FacePalm Friday
Welcome to this week’s edition of FacePalm Friday.
This is where your hosts will list their top picks for this week’s FacePalm moment—something they learned or read about this week that caused the FacePalm to happen (you know, the expression of embarrassment, frustration, disbelief, shock, disgust or mixed humor as depicted in our Rally FacePalm smiley).
We invite you to add your FacePalm of the week to our comments. Go ahead and add a link, tell a personal story, or share something that triggered the FacePalm on the subject of child welfare or adoption.
(1) Indians adopting kids via kiosks
“India is using kiosks to help with the adoption process, according to a story on CNN-IBN. The Department of Women Development and Child Welfare is opening Internet kiosks after working with the Electronics Corporation of India Ltd for more than a year to create kiosks equipped with touchscreens and Telugu interactive voice systems to help illiterate people use the facility, said K Padmaja, assistant director.”
Because having illiterate people adopting a child from a high-tech vending machine is so for the children and all 
Maybe they can get some too!
(2) “Cultural misunderstandings” in an AWA Ethiopia single mom back to back sibling group adoptions.
From Ethiopia, with love: PSU professor takes on role as single mom to 6 adopted children
[Centre Daily 3/10/12 by Courtney Pruitt]
“One usually expects chaos in a home where a dozen children’s shoes are piled at the door.
Yet all six of Susan Strauss’s recently adopted Ethiopian children can be found quietly reading and doing homework on a Friday afternoon, sitting in a circle in the cozy living room of her home in Lemont.
Strauss adopted the two groups of siblings — four girls: Tenaye, 13, Adanech, 11, Mihret, 11, and Terefetch, 6; and two boys, Bereket, 9, and Biniyam, 9 — in two separate adoptions, returning home with the first group in January 2010 and the second last December.
A small woman with black, curly hair — Tenaye and Adanech are taller than she is — Strauss paces between the adjacent kitchen and living room to check on each child’s progress.
“School’s hard,” she said. “I insist on them working through the reading and math to catch up.”
Strauss, who said she didn’t consider herself “college material” in high school, is an associate professor of applied linguistics at Penn State, having earned her doctorate in the field at the University of California Los Angeles. She knows English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, some Persian, German, Amharic and Sidaama. The latter two are the native tongues of her children.
Each weekday, Strauss rises at 3 a.m. to prepare for her classes. At 6:30 she makes the kids’ breakfast and packs lunches, leaving by 7:15 to walk Tenaye to the bus stop for Mount Nittany Middle School.
She returns to get the remaining five out the door by 8:25 to catch the bus to Mount Nittany Elementary School.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Strauss heads to University Park for her 9:45 a.m. class.
But unlike their daily schedule, the story of how the seven became a family is messy.
Strauss initially applied in 2008 to adopt a single girl from Ethiopia because it was one of the few countries that allow single parents to adopt.
She received a referral — the child’s basic profile and medical information, along with a picture — in March 2009 for a 3-year-old girl named Terefetch from a village in Sidama, a six-to eight-hour drive south from Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
Two months later, Strauss’s adoption agency, America World Adoption, asked if she also would adopt Terefetch’s older siblings, Biniyam and Adanech. The agency tries to keep siblings together, said Anna Graham, its senior director of programs.
Strauss agreed and began studying the children’s native language, Sidaama.
But in July 2009, a cultural misunderstanding caused complications more unusual than in any adoption case Graham had dealt with before.
In Ethiopian court, the oldest sibling, Adanech, had referred to her uncle as her biological father, because in her culture it is considered disrespectful to refer to caregivers as anything but parents.
Despite documented evidence proving she was an orphan, the judge ruled that Adanech was not adoptable and threw her uncle, who insisted he was not her biological father, in jail for perjury.
Days later, America World Adoption told Strauss that the three children may never become adoptable or, if they did, it would take at least a year.
With the situation seemingly hopeless, Strauss applied for another sibling group, receiving a referral for three children from Addis Ababa in August 2009. Within hours of seeing the photos of Tenaye, Mihret and Bereket, Strauss said, she knew she wanted to adopt them. The adoption cleared Ethiopian court on Dec. 10, 2009.
Strauss traveled to Ethiopia to pick up the three in January 2010 at America World Adoption’s transition home in Addis Ababa, where orphans await their adopting parents.
Meanwhile, Adanech, Biniyam and Terefetch, also living at the transition home, had seen pictures of Strauss and her house before their adoption fell through.
The agency told them about the legal complications, Graham said. But after seeing the pictures, the siblings believed Strauss was supposed to be “their mom,” Strauss said.
Strauss said she felt torn when picking up Tenaye, Mihret and Bereket. “While it was the happiest day of my life, it was also the saddest because I had to leave the other kids behind,” she said.
“Even my own children were, like, ‘How could you leave them there?’ ” she said.
Strauss reapplied for the group as soon as she returned home. After Ethiopian court approval in November 2010, Adanech, Biniyam and Terefetch legally became Strauss’s children in Ethiopia.
“And then we had some trouble,” Strauss said.
A turnover in embassy officials coincided with news of adoption fraud and child trafficking in Ethiopia in the spring of 2011. The U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa questioned the case, suspicious of Adanech’s testimony in 2009, Graham said.
In August, Strauss received an email from the vice consul of the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa, saying that because of Adanech’s testimony and her uncle’s refusal to take a DNA test, Adanech likely had living birth parents and was not “clearly approvable as an orphan.”
The case was sent to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service office in Nairobi, Kenya, for a final decision. Strauss contacted the office of Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., to expedite the process of approving Adanech’s orphan status.
On Oct. 19, Strauss received a request for evidence from the customs service in Kenya. At the suggestion of America World Adoption, she hired Lynda Zengerle, a partner in the Washington office of Steptoe and Johnson LLP, to help with the investigation.
“It’s not the kind of thing someone would try to do on their own,” Zengerle said. “Getting factual information from the siblings and cultural information from anthropologists is really what won the day.”
Evidence included interviews from family members of the siblings and others in their village in Sidama on videotape saying their parents were dead, Graham said.
In late November, the customs service approved the case and on Dec. 15 Strauss traveled to Ethiopia to bring home her additional three children.
During her eight-day stay, Strauss visited the children’s village, where Biniyam was received like a “celebrity,” having been gone for 2 1/ 2 years.
The adoption agency also helped Strauss track down the mother of Tenaye, Mihret and Bereket. She was living in government housing and had relinquished her rights to her children after becoming too ill and poor to care for them.
“I thought it was important to let their mother know (they) missed her,” Strauss said.
On Dec. 23, almost four years after Strauss initially applied for them, she returned home with Adanech, Biniyam and Terefetch, forming her family of seven.
Strauss said she was inspired to adopt abroad by the story of Josephine Baker, the famous performer and activist who died in 1975. Baker adopted and reared 12 children she deemed the “Rainbow Tribe,” all of them having come from a mixture of ethnic backgrounds.
“I always knew I wanted to adopt, and during the mid-’90s the idea came back to me strongly as a grad student at (the University of California Los Angeles) at the time,” Strauss said.
A friend told Strauss to wait until she achieved tenure, when she would have more flexibility financially and with her schedule.
Now, more than 15 years later, Strauss said she appreciates the advice, describing the past two years as “immensely difficult.”
When her first three children arrived in 2010, Strauss said she had to rely on neighbors to help her assert her authority. One day when the children refused to go to school, Strauss recalled, a neighbor helping her get the children into the car.
“They were testing their limits … in extreme ways,” Strauss said.
The first few nights after bedtime, Strauss recalled, she was sitting outside Tenaye, Mihret and Bereket’s room, reminding them to be quiet. Each time she turned the light off, the children would get up and flip it back on.
After several repetitions, Strauss got her ladder and took the light bulb out. “It was hard for them to give up that control; it was a major trust issue,” she said.
The three have been enrolled in camp the past two summers at the State College Branch of the YMCA of Centre County.
“You could see how far they really have come,” said Veronica Foust, assistant to the youth and family services director. “The first summer they would be willing to say hello and that was as far as they would get, and the second summer they’d be talking up a storm and taking part in everything we’d do.”
Her children also needed help academically; doing homework or reading was foreign to them, and they knew little English, Strauss said.
To Strauss and Debra Latta, principal of Mount Nittany Elementary, it soon became clear the children, because of their background, could not be taught like typical ESL students.
“We couldn’t assign them to research a planet when they didn’t know what Earth was,” Latta said.
Though the elementary school children are not yet at grade level, their progress has been rapid, which Latta credits mainly to Strauss for “turning everything into a lesson” at home.
One thing Strauss has done is have each child read to her while she cooks dinner each night. She reports homework difficulties the children have during weekly meetings with the principal and teachers.
Strauss also is building an addition to her house, including a large room upstairs where the family can study together.
She plans to write a book about her story this summer and hopes to return to Ethiopia with her children to visit their villages and the families they left behind.
“You see how healthy this kind of reunion is,” she said as the family huddled around her computer to watch a slideshow of her photos from Sidama.
But for now, Strauss said, the seven have their own little Ethiopian community right in State College. ” 
(3) Bethany Adopt-A-City “Targets Orphans”
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Missions/Default.aspx?id=1553264
Step One on their new marketing phase of being the PREMIER family preservation agency. Of course, starting in Ethiopia…
“”Because the need is so great, and there are so many orphans — we’ve all heard about the 163 million orphans around the world — Bethany is moving into doing some family preservation services,” Bowels explains. “And we’re trying to go to some of these countries that are in severe need and have a severe orphan crisis and try to help those children that are remaining in the country.”
Bethany Christian Services is launching its “One Family” campaign in which an American city will adopt a foreign city to provide essential services. The first is Knoxville, Tennessee, which is adopting Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.”
Tennessee is an interesting state to start-that is where two of the children they placed from China died in the hands of APs. 
(4) More Facebook Advertising for Domestic PAPs
““In the end, we want a family more than our privacy,” Mrs. Davison said”
“It contains pictures, descriptions and lots of detail about the Davisons and their dream.
“It’s all out there,” Mrs. Davison said. ”
Couples eager to adopt make appeals on social media
[The Columbus Dispatch 3/12/12 by Rita Price]
(5)Buzz Buzz, where do we begin with the great cross-pollinator, Craig Juntunen’s, latest blathering…
“Most Americans are likely to think about celebrities when confronted with the issue of international adoption.” Nope!
“But the drama surrounding celebrity adoptions overshadows the darker facts about the issue:” You mean trafficking for adoption? Oh..no…statistics…
Then he rants on about how great he is….
“Recently, Senegal joined a growing list of countries — China, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Guatemala — that have suspended or curtailed international adoptions because of systemic weaknesses, corruption or other reasons. As with the other countries, the Senegalese painted the move as an effort to implement standards of The Hague Adoption Convention, the global pact on safe adoption signed in 1993.”
Senegal…a country in which only 14 children came to the US since 2001, has ALWAYS had trafficking issues. China is open, but I am sure you are wanting those healthy abandoned girls that you still believe were legitimately there to begin with. You are so dumb that you are dangerous! 
“Instead of letting this conversation get swept away in politics, let’s start with the universally accepted fact that institutionalization is an emotional — and sometimes a physical — death sentence for a child.”
Orphanages are the safety net for most families in other countries. I know you are trying to divert the conversation away from the hard thing to solve-poverty, but this line is really getting old.
As for your “sacrificing safeguards and child welfare” blather, there are NO real safeguards and money allows the rules to be bent everywhere.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-juntunen/international-adoption_b_1342072.html
(6) Step 2 in Bethany’s “Premier” Family Preservation mantra-their new self-promoting Christian Post blog called Every Child
http://blogs.christianpost.com/every-child/family-preservation-8758/
It had one comment but it was already removed. 
“I am proud to say Bethany is a premier family preservation agency: The heartbeat of our organization is providing the best possible scenario for the child. We do that through serving women and children, keeping families together, and finding families for children in need. Our services in 21 countries and spanning five continents have provided families and communities with a lifeline of hope and help.” 
And they mention Safe Families “The problems that children and families are facing aren’t only happening “outside” of the United States. There are many people struggling right here in our cities. Bethany is working to preserve families in the U.S. through avenues like our Safe Families for Children ministry. This is a movement of volunteer host families who agree to open up their home to children whose families are experiencing a crisis.”
Yes, they really think that they are Superman 
We give them a 
for blowing into country after country and specifically NOT doing family preservation.
We also have blogged on this topic in our Family Preservation Facepalm in February 2011.
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