Africa Adoption

The West African country of Ghana is in many ways a success story. It's neither war-torn nor dictator-ruled, businesses do well there and investment is heavy, and one of their citizens just finished a stint ... a very long stint ... as Secretary General of the United Nations, one of the biggies in prestige jobs in the global village. The country gets no pass on other problems rife in Africa, however, as allegations of corruption and a huge HIV/AIDS population both come with the territory. Of course, the UN is involved in most aspects of government, or non-government as they prefer, and makes a habit out of sticking its tentacles into many local pie charts. In the report we were discussing in the previous

I need to take a minute before jumping into this post to scratch my head in wonder at some of the thinking that takes place in peoples' heads, then gets written about in the news. I don't know about everyone else, but some things that come through to me as crystal clear and with no ambiguity seem so astonishingly simple to grasp, and I'm absolutely confounded when confronted with black and white proof that others so often miss the point completely. Here's my example of this for the day, a report which features the District Officer of a Social Welfare Department in Ghana demanding an orphanage be closed down. The facility, the Royal Seed Needy Home, is admittedly over-crowded, with 75 children packed into a four bedroom house, and most… [more]

South African President Thabo Mbeki has taken yet another intentional and stupid step along his meandering backward path of dealing ... or actually, not dealing ... with the huge HIV/AIDS crisis in his country -- he's fired his Deputy Health Minister, a knowledgeable, staunch and outspoken advocate for greater and more aggressive action against the virus. The reason? She attended an AIDS conference in Spain against his wishes. Do the phrase "politically motivated" ring a bell? How about "short sighted", "ignorant", "arrogant", or "just plain don't care"? Sheesh. The guy just doesn't get it, and he never has. If you recall, back in the early days of his presidency he insisted, against a world of evidence to the contrary, that HIV

One of the world's biggest charities, CARE has taken a bold and huge step in a positive direction by announcing that they're walking away from $45 million a year in US food aid money. Since much of the federal funding for Africa comes from selling tons of American farm products in African countries, the thinking is that the system actually hurts many of the people it is supposed to help, and that it's plagued with inefficiencies. Here's how it works in a process called "monetization": Under the system, the U.S. government buys the goods from American agribusiness, ships them overseas on mostly American-flagged carriers and then donates the goods to the aid groups. The groups sell the products in poor countries and use the money to fund their anti-poverty… [more]

Adoption.com's Adoption Week e-magazine (which is free and full of great stuff) had a great article in it this week about teens in Missouri helping orphans in Uganda find loving adoptive homes in the United States. The story comes out of Kansas City, Missouri and is titled "Teens Help Ugandan Kids Find U.S. Homes". The article is about Bethany Hartzler and her friend and college classmate, Amy Wolf, who helped navigate the international adoption process in Uganda for eight orphaned Ugandan children, including 10 year-old twin boys who are now Bethany's new little brothers. It is hard to imagine two college girls handling the complex procedures of international adoption, especially ones from an African country without an established adoption program, however, that seems to be what happened in this case. Like many… [more]

A recent news story out of Zambia is bad news for families using the U.S. adoption agency Faithful Adoption. The Namibian ran a story on August 13 titled "Zambia Smashes Adoption Scam." The article states that the Zambia government has uncovered and ended an adoption scam that involved flying children out of Zambia with adoptive parents, without proper adoption procedures being followed. As a result of these findings, the article claims, three children have been "withdrawn" from the American families that were planning on adopting them. The Zambian Community and Social Welfare Minister Catherine Namugala, said that unconfirmed reports showed that at least 17 other children had been taken out of the country for adoptions, without the knowledge of the government and without legally binding adoptions haven taken place. In… [more]

I'm starting off a bundle of news related to African adoption, orphans and such with a link to a lovely African adoption story of three Liberian kids adopted into a family in a small town in Northern California. Mawolin, Joseph and Elizabeth Summers haven't been home long, just since April, but this report indicates that they're doing very well in their settling in and happy to be part of this new family. Zambia just made its first ever contribution to the UN World Food Program (WFP), with 10,000 metric tons of corn. I don't really understand this story, though, as the corn will reportedly be used to "... allow hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Zambians to keep receiving crucial food assistance beyond September." There must be some sort of… [more]

As I wrote about in my last post, there can be many challenges involved with adoption from Africa, especially when prospective adoptive parents are not adopting through a very established program (or are not going through an adoption agency). While the rewards of a successful adoption are great, the risks can be great as well, so it is important that adoptive parents go into an adoption from Africa educated and prepared. One of the common roadblocks (or at least hurdles) in adopting from Africa is that many of the African countries that do have actual laws and procedures in regards to international adoption, have lengthy "residency requirements" for adoptive parents. While I would love to live in Kenya, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Lesotho or… [more]

Adopting from Africa is not always an easy thing to accomplish. In fact, it is often quite complicated. There are several well-established adoption programs, such as Ethiopia and Liberia, but in most cases there are very few laws and regulations regarding international adoptions, and in some countries, there is not even a native word for "adoption". Traditionally in Africa, if a child were to become orphaned, then the extended family would automatically take that child in and care for him. There were no legal proceedings or big to-do, it is just the way that things were done. However, with the civil wars, famines and the HIV/AIDS crisis that have plagued Africa, the number of orphans has boomed to millions. Adults have died… [more]

This story from South Africa's Western Province addresses the increasing influx of orphans, and the difficulty children's centers have in keeping up. Adding to the AIDS toll and poverty, the fact is that crime is rampant and in many places there is no shame in stealing from orphans or burning down and vandalizing facilities that care for them. In Cape Town, they're trying to prepared for soaring numbers of orphans there, too, with some warning that the problem has moved from being merely a social problem to a socio-economic problem with ramifications long-term and wide spread, impacting everyone, including those who'll be hit only through their wallets. With care for orphaned children getting squeezed a bit tighter every year as the numbers… [more]