other children? It is not possible...
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3 comments:
Great post. So good to hear the people of Haiti supporting adoption...now if we can just get the leaders of Haiti to do the same. But then again, disconnect between the leaders and the people seems to be a continual cycle.
What frustrates me most is that agencies that should be leading the world in terms of caring for children are idealogical rather than practical. They don't seem to understand how to effectively implement policies/procedures/laws that would protect children from the "bad guys" while helping some families stay together and helping yet other families choose adoption. I don't expect perfection but it just seems like there is such a big gap between the ideas and the practical.
It reminds me of the way Madonna's adoption has been in the news. One child advocacy group stepped up and said that all it would take to keep this child with the family was x amount of dollars per year. So of course, they thought they should raise this money and keep the child in her home country. Nevermind that it doesn't solve the problem for the 100's of thousands of other children in that country which makes simply providing money for all of those families to stay together totally impractically. Nor does it really look at the child's situation and determine if her family really can provide for her in ways other than finances. Imagine if in the US, we just gave money to all of the families who have children in the foster care system or all of those who are considering placing their children for adoption with the idea that if they had more money, they could become a better family and stay together. Not only does it assume that money is the only reason people place their children for adoption, it also assumes that money can make a happy, healthy childhood. And in the case of a 3rd world country, I doubt very much that this particular group considered how gifting a very poor family with large sums of money would affect them personally and socially. It's not just as simple as handing out money.
Hopefully the government heard what this program had to offer. It is very difficult to understand why parents with biological children are held back. The kids at home will greatly enrich the lives of the new family member.
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