Following the visit, the two families began e-mailing or talking every couple of months with the help of a cellphone that Marcy bought Alma and a network of friends and professionals to translate.
Not all relationships go so smoothly, though, and several searchers told me they are frustrated by adoptive parents who vanish after the initial contact. In some cases the parents, or their children, are uneasy with the facts a search uncovers — adoption corruption or alcoholism or a birth mother who abused her child. But other parents simply get what they need and don’t want more. “We get phone calls from birth mothers begging for some more photos or news of the child, but the adoptive parents do not respond,” says one searcher in Russia.
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Miriam on October 30th 2007 in Articles, reprint articles
Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers
By MAGGIE JONES
A few months ago, in an office near Guatemala City, a woman known as a searcher spread out a large map across her coffee table. The map was dotted with about 250 tiny, hand-drawn circles, each one representing a place where the searcher had tracked down a birth mother who had placed a child for adoption. Sometimes she found a birth mother after knocking on a few doors in Guatemala City. In other cases, she traveled for three or four days to remote indigenous areas in Guatemala or farther afield to Nicaragua, Honduras or El Salvador.
I heard about the searcher, who because of the sensitivity of her work asked me to identify her by the first initial of her name, S., more than a year ago on an adoption listserve. That is when I began scouting to find my own daughter’s birth mother. One reason my husband and I chose to adopt from Guatemala more than three years ago was that we knew families who had met their children’s birth mothers at the adoption finalization and had a continuing exchange of photos and letters and, in some cases, made occasional visits to them in Guatemala.
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Miriam on October 30th 2007 in Articles, reprint articles
The Consular Section of U.S. Embassy Hanoi and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) office in Ho Chi Minh City are pleased to announce that effective October 29, 2007, all I-600 petitions to Classify Orphans as an Immediate Relative will be accepted by mail. As explained during the September 2007 Adoption Service Provider meeting, this procedure will take the place of the current I-600 interview. Special procedures apply for prospective adoptive parents who are currently in Vietnam or who have imminent travel plans.
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Miriam on October 25th 2007 in News
Ongoing concerns related to inconsistencies in documentation and circumstances of relinquishment or abandonment of children in Vietnam, has led the USCIS to have families file their I-600 (the blue form) in the US prior to travel, beginning October 29, 2007. The initiative has the following goals: To allow an appropriate period of time for USCIS to make determinations related to the orphan status of each child prior to the potential adoptive parent(s) travel to Vietnam and prior to completion of the adoption
Usually, the I-600 is filed after the potential adoptive parents have
traveled and completed the adoption: Referral > Travel > Finalize Adoption > I-600
New Process: Referral > I-600 > Travel >Finalize Adoption
This new process hopes to: Decrease opportunities for irregular and/or fraudulent adoptions; protect children’s right to permanency through intercountry and intracountry adoption; minimize the potential of adoptive parents finding significant problems after finalizing an adoption; and decrease concerns and delays with the filing and determination of the I-600 application. (USCIS is stating that the new process will not significantly increase the amount of time a child remains in an orphanage.)
Lori on October 25th 2007 in News
October 8, 2007
Through direct dialogue with UNICEF headquarters in New York, Joint Council confirms that on Friday October 5 2007 UNICEF updated its stated position on intercountry adoption to reference the best interest of the child during a country’s transition to full implementation of the Hague Convention.
Specifically UNICEF now states, “UNICEF urges national authorities to ensure that, during the transition to full implementation of the Hague Convention, the best interests of each individual child are protected.” The revised version of UNICEF’s position on intercountry adoption can be found in its entirety at http://www.unicef.org/media/media_41118.html .
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Miriam on October 9th 2007 in News
INTRODUCTION
In 1993, the Hague Convention affirmed that intercountry adoption, when completed correctly, is a preferable alternative to institutional care. Unfortunately, implementation of this ground breaking treaty has not been focused on doing intercountry adoption the right way; Hague implementation has been about preventing intercountry adoption from happening at all. For children the treaty was supposed to protect, the results have been catastrophic.
That adoptions have ground to a virtual halt in Central and South America is evident from the statistics: Before 1993, the majority of non-Korean intercountry adoptions involved children from Central and South American countries, all of which (except Colombia) had adoption processes with significant private sector involvement.
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Miriam on October 5th 2007 in News
FOA was about to begin a campaign to support adoption friendly legislation in Guatemala, including our analysis of Bill #3635 and support of it as a Hague compliant law which could be implemented fairly quickly and would allow adoptions to continue with great government oversight. Please scroll down to see the introduction to this position paper.
However, Unicef and the Permanent Bureau of the Hague and our own Department of State have succeeded in getting the Guatemalan congress to pass the Ortega Bill (with at least 80 amendments and more to come). this is a bill which had no funding plan, no child care plan for children in the process, and no real plan for children to get into the process. Unless this law has changed considerably with the multiple amendments suggested, then my understanding is that once a child gets into the “system”, the relinquishing parent would have to wait while the government department violates her privacy by trying to find relatives who might care for the child. We don’t know who will care for the children who might be relinquished to the government authority —- those birthparents who manage to know about this option and manage to get down to Guatemala City to deal with government officials — presumably the orphanages who are now receiving children adjudicated by the courts (who are found on the streets, or who are removed from their families because of neglect or abuse).
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Miriam on October 5th 2007 in
