Categories: uncategorized
Date: 26 January 2006 11:38:41
Well, fast forward to yesterday and today. We'll leave the flashbacks for a little while, although there are more. Very moving programme on BBC1 last night about international adoption called Baby Be Mine. It followed the stories of three adoptive parents who adopted internationally with very different stories. The second part is on next Wednesday and follows new stories so don't miss it.
Oh but so heart wrenching. Tears were shed.
I guess, being from the US where around 21,000 international adoptions happen every year (stats come from the programme) I always assumed (from a young age) that I would adopt internationally. (I had family friends who had done this and they were very positve role models. It became something I wanted to do early on.) But now I live in the UK where less than 300 adoptions each year happen internationally. Wow. that's a big difference. And I don't believe it's a beurocratic difference, I believe it's a difference in attitude. Which I find a bit difficult.
Here in the UK you read a lot about how it's of utmost importance to keep a child in their own country, and be raised by a family of their own race and culture.
However my thoughts on this were expressed by the programme last night in one of the stories. A girl from the UK went to Romania as a volunteer to work in Romanian orphanages when she was in her early 20s. The orphanages were a terrible place where babies were placed in a cot and ignored completely all day. No one to attend to their physical or emotional needs. No one to hold or touch them. Their nappies weren't changed when they needed to be, they were only changed when it suited the staff's schedules.
The girl bonded with a little boy who had been dumped on the steps of the orphanage when he was 2 days old and had spent a long time in the orphanage with no attention at all. He had developmental setbacks and autism and was now a young boy. She took him to her Romainian home and fostered him for the next 4 years. She was the only mother he knew and she loved him very much. She played with him, fed and clothed him and took him to school and told him bedtime stories. She taught him, talked to him, cuddled him, loved him. Everything a mother should do. She was mummy.
But the Romanian social services would not let her adopt him and travel back to the UK with him because she wasn't Romaian and they said that it was better for him to be with "his own mother". So they hunted down and found the woman who gave birth to him. The woman who had abandoned him, wanted nothing to do with him for four years, lived in squallor with no electricity or toilet, drank heavily, didn't even know how many children she had given birth to (although her 13 year old daughter living with her drank heavily too). They said that he had to go back to his birth mother, because he would be better off. After all she was Romanian. The woman agreed and said to the camera, as partially clothed and skinny, badly fed children ran amok, "She can't give him anything better than I can. I'm his mother." The fear was that the only reason why this woman wanted him back was so that he could be used to beg on the streets.
The story eventually ended well after much beurocracy and legal battles. Eventually the Romanian govenrnment granted the British woman honorary citizenship as she'd lived there so long, opening up the possibility of adopting him. She was the boy's mummy. She returned to the UK with him and he was to receive specialist attention for his autism.
This evening we are attending an open evening at our chosen adoption agency. I wonder what it will be like.