Note: For detailed coverage of the Haiti crisis and adoption, go to Bastardette.
1. Imagine what it would be like for your kids if an earthquake or other disaster hit your community. Imagine it and don’t let go. Think about what you would wish for your kids under those frightening, devastating circumstances. Feel the agony of not knowing, not being able to do anything because you can’t move from the makeshift hospital you’ve been brought to. Day after day you wake up realizing you have no idea where the rest of your family is. Nada. I imagine my own daughter wandering around—dazed, hungry, thirsty, injured, crying for me—and it makes me go insane. (Not to mention that nobody in his right mind would put the two of us together.)
Now think about how much worse this is for a country with minimal infrastructure and a history of poor leadership.
Then imagine the nice adoptive family several thousand miles away already eager to adopt your child into their forever family. What is your gut reaction?
Yeah, I thought so. And that’s why intercountry adoption is going to occupy the 10. spot on our list.
2. Carefully distinguish between temporary and emergency care; interim care; and long-term care. It may be necessary to relocate many children and other vulnerable people on a temporary basis but not forever. Tell your Member of Congress or Parliament that you think it’s a priority to locate emergency foster families not only in the US and Canada but in nearby Dominican Republic and other nations in the Caribbean, or even parts of South America.
North Americans are offering to foster, not just adopt. It’s all over the blogosphere. There are lot of people out there humble enough to say, “Just tell me what these kids need and what to do and I’ll do it.”
3. Think of some “red tape” as a protective measure, not a frustration. See this post for some insights. “Red tape” can help to ensure that adoptions in progress are legitimate and it can help (but entirely prevent) situations described in point 4.
4. Acknowledge that child trafficking may have already begun in Haiti, despite the warnings from major charities. According to a UNICEF representative in Haiti
. . . many of the tens of thousands of Haitian children left homeless by last week’s earthquake are being trafficked out of the country.
Guido Cornale, the UNICEF representative in Haiti, said people with bad intentions are stealing children — even from hospitals — and shipping them out of the country to “sell them.”
“We had to move children who were in hospitals so they could be better protected because we noticed there were people coming in to take kids,” he said.
Cornale blamed loose controls at the airport and the land border to the Dominican Republic.
“The access to the airport is pretty open. We, the national police and MINUSTA (the UN mission in Haiti), we were not able to control access to the runway and UNICEF observed children being brought onto planes,” he said.
5. Help people access the tools that are available to search for loved ones, including children who may be orphaned. Blog about the Google/US State Department People Finder or display it on your website. Tell people about it. Voice of America has also set up a hotline for people to call in the names of missing relatives. Call up local churches with Haitians in the congregation and tell them about these ways to find people if don’t already know about them. Offer to help non-computer-literate folks add their names to the Google data base.
6. Get familiar with the status of children and orphans in Haiti before the earthquake hit. Blissfully ignorant myself, I’ve since tried to do a little reading and recommend this document, which focuses on HIV/AIDS but includes a lot of general background. As always, it’s a complicated story with no clear-cut positives and negatives.
Example:
. . . it seems likely that care for orphans will continue to come largely from extended families and communities.
While this is true, not all children in families are thriving. Some restaveks [children sent by parents to work for host families as servants when their own family is too poor to care for them] for example, are “fostered” children who suffer from a variety of abuses and whose basic human rights are not respected. Other indicators signal that additional support is needed if families are to provide for children’s basic needs and rights. The high level of malnutrition, low school attendance, low immunization rates, and high infant and child mortality signal problems for all families that must be addressed if family care for a large majority of children in Haiti is to be improved. Community-based monitoring systems may also be needed to assist families with social, economic or psychosocial difficulties.
So the drumbeat to strengthen local ties might not necessarily be in the best interests of the kids. Still, information like this can help point the way to where money could be spent.
7. Ask the kids what they think. If you have somebody’s ear to bend, remind them that these children need to be part of the discussion and the decision-making, which could potentially uproot them and affect them. The conversation should continue around the decision to foster or be a guardian or adoptive parent—whatever form of care is deemed most suitable.
8. Related to seven. This is the time to roll out alternatives to adoption and to think critically about the kind of identity-erasure that can come with formal adoption. It may not be in an individual’s best interest to be adopted under these circumstances. Think again about your own child. If he loses you and everybody connected to you, what would you want for him? If there are people out there willing to foster, then there will be those open to guardianships, especially for older children. Start a conversation in your own faith group or adoption community about uprooting a child from her faith, especially a child from a place where 80% of the people are Roman Catholic and devoutly so.
9. Mobilize your church or your community to sponsor a refugee family. Canadians, get information here.
10. Let international adoption remain on the table as a way for some children to gain families. Acknowledge that for some kids it will be a choice between adoption and a lifetime of poverty and oppression with no surviving family members to act as a buffer or blanket.
A friend wrote to me recently about Haiti in the adoption blogosphere: “There seems to be a lot of righteousness being flung around.” She advised that cutting through the BS on both sides of the adoption divide might begin to shed some light on what to do.
Please add your thoughts about how to think about this issue, and what to do. There are no steps too small.
