A DARK DAY FOR GUATEMALA'S ORPHANS

We received an e-petition in the mail today from Les Hardison, Judy's uncle who lives in Illinois/Florida depending on the season and flying conditions. I'm not normally keen to read emails with petitions and pyramid schemes, but I can say that this e-petition is legitimate and addresses a very important issue.

UNICEF, the child welfare arm of the United Nations (yes, I know it's the U.N., but we don't just have to sit back and let more damage be done), has carried out a campaign to get as many nations to ratify the Hague Convention and Convention for the Rights of the Child. The effect has been elimination or severe cutbacks in the occurance of international adoptions of needy children from countries that ratify. Here is the body of the letter that Susan and Dan Black, Judy's cousins who recently adopted their son Jimmy from Guatemala, wrote to describe the effects of these Conventions on the adoption process of Guatemalan children:

One month before receiving Jimmy’s referral, the adoption process in Guatemala began to undergo radical and devastating changes largely due to pressure from UNICEF on Guatemala to ratify and implement the Hague Convention and the Convention for the Rights of the Child. These treaties basically take away the right of the birthmother to place a child for adoption internationally. The premise is that a child should never be deprived of their birth heritage and thus international adoption should be viewed as a last resort and only available after an exhaustive search has been made to prove that a child cannot be placed in country (a search which takes in practice longer than a year).

On July 1st, Guatemala announced new adoption procedures to conform to the Hague Convention. Adoptions have, de facto, been suspended as of March 5th of this year. The new procedures include a statement that only four orphanages are accredited to take children (up until this time children placed for adoption in Guatemala were largely in private foster care with a maximum of 2 children per home or in privately-funded children’s homes). So, under the auspices of acting in the best interest of the children, Guatemala is moving to a system wherein it appears that children will wait in under-funded, over-crowded orphanages if they are lucky enough to make it that far. Other alternatives available to birthmothers are infanticide, illegal abortion, raising the child alone (women who relinquish children for adoption to the US must be unmarried) in extreme poverty (45 children die every day in Guatemala of poverty-related causes) or anonymously abandoning the child. The current system in Guatemala conforms to Guatemalan law. The new system is unconstitutional. Unfortunately, Guatemala has violated their own constitution many times in the past so there is little hope that the constitutional challenges currently underway will have any effect. In addition, unfortunately, there is only one proposal before the Guatemalan Congress related to international adoption. This proposal includes a clause that says that any family that adopts a child internationally has to sign and notarize a statement indicating that they will never remove an organ from the child.

I don't intend to go into a very well-meaning dissertation about all of the history of problems for Guatemala, most self-inflicted, but some exacerbated by U.S. policy. But I will say that the accords being pushed by the U.N. do not appear to have any provision for a minimum standard of child welfare infrastructure that must be provided by a government that ratifies these Conventions. In effect, no matter how poor, corrupt and destitute Guatemala is, if it ratifies these Conventions, welfare of Guatemalan orphans will in every circumstance be worsened. I can attest to these facts personally given our first-hand observations both times we have visited the country.

What the Blacks do not either understand or get into, is that in many countries, poor mothers give up their children, who are then in turn likely to be forced into child labor elsewhere. Indeed, the welfare of these children is advanced by some provisions of these Conventions. However, the majority of children that these measures affect would benefit significantly by the ability to be adopted by parents from the U.S. or many other countries who have loving homes welcoming them.

Oddly enough, in the case of Guatemala, awful rumors get repeated and perpetuated in the rural areas to the effect that white people (gringos) and other non-Guatemalans adopt Guatemalan children to harvest their organs for medical purposes. There is no substantiating this rumor, it is not clear where it started, but it has cast a very real shadow of fear over many villages in rural Guatemala where many of the children needing adoption come from. It sounds odd to us, and I don't know for sure the origin, bit I strongly believe it has been one of the disinformation campaigns spread during Guatemala's 30-year Civil War that ended in December of 1996, right after Jill's and my first visit.

The barbarism of the government-sponsored death squads in rural Guatemala got so bad that the only way to find any safety as a common Guatemalan peasant was to be lucky enough to have a gringo in your village for whatever reason. That did not guarantee your safety, nor the safety of the white person, but by the early 80s, thousands of murders were committed by the government making very little news, but any time a white person was murdered by accident or whatever, it made big news. Thus, the government avoided gringos if at all possible. Peace organizations like Witness for Peace and other religious organizations caught on and sent volunteers to live with villages and document incidents as well as be somewhat visible so that the village wouldn't be attacked.

It's not too difficult to see that the credibility of the white person must then be destroyed if they cannot be outright murdered due to the publicity. So, in all likelihood, the rumor of child organ harvesting was born and has appeared to have damaged the level of comfort some rural villages have with perfectly well-meaning non-Guatemalans. As recently as 2000, a Japanese tourist was trapped in his tour van and burned alive inside simply for trying to photograph a Guatemalan child in Todos Santos, a village Jill and I visited later that year. That link gives more information about other attacks related to fears over abduction of Guatemalan children, but with more of a satanic cult angle on the explanation. I won't even get into Guatemalan superstitions...

Anyway, here is a link to the e-petition that if you care to sign, won't take but a minute or two. I don't know what good it will do, but it really is an important issue.

Petition to Unicef

Thanks a bunch; a lot of distraught adoptive parents-to-be would thank you, as would thousands of Guatemalan children, some of whom I've seen firsthand, thank you also. In a way, Jill and I thank you because, though we hadn't formally planned it, we have often discussed that we'd like to adopt a Guatemalan baby as a second or third child depending on our ability to have our own.

RUMOR HAS IT MOM HAS GOTTEN BACK HOME

Although I haven't heard verification personally, rumor has it Mom has indeed returned to Las Vegas. She arrived in Sacramento at 8:15 pm (bonus points for being within 15 minutes of my guess?) on Sunday. Tom reported that on Monday, she visited the nut farmers (Diamond?) to get various flavored almonds, but was distraught when she learned that they were out of cashews. I would be, too. She left by 12:15pm Monday and apparently got back into Vegas later that day via Reno. You'd think the telephone hadn't been invented yet, wouldn't you?

FRIENDLY NEIGHBOR DOING OKAY

Jill and I have a friendly, elderly neighbor lady that walks her yellow lab twice a day, or did regularly until a month or two ago. That's when we saw an ambulance out in front of her house for an extended period, and then we just didn't see her. Yesterday, on the way to dropping me off at the MAX Station on my way to work, we saw her and stopped to talk. We learned the sad news that her husband, who had been physically disabled for some time, had passed away when we saw the ambulance and had been with family since (I think she said that..). She's now trying to return to a normal schedule and seems healthy and brave about it. We were sorry for her loss, but she's a strong lady and we look forward to chatting with her again regularly while we're out digging our holes.

UPDATE: MORE BAD NEWS FOR TOM'S GRAY DAVIS RECALL CAMPAIGN

It was just a few days ago that I posted a link to a lawyer who correctly predicted the success of those gathering signatures for the Gray Davis recall bid. On her website, she then predicted that some group, with whom Davis would swear no affiliation, would file a lawsuit to challenge the process. That prediction has come to pass as this article attests in the New York Times. You might have to enter a free log-in name and password to read things at that website if you don't regularly.

Sorry, Tom. Your only hope now is that some Democrat with a spine will challenge Davis because I think the said prediction that Arnold wouldn't join the race is a prudent forecast. But then again, I'm an economist and I'm used to being wrong!

MORE UPDATES SOON.. things should be a little less busy for me, so hopefully I can finally get around to the oft promised airline food update as well as some surprising information about Bill and Jill out there on the internet...