Chinese babies stolen by officials for foreign adoption

"The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: 'Bring out the baby.'"

Very sad story from the LA Times:

"Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States...

"Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 [about six times the annual income in rural China and usually handed over in new $100 bills] per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.

"Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products," said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States."

The US government stopped allowing its citizens to adopt from Cambodia since 2001, citing concerns over Cambodia's "child welfare" (read: "child trafficking") system. Here is a 2007 update from Cambodia adoption connection:

"Cambodia has begun this process with its accession to the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in March 2007. However, the U.S. Government continues to wait for Cambodia to take further steps towards Convention implementation as well as to make progress on updating its overall child welfare system. The U.S. Government will continue to urge Cambodian officials to develop significant and much needed reforms that could eventually lay the groundwork for a resumption of intercountry adoptions between Cambodia and the United States."

One of my friends is unable to go back to the US with a few of her adopted Cambodian children because of this ban on Cambodian adoptions.

"Baby Farms" in Nigeria

While on the topic of orphanages and adoptions....

World Breaking News Police raids reveal 'baby farms'

"The doctor in charge, who is now on trial, reportedly lured teenagers with unwanted pregnancies by offering to help with abortion.

They would be locked up there until they gave birth, whereupon they would be forced to give up their babies for a token fee of around 20,000 naira ($170).

The babies would then be sold to buyers for anything between 300,000 and 450,000 naira ($2500-$3800) each, according to a state agency fighting human trafficking in Nigeria, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP)."

Thanks to andrewinmelbourne via reddit.

Cambodia's ophanages for non-orphans

Thanks to Alison for pointing this out to me. A Nov 8 video by Aljazeera on a Cambodian orphanage where only five in 100 children there were actual orphans. This is typical of Cambodia--"orphanages" are centres that take in children from poor families who cannot afford to look after them. I don't think it is morally reprehensible to take in children who would otherwise be abandoned by their parents, but eyebrows were raised in this case because, among other things, the orphanage director featured apparently refused to have his accounts audited.

I once spoke to the Western director of one big orphanage who told me about a father bringing in his seven children to leave at the orphanage. When the director asked the Cambodian man why, he replied he found a new wife and he was planning to start a new family with her.

I know a Cambodian woman who grew up in an orphanage in Sihanoukville who was left there by her father when he remarried. She told me about the corruption in that orphanage. Then there was Chantou, our cook at Bloom cafe who lived in an NGO for children who told me about rice and stationery donated to the centre and then promptly sold by the NGO's director, an Asian woman who made enough money to retire to France.

When you live in Cambodia long enough, you will get to know Cambodians who were former drivers/helpers of missionaries and other NGO heads who now run their own NGOs or orphanages. It's just too easy. Why work when you can get donations?

And while we are on the subject, adoption facilitator Lauryn Galindo was so successful in her scam, two of her Cambodian staff members started their own adoption agencies. Galindo was sentenced to 18 months in prison in the US and ordered to forfeit the proceeds of her crime to the government in the form of her home in Hawaii worth $1.4 million, and the value of her Jaguar (approx $25,000). You can read the press release from the US Department of Justice here: jcics.org/Cambodia.

Galindo was also the facilitator for Angelina Jolie's baby. Incredibly, even as she was running "a scheme that treated hundreds of children as nothing more than commodities", to quote the US special agent-in-charge, Galindo saw herself as doing humanitarian work, as she told Cambodia Daily reporter Richard Sine way back in 2002.

US ban on Cambodian adoptions

This is Kerri Evans and her five children. Kerri is my best friend in Cambodia and is an institution in Phnom Penh. Everyone knows about this Western lady with her bright yellow tuk tuk. Everytime we go out on her tuk tuk, Cambodians will point and stare and laugh. It amuses them no end that a Westerner, and a woman at that, should go around town driving a tuk tuk. Some tuk tuk drivers at the Russian Market even joke and ask her how much for a ride!

Kerri is from the US and has been living in Phnom Penh for the past three years. She came to Cambodia three years ago to find the biological sister of her already adopted Cambodian son, Kameron. Chenda is the sister and she was found working as a domestic helper for a relative. Later on, Kerri noticed a boy who used to play by himself in a box at the Russian Market (hence his early nickname "Box Boy") and took him in too. The family calls him Noah now and I have personally seen how Noah has changed from a malnourished little boy to a playful, confident child who speaks excellent American English.

Kerri is stuck in Cambodia because the US government has a moratorium on Cambodian adoptions because of child trafficking problems. To give you an idea of how complex adoptions and child trafficking is, read this New York Times article.

Or this one on Angelina Jolie's child Maddox by The Sydney Morning Herald.

As the first article notes, there are people who try to adopt legitimately, but are stranded in Cambodia as the US government has, since 2001, suspended visas for adopted Cambodian children."The suspension... will last as long as it takes to ensure that the adoption system in Cambodia is not systematically corrupt, and private aid agencies and Cambodians say that could a be long time."

How can you change Cambodia's corrupt system? It's very difficult and complex, requiring effort on many, many fronts, and it is certainly not something the US government can will to happen. In the meantime, US citizens like Kerri who genuinely want to provide a loving home for unwanted, neglected and bullied Cambodian children cannot do so. Kerri has lived in Cambodia for the past three years with her kids, demonstrating her commitment to them. All this time, she has been living apart from her husband John, who is in Arkansas where he has a job that provides for the family. John visits his family regularly but they have not been able to live together as a family for three years now.

Said Kerri: "The US government is not recognizing my [Cambodian] court adoptions. They deemed ministry adoptions too corrupt to continue but now they are forcing me to get a ministry adoption. I could get one but it would involve an illegal bribe. Because I refuse to break the US law, I am being held hostage in Cambodia by the US government. My court adoptions are legal and final. It seems an oxymoron for the US to say ministry adoptions are corrupt but force me to get one and then punish me because I won't break the law."

I don't pretend to know the legalities of US adoption of Cambodian children, so I would be more than happy to hear from people familiar with the situation. Let me know if you can figure out these seemingly contradictory US policies.

On a final note, I just finished reading "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hossenini - a wonderful book- and there is the same situation re adoptions with Afghanistan, with the tragic result that many victimised Afghan children are unable to escape their personal hell-holes.

Of course I understand the US government is trying to do the right thing with the ban, because it does not want to encourage child trafficking. But I am unsure a blanket ban is the way to go. The US government has exactly the same way of dealing with rogue nations - just slap on an economic embargo, a boycott, which punishes innocent civilians, often more than their evil, corrupt leaders (like the boycott of Iraq which did nothing to remove Saddam Hussein, or the embargo on Burma, which is doing nothing to lessen the grip of its military dictatorship).

Just as others see how embargoes hurt ordinary people, I keep thinking of the adoption ban hurting children who are genuine candidates for adoption. I think of all the abused children who could have a shot at a better life, and the families who want to offer them that chance, and how many lives are wasted and worse--tortured, as in the case of sexually abused Afghan or Khmer kids--because of some bureaucratic decision. Surely the right thing to do is to decide on a case-by-case basis, when what is at stake is a child's life (and I mean life as in its daily living, not just life as opposed to death, which seems a kinder alternative when you know what some of these children live through).