Well, this blog was going to reach its end at some time, and that time is now.
So many times I’ve sat at the keyboard wanting to write the truth as I saw it. And, I realized that the kind of truths I see in my mind’s eye today and probably for many years to come should not be hemmed in by the confines of a blog.
You may have found my writing eloquent; you may have found it demanding; you may have found it daft; or, you may have found it groundless, baseless and completely detached from any kind of reality you live in. But at least I made you look. 8^)
In all seriousness, I maintained a blog for this amount of time because I was looking far into the future and thinking of a boy who for some odd reason, unbenknownst even to himself, typed in “Vietnamese adoptees” in a search engine and would possibly come upon this blog.
I would just like him to know that it’s okay to ask Questions because there may be an Answer.
An Egyptian court on Thursday jailed two Christian Egyptian-American couples for two years in a high profile illegal adoption case in mainly Muslim Egypt.
“We believe they are not guilty … They adopted children and this is not a crime. Even in Egyptian law this is not a crime,” Saleh told Reuters.
It said the couple had agreed with an orphanage worker “to buy two newborn infants, a girl and a boy, in exchange for 26,000 pounds.” The family’s lawyer said the couple wanted to adopt the children and did not knowingly break the law.
The second couple was accused of obtaining a forged birth certificate for a baby boy to take him to the United States but was not accused of buying the child, the indictment said.
The couple tried in absentia was accused of forgery and paying 10,000 pounds for a baby girl. All the children involved have been returned to Egyptian orphanages.
Rights activists say trafficking in infants and young children takes place in the most populous Arab country, and infants in orphanages and babies of street girls are at highest risk of being trafficked, often to infertile couples.
“We believe they are not guilty … They adopted children and this is not a crime. Even in Egyptian law this is not a crime,” Saleh told Reuters.
Of course, the adoption of a child is not a crime…
It said the couple had agreed with an orphanage worker “to buy two newborn infants, a girl and a boy, in exchange for 26,000 pounds.” The family’s lawyer said the couple wanted to adopt the children and did not knowingly break the law.
The second couple was accused of obtaining a forged birth certificate for a baby boy to take him to the United States but was not accused of buying the child, the indictment said.
The couple tried in absentia was accused of forgery and paying 10,000 pounds for a baby girl. All the children involved have been returned to Egyptian orphanages.
Paying money in exchange for a child and then forging paperwork to bring him or her out of the country IS A CRIME.
How much would you like to bet that the “Christian” spouses of these Egyptian-American couples believe they were on a mission from God to save “heathen” children?
All kidding aside, the last paragraph of the article pinpoints the reason for my ire about this sad episode:
Rights activists say trafficking in infants and young children takes place in the most populous Arab country, and infants in orphanages and babies of street girls are at highest risk of being trafficked, often to infertile couples.
It’s a translated account of a 17-year-old boy named Christian who was adopted from China. It’s yet another testament to how scandalously children enter child welfare institutions, are given the label of “orphan”, shipped off to another country and then encouraged to believe that they were “abandoned”.
…the opacity of children living in institutions is a serious problem. In fact, on July 1st “Nandu Daily” reported the scandals on the welfare center in Guizhou Zhengyuan county. They will take babies away by force if parents cannot afford to pay the fines. They will then announce the baby was “abandoned” and send them overseas for adoption in order to profit.
I commend Christian’s adoptive mother who took the initiative to heed her son’s memories and desire to reconnect to his other, real, past.
After I read them, two images slammed together in my mind, telling me I was on to something…
Don’t know if I’m being too flippant with the messages and/or stereotypes behind these images. Don’t know what my intentions are either other than to inject my quirky viewpoint into this long-running debate.
Was collecting some songs by Thin Lizzy on imeem and decided to look into the band’s history. They were an Irish band, and I’m sure this is already well known by hard rock afficionados, but Lizzy’s frontman, Phil Lynott, was of mixed race – his father was Afro-Brazilian and his mother was Caucasian.
Another curiousity is that Lynott was involved in a band named Orphanage before fronting Thin Lizzy. According to irishrock.org, the name Orphanage was supposedly a reference to “the house in Sandymount occupied by Dr.Strangely Strange … where beat and folk musicians would come and go.”
Anyway, The Boys Are Back In Town is a song of theirs that has become ubiquitous on many a classic rock radio channel song list. Also, Metallica covered Thin Lizzy’s song Whiskey In The Jar on its Garage Inc. disc, which I still enjoy listening to. I always thought it was a great piece of songwriting, especially because of its swashbuckling storyline. Come to find out, Whiskey In The Jar is a classic Irish folk song that has been covered by many bands over the years.
I really like YouTube. Like, REALLY LIKE IT. It’s as if you stepped into thousands of people’s storage spaces where each of them has kept hundreds of home movies and they allow you to take a peak into their lives through video – no matter how boring or scandalous.
So, I favorited a video of Rita Dove reading her poem ‘Parsley’ back in 1987. I was immediately intrigued by it and what it was saying because its underpinning is an historical event. Take a listen/look:
Poems like this one that use obscure, but meaningful, historical references add to my moral education and understanding of human psychology.
For example, in this interview with Dove about her ‘Parsley’ poem on the Modern American Poetry website, she hints at something profound:
It was important to me to try to understand that arbitrary quality of his cruelty. And I’m not afraid of making him too human. I don’t believe anyone’s going to like him after reading my poem. Making us get into his head may shock us all into seeing what the human being is capable of, and what in fact we’re capable of, because if we can go that far into his head we’re halfway there ourselves.
This issue of Conducive Magazine features the topic of international adoption from six adoptees who are leading the charge against the silence instilled in us.
Happiness is fleeting. If I’ve ever felt joy in doing anything or being anything, I’ve lost it.
No, it’s never too late to get it back; it’s never too late to fight for whatever I fancy at the moment. But, there’s also a point of no return. There’s a point where I need to reinvent myself and give up whatever I craved, whatever I thought I needed/wanted. To struggle for something that’s not even there anymore, to continue to let my mind and other people trick my logic into believing that it still matters would be just another kind of suicide.
I’m reminded of one of our great American poems, “Epic” by Faith No More:
Adoption is already steeped in the legacy of loss for the child and his family. Add to this the recent revelations of the selling of babies for adoption in countries like Vietnam and India, and one needs only to reconsider who exactly is benefiting from adoption. Kevin Minh Allen, a Vietnamese adoptee, explores ways to effectively address this element of human trafficking. These include, but are not limited to, having the U.S. government sign the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and diverting funds away from the adoption industry and into worthwhile child welfare programs in their home countries.
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By Johnnie Chamberlin Four years have passed since Katrina ravaged New Orleans. Immediately following the hurricane, investigators determined that historic loss of coastal wetlands played a major role in the depth of flooding that took place. Plans were soon drawn up to restore the protective barrier of wetlands along the coast that had for decades been [.. […]
By Johnnie Chamberlin In 1977, Congress passed the Clean Water Act (CWA). This act was created to gradually eliminate all man-made sources of water pollution. Sadly, federal, state, and local governments have used the act to continually permit more discharges of pollution into our rivers, lakes, and drinking water sources. The New York Times recently ran […]
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Under the belief that her daughter’s life was in imminent danger, Mai Thi Kim sent seven year old Heidi to America along with over 2,000 other Amerasian children as part of what became known as Operation Babylift. Over twenty years later, PBS documentary Daughter from Danang follows their heartbreaking journey. [...]
Posted by Kev Minh 
Posted by Kev Minh 
Posted by Kev Minh 
