NY Times article about US-born girl returned to Guatemala; her parents are undocumented

March 23rd, 2011

On March 22, the New York Times reported that a four-year-old United States citizen, Emily Ruiz, born to parents who are undocumented Guatemalans living in Brentwood, New York, was returned to Guatemala by authorities at Dulles Airport after returning home from a trip to Guatemala. Emily was traveling with her grandfather, who possessed a valid work visa, but was stopped for an immigration violation from two decades ago. In the article, U.S Returns Young Girl, a U.S. Citizen, to Guatemala, Sam Dolnick reports:

That has left Emily, a pigtailed native of Long Island, in an unusual limbo. As a citizen, she has the right to re-enter her country. But her parents are illegal immigrants, which has complicated the prospect of a reunion.

Today, Emily is in Guatemala, her parents are struggling to bring her home, and lawyers and federal officials are arguing over parental responsibility and citizenship rights. The Ruizes find themselves on the front lines of a heated immigration debate: how to treat families in which the parents are here illegally, while their children, born in the United States, are citizens.

The case comes as elected officials across the country have pushed for bills to end automatic citizenship for children, born here, who are sometimes referred to pejoratively as anchor babies. Immigrant advocates say the proposals are antithetical to American ideals.

Cases of families where some members are citizens while others are not are common in the area where we live in California. This case may have far-reaching implications for them and many other families living in the U.S.

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Guatemala’s First Lady files for divorce

March 22nd, 2011

Guatemala’s First Lady Sandra Torres de Colom is seeking a divorce so she can run for president in the country’s September election, it was reported in the March 22 English edition of Aljazeera.  Torres is supported by the governing National Unity for Hope (UNE) party and the right-wing Grand National Alliance (GANA). Incumbent president Colom, who assumed office in 2008, cannot run for re-election.

In a statement released to the newspaper Prensa Libre, Otto Perez Molina, the main right-wing opposition candidate, called the divorce a “fraud”. “We will not allow them to mock the law with this move,” Molina said.

According to the constitution, close blood relatives of the president and those of “second level of affinity” are banned from running for office.

The divorce papers, which indicated a mutual desire for separation, came despite previous comments from the president that divorce was not an option and that his wife was eligible to run.

If both parties agree, the divorce could be final in about a month.

In her announcement of her candidacy, Torres said she decided to run “for the people, for my country, for the elderly, children, disabled, abandoned, orphaned, for all the needy in Guatemala.”

I don’t know a tremendous amount about history, but I know enough to hear echoes of Eva Peron in Torres’s platform statement. When Colom was elected President in 2008,  several people in Guatemala told me they viewed his election as a stepping-stone for his wife’s political aspirations.  Her willingness to divorce in order to be eligible reveals a strong desire to win.

For further background on Torres, read this March 10 article by Renata Avila in Global Voices.

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Open Letter from Dr. Jane Aronson to President Bill Clinton

March 20th, 2011

 I saw Dr. Jane Aronson’s open letter to President Clinton on another blog, Whatever Things Are True. Dr. Aronson is founder and CEO of Worldwide Orphans Foundation, and writes with the authority of a physician involved in international adoption for some twenty years. Her message is so passionate I’m also printing it here, in the hopes of adding to the letter’s readership. Dr. Aronson’s subject is the recent news about adoption from Ethiopia, and her interpretation of its meaning.

March 13, 2011

An Open Letter to President Clinton 

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 not 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. Continue… »

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Friday

March 18th, 2011

 The past few days have been hectic, beginning with the annual St. Patrick’s Day party at our church and ending with this moment now, as I stand at my kitchen counter writing a blog post, 40 minutes before I’m due to pick up Mateo from kindergarten. In between, I drove to Sacramento to meet with the book club of my great friend and fellow writer, Laura-Lynne Powell, whom I met through Writing Mamas, the writing group sponsored by Book Passage. (How’s that for back story?) Laura-Lynne’s book group has been meeting for 15 years, dating from when Laura-Lynne met one of the other moms on a playground. Last night, they were planning the wedding of one of their daughters, so you know they have a history.

Based on my recent experiences, I’ve decided the most fabulous women in the universe belong to book clubs. Really, I must join one immediately! And I love how the groups seem to meet forever—beginning with babies in diapers and continuing through middle school, weddings, and beyond.

Two of the women in the group are adoptive mothers–Laura-Lynne included, which may explain why we bonded quickly–so the conversation centered largely around our collective experiences. The other women asked great questions”– “Why Guatemala?”, “How do your children react to having a relationship with birth family?” and “Were you ever afraid?” among them—and we adoptive mothers did our best to fill them in. The more I meet with people to talk about Mamalita, the more I realize that a big part of my mission in life is to “normalize” adoption. As one mother pointed out, adoption has been with us at least since biblical times. The story of Moses, anyone?  There is no reason why the subject should be shrouded in mystery and shame.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures, so I have none to post here. However, on my way home, I did stop by Davis, California, an absolutely charming university town, where I discovered the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame, and snapped a shot. I also stopped into the Yolo County Public Library to ask the librarian if she would consider adding Mamalita to the collection. I explained the book is circulating in the Marin and San Diego county systems, before giving the librarian copies of the book’s great reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. Fingers crossed that Mamalita will be added to the shelves. If you live in Yolo County or surrounding environs, please ask for Mamalita at your local branch. I hope you enjoy the read!

On to kindergarten pick-up!

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Heritage Camp and Mamalita

March 16th, 2011

I cannot believe that it’s almost time for Heritage Camp. Something else I cannot believe is that I have been blogging at this site for more than a year! Yes, friends, the first Mamalita post appeared in February 2010, nine months before my book was published, and soon after my publicist at Seal Press, Eve Zimmerman, said “You need to build your platform. Have you thought about starting a blog?” To which I answered, “Honestly, no. I haven’t.” 

What I didn’t say, but I’m sure Eva understood, is that writing Mamalita had required my every molecule of writing energy and focus. Answering emails drained me enough, and thank goodness I hadn’t yet discovered Facebook. Could I add blogging to the mix? Add it to the mix I did, and found I really liked the practice. (My husband often calls me “the mad blogger.” ) My plan is to continue until I finalize my ideas for my next book and commit myself to a schedule for writing it. There are super-human people who can do both–focus on a manuscript and blog daily–but I don’t think I’m one of them.

Meanwhile, back to Heritage Camp. The great news is that for the fourth consecutive year, our family is attending Latin American Heritage Camp in Fraser, Colorado, and this year Mamalita: An Adoption Memoir is the book club selection. Yippee! If you’re going, please plan to join us on Friday night for a discussion. At some point during the weekend, I’ll also be leading an adult workshop on memoir-writing and the adoption experience. Stay tuned for details.

For those who are unfamiliar with Heritage Camp, I’m re-posting a section of my blog from last April so you can read all about it.

One of the very few places in the world where our family does not stand out as different is Colorado Heritage Camp. For the uninitiated, heritage camps are designed specifically for adoptive families of all kinds. The camp we attend is geared toward families with children from Latin America; camps are also designed for families with kids from Africa and the Caribbean, Cambodia, China, India and Nepal, the Philippines, Korea, Russia, and Vietnam.

Our family loves Heritage Camp. This will be the third year we attend. For a long weekend in June, we’ll stay in a YMCA lodge in the Rocky Mountains, along with other adoptive families from around the country. During the day, our kids will play games and do art projects that emphasize their Latin American culture. We adults will attend workshops and roundtables led by experts in adoption and child-rearing. Not all activities are scheduled: Families also find time to swim, hike, shop at the mercado, and practice their samba dancing at the Saturday night fiesta.

Every year, camp opens with an opening ceremony where the kids parade into the meeting hall carrying flags from the countries where they were born. As Olivia waited her turn the first year, she said to me with awe in her voice, ”Everyone here looks like us.” I was too choked up by the sight of our beautiful children carrying their flags to respond, but I squeezed my daughter’s hand to let her know I agreed. Olivia and Mateo hope to attend Heritage Camp every year until they turn 17. After that, their plan is to become counselors so they can be the “big kids” they now look up to.

For more info, check out this link.

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Archbishop of Guatemala on family planning and brutality against women

March 14th, 2011

Last week, I mentioned the two-part PBS television series on Guatemala, which focused on brutality against women and maternal health and family planning. The segments were hosted on March 7 and 8 by Ray Suarez, reporting from Guatemala, and funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The PBS blog contains several interviews by Suarez that were not included on-air. One was with Guatemala’s Catholic Archbishop Oscar Julio Vian Morales of Guatemala. The Catholic Church, along with Protestant churches, commands a position of influence and authority for many Guatemalans. I was pleased to read that the Archbishop acknowledges a need for family planning, including “all the methods that within the family they decide is best for them.” The Archbishop also promotes the use of condoms to stop the spread of disease.  This is news not often reported. Here is the exchange between Suarez and the Archbishop:

RAY SUAREZ: When American officials look at Guatemala they see a country with the fastest growth rate in population in the entire hemisphere, and they see women who wouldn’t necessarily want to avoid having  children but would like to space them better.  Is there in the family context an acceptable reason for using birth control?

JULIO VIAN MORALES: Our governments as well as other international institutions attack birth directly, but they never attack, or help us to educate people in a way which people start becoming conscious  of how many children they should have, because the church  is not opposed to family planning. It must exist and it must be compulsory in all facilities.

The problem is how or the methods that are used in this planning, like forcing families and many times sterilizing them for life. In regard to this matter  I think we should insist and the foreign governments should insist  not that much on family planning to have less children, but in that conscious planning in each family in a responsible manner.

Therefore, they should insist more on education, health, work that our families need so much in our Guatemala.

RAY SUAREZ: You say that the Church is not opposed to family planning. What methods would be ok, what methods would be approved and which are not?

JULIO VIAN MORALES: The method we approve is the one we all know as the Billings method, and all those methods that  within the family they decide is best for them. For example, the condom, many times it is an obligation for people to use it. And it is an obligation for people who have AIDS or any other disease.

In that case, it is not that this is a sin, but it is a sin not to do it, because other people are being harmed. In all this methods what must always be present is respect for the human being, for it not to be harmed. We do not accept any  methods which may harm the human being.

In another part of the interview, the Archbishop recognizes that any conversation about family planning or violence against Guatemala’s women must begin with Guatemala’s men. Without a change in attitude among men, no real and lasting change can begin to occur.

RAY SUAREZ: I ask about the Catholic church because there is also a great problem that is violence against women and girls, and in fighting them, can the Catholic church tell men, order them: stop beating their wives,  their mothers their sisters the women of this country?

JULIO VIAN MORALES: Yes, constantly, be it through the sermon or preparations| that we have in the parishes, we are insisting on this issue. Even more, in each church we have the so calledPastoral de la Mujer  [Women’s Pastoral] to help them on this matter.

In fact they are becoming more conscious of their own rights, by attending these groups that have been created. Now, not only do we help change the heart but the mind of us men who, many times  don’t know how to treat  women, because of that culture, in other countries they would call “machista” , and that certainly also exists here in our country.

A man is the first who has to attend this Pastoral de la Mujer, to know how to treat her and give her the place she really deserves.

As the PBS series illustrates, to live free from brutality and to control reproduction are two rights not possessed by all women in Guatemala. May this unfortunate reality change soon.

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Korean children in foster care and the Ethiopia Adoption Alert

March 11th, 2011

For anyone interested in Korean adoption, here is an article about Korean-American children in Los Angeles who are living in foster care. More Korean Kids Ending Up in Foster Care was posted on the New America Media site on March 10, from the Korea Times.

“…According to the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) in Los Angeles, the number of Korean children in foster homes has risen steadily in recent years, an effect of the increasing number of divorced or single parents choosing to give up their kids for adoption.

***

Kim is a 20-something Korean mother who left her child with DCFS a week after giving birth. An international student, Kim, who asked that her last name be withheld, says her family back in Korea never learned of the pregnancy. “I had no choice. I don’t have the capacity to raise the child and could not bring myself to tell my parents.”

***

In a similar case, Ms. Park, a young mother, left her one-year-old daughter with DCFS following a bitter divorce from her husband of three years. Although she was given custody of the child, the 30-year-old divorcee said her daughter would prevent her from ever being able to remarry and start a new family.

Efforts by DCFS to reunite the daughter with her father were unsuccessful, officials said, as he had returned to Korea and remarried soon after the divorce, showing no interest in taking responsibility for the child.

***

Chung Ja Kim, a social worker with DCFS, says it is becoming more common for her to come across young Korean mothers looking to give their kids up for adoption. “Last year I worked on 10 cases involving single Korean mothers who were unwilling to raise their children, three of whom were newborn infants,” she noted.

***

Experts say the issue of adoption remains an awkward one within the Korean community, where the emphasis on blood ties remains strong. Soon Ja Lee is a practicing psychiatrist in the Los Angeles area. She says that compared to other ethnic groups, “Koreans tend to lay a great deal of stress on blood relations.”

Kim with DCFS says that in recent years there has not been a single Korean family that has approached the organization seeking to adopt. She adds that many Koreans harbor preconceived notions about the nature of abandoned children.

And while there is a consensus among adoption experts that abandoned children do better when adopted by parents from the same ethnic group, statistics show that on average the number of adoptions among Korean-American families remains miniscule at best. DCFS adds that there is not one Korean family registered on their list of eligible foster care homes.”

On a separate note, as predicted, the U.S. State Department has issued an Ethiopia Adoption Alert, which announces the 90% cutback in processing adoptions that will begin today. Dawn Davenport has posted an analysis on the subject, Drastic Cutbacks to Ethiopian Adoption: Are They Necessary and Effective?, on her blog, Creating a Family.

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From Ireland, a radio broadcast

March 10th, 2011

From County Cork in Ireland, adoptive mother Jools Gilson sent me the link to a radio broadcast she made for RTÉ Radio 1, Ireland – Documentary on One – the home of Irish radio documentaries. Los Preciosos tells the story of Gilson’s family: an English mother, an Italian father, and two Guatemalan children, all living in rural East Cork. Here’s the description:

“Los Preciosos means ‘the precious ones,’ and this documentary follows the story of years of assessment by domestic social workers, monumental bureaucracy in Ireland, England and Guatemala, and eventually traveling to bring the child home. And then there is another child…”

What I love about this broadcast is the warmth, perception, and honesty of the voices–Jools’s and her husband Vittorio’s–and the laughter of their children. In all the debate and controversy about international adoption, what often gets lost is that adoption is about family, and love, and a place to call home. Listening to this broadcast reminded me of how adoption transforms lives. We cherish our children, whether we live in County Cork or California.

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Adoption from Honduras

March 9th, 2011

The Fort Worth, Texas-based Gladney Center for Adoption is one of four U.S. agencies recently approved to process adoptions through Honduras, the Forth Worth Star-Telegram reported yesterday, in an article by Anna M. Tinsley titled Gladney Center OK’d for Adoption. This could be good news for potential adoptive families who feel an affinity and connection to the culture and heritage of Central America. In 2010, Honduras finalized nine cases for international adoption. In the article, Tinsley writes:

“We haven’t advertised this yet because we don’t have 100 percent of our ducks in order,” said Marshall Williams, Gladney’s vice president of international adoptions and family services. “But we have had a remarkable number of people contacting us, indicating their interest in adopting from Honduras.”

Williams is in Honduras this week to hire an attorney and facilitator, the last two employees needed to get the effort under way.

Gladney initially applied to handle adoptions there about two years ago. After a change in government, the Honduran agency that oversees international adoptions recently approved Gladney and three other U.S. agencies to facilitate adoptions of Honduran children.

“There are many thousands of orphans in Honduras that would benefit from intercountry adoption,” said Chuck Johnson, CEO of the National Council for Adoption. “In 2010, there were only nine intercountry adoptions.”

“There is definitely interest in adopting from Latin America. My hope is that the Honduran government can provide oversight to the intercountry adoption process and work with quality U.S. adoption service providers.”

Last month, a Honduran delegation visited the Gladney Center, meeting local staffers and observing how the adoption process is handled in the United States, officials said.

In 2009, there were four children adopted from Honduras, compared with 11 in 2008, 22 in 2007, three in 2006 and 10 in 2005, federal records show.

So far, Gladney officials are compiling a list of people who want to adopt from Honduras.

“There are fewer families in line, so it might go faster in the beginning,” Williams said.

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Ready for spring

March 8th, 2011

In this house, March and not April is the cruelest month, probably because in our school district, March is the month with no holidays. Winter is over, but Spring is not yet here. For weeks, we had looked forward to our trip to Guatemala, and now the trip is over. It’s tough for the kids to play outside. Every day, it rains.

Is the situation much worse for everyone else–in nearly every part of the country, if not the world? Of course it is! My sister in Boston sleeps in a down vest and wears gloves six months of the year. Friends in Pennyslvania defrost the seats of their cars before they can sit down. And do I have to mention conditions year-round in Guatemala, bad weather or no? Enough said.

Nevertheless, the past few days have been tough. The mornings especially. The kids don’t want to get out of bed, after not wanting to go to sleep. Breakfast is a battlefield. “The cereal is too soggy, too much jam on the bread. This egg is overcooked. I hate pancakes!” Teeth are haphazardly brushed; hair combed only sort-of. My single goal becomes “Just get shoes on and let’s get out the door.” (I cringe when I realize that last sentence was said at a very high decibel-level). Yesterday, we had to run down the hill and almost missed the bus. Today, we made it, but by 7:30 in the morning, both kids already had cried.

Some days are like this, even some weeks. No “mother of the year” awards for me. No gold stars. Just our family muddling through.

Tomorrow is another day. Breathe.

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