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.
Your Host’s Selections:
(1)Michele Bachmann, CCAI, and Haiti…
“As I reflect on all that has been accomplished through this delegation, I am most proud of the fact that CCAI exists to be the storyteller of the vulnerable.”
Yeah! Like CCAI doesn’t Just promote International Adoption. 
I guess all the other congressman were busy…
!
(2) Adoptive Mom Cooler
http://teespring.com/xadoptionxmomxgirlx_amc?fb=PE
“I’m an Adoptive Mom..just like a normal mom…except much cooler.” 
(3) Father’s Rights Case
http://dorkzilla78-welcometomyworld.blogspot.com/2014/10/corruption-out-of-benton-county.html
“The judge, Xollie Duncan, granted the Morris’ petition to TPR Trent on the grounds of unreasonably with-holding consent. ” 
“Then, to add insult to injury, this skanky judge put a gag 
on the case to ensure Trent couldn’t speak out against the corruption or go to the media regarding the kidnapping of his daughter.”
(4) New Chief of the Adoption Division
“Trish joins the Department of State from the Department of Justice where she worked in the Civil Division for almost six years. Before joining the U.S. government, she held several positions in the intercountry adoption field: as a program coordinator for an adoption agency; a board member and interim administrator for the Joint Council on International Children’s Services; the founder and President of Ethica, a non-profit organization dedicated to ethical and transparent adoptions; and as an expert consultant to the Hague Conference on Private International Law. ”
(5) African Adoption Services
http://kitumaini.blogspot.com/2014/10/guest-post-sharing-our-experiences-with.html
“AAS recently informed their clients via email that many biological parents are “revoking their consent” and taking their children back because of negative news stories about American adoptive parents. We also learned later that AAS’ claim that they did not work with orphanages to be false, as AAS received referrals from several orphanages — including One Destiny, an orphanage that AAS later told us had been raided by the Congolese authorities.”
OOOOO!That blogger clobbered AAS 
!
So much of what’s wrong in adoption, part 1:
Jen and Cal Wilkins decided they’d return to DRC, grab “their” kids plus others in the same orphanage aka KIDNAP THEM and take them to a house they plan to rent nearby to minister the gospel to them.
Note that “their” DRC kids biograndad didn’t turn up for his US Embassy appointment, suggesting he doesn’t want his grandkids adopted!
“*The biological grandfather did not show up for his interview in the capital city for the U.S. Embassy appointment which puts our children’s U.S. immigration on hold.
*The founders of the orphanage appear to be lining their pockets with the money that has been provided for food, water, clothing and staff salaries, so our children were receiving one meal or less per day, one small cup of water in 80 – 90 degree heat with 100% humidity, there was 1 (sometimes 2) workers at the orphanage to care for 9 children/toddlers and 3 infants and their jobs included bathing them, preparing food (over a camp fire), hand-washing and line-drying clothes for 12 children, changing “diapers” (plastic bags from the market fashioned into some sort of poo-catchers), etc… There was no time for playing, hugs, tickles or good night kisses. They were just barely surviving.
*Babies were left to lay on mats made of bamboo outside or in a plastic chair for naps. Their bottoms were left unchanged for hours. Toddlers had accidents and diarrhea in their pants and were left unattended also for hours. Our children, Izarrah and Zylor helped by feeding the babies and playing with them on occasion, but even most of their time was spent sitting out in the shade trying not to over-heat with the lack of water.
*The village well was shut off regularly to conserve water and no one knew when it would happen or for how long. When Cal or the other adults would offer our children a second sip of water (or glass-full), they’d look up at them with eyes that said, “Are you sure? Is it really ok??” The kids had been being rationed water.
*Conversations between Cal and his travel companions (my friends) were crazy to even comprehend…”Do we get the kids out of the orphanage so they can survive, or do we have them stay and try to monitor where the money goes? How do we assure that it goes to their food and water and not into the director’s pockets? How do we communicate effectively with the language barrier? If we take our kids out of the orphanage and the funds stop flowing to the orphanage, the other children and babies will die…”
*The situation in our children’s village was not that dire in comparison to their orphanage. Aside from the water issue, the village really was a healthy place. The market had beautiful avocados, bananas, peanuts, meat, rice, beans, other fruits and vegetables, etc… The water is available for roughly 10 cents per gallon. Very affordable (especially with the budget our agency provided the orphanage with) The market had food readily available at affordable prices, but our children did not get food because the ample funds that had been sent to provide food never made it to their mouths. When introduced to bananas, Cal said that our children had no idea how to even peel them! He said that bananas were all over the place there, but our kids had never seen one! He and his group began to call the orphanage yard the prison yard. Everything beyond the walls of the orphanage were foreign to our children. They were terrified to go outside of the walls.
*As I mentioned in an earlier post, on one video I watched as Izarrah and Zylor hunted for remnants or crumbs from the preparation bowls of one of their “meals”. They wiped their hands on all of the bowls and utensils that had been used to prepare it to gather any left-over crumbs or powder and lick them into their hungry tummies.
*The kids did not gain any weight from last May when Nicole visited last until now. Some kids lost weight.
*Will is there currently and could use prayer. He is afraid to leave the kids at night because there is little to no adult supervision for the 12 infants/children there and he’s found them in some pretty scary situations upon arrival in the mornings or when he returns with water. Instead of working on schooling as he’d planned, he’s helping them to survive. Nicole hasn’t had a chance to talk much with her hubby because the connection has not allowed it. Please pray for this very tough situation and for the hearts of Will and Nicole as they are separated in sacrifice to care for each of our precious children there!
*In obedience to a firm conviction on his heart to go to Congo, Calvin went there in a leap of faith asking God to either open or close doors for our family to move there which God was faithful to do. God showed Cal the need and desperation there of all of the children in and around the orphanage (not to mention our own children), He revealed possible housing options at less than we realized per month, He provided a friendly contact there who is an American Christian man working with the government on road engineering, God provided full compensation for our at-home budget through our church body for the days of work that Calvin missed while traveling, but upon arriving home to the States, Cal’s logic said that he could not move his family to a remote African village where there was no running water, electricity, communication with the “outside world” or medical facilities. During the next few days, in Cal’s personal time in the Word, Sunday School and hearing the Word proclaimed in Sunday’s service this week, Cal said that the Lord was talking to him and it wasn’t subtle (He may as well have been whacked over the head with a brick, in how he described it God’s incessant prodding)! Cal was convicted to his core of quite a bit and realized that if he puts off following where the Lord is leading him (to teach English to the community and to minister to the orphans of that village) that he would be in disobedience to what God was calling him to do because of his fear of going. What a shame it would be to miss out on what God was calling him to for fear of what the outcome could be! God was asking him to surrender, just as Jesus had commanded the rich young ruler, “Go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” (Mark 10:21) The young ruler could not do it – he had many possessions and his logic warned him against it. But oh, the blessings, ETERNAL blessings, he missed out on!
*Cal did find some homes while he was there that he believes could work for our family, but he’d still like to hunt further to see if there were any other options a little bit outside of the village. We were so excited to see that they DO have toilets, just not sure if they flush!!! No kitchens anywhere (just a campfire), but we’re considering hiring a cook (what we’d pay would be peanuts to us, but total provision for them) so that she could earn a wage and I could be free to home school our children.
(It would be especially neat to hire a widow who would typically starve without a husband to provide for her, and to give her a place to stay and food to eat in return for her cooking expertise!)
– So yes, we are working towards a move to our children’s village in a long-term missional capacity!
– No, we don’t know for how long.
– No, we don’t know when we’ll move (working toward moving as soon as things can come together – kid’s passports, visas, house rented out, cars sold, etc…)
– Cal plans to offer English lessons (and the Gospel) to the locals there in an effort to also learn the local dialect himself, as he’s giving them their ticket to a great job for life because English is so eagerly sought after.
– Cal also hopes to get as many of the orphans into our home as possible for short OR long-term depending on how the Lord leads and opens or closes doors, but they are dying (31 passed away just last year, including our two young sons) and locals will not take them in as they are struggling to survive themselves. Fostering and adoption are very foreign concepts to them and they can’t understand why someone would want to pay for an extra mouth to feed. When the community first heard that Americans were coming to adopt some of the children, they thought that we must be coming to eat them because they couldn’t think of any other feasible reason someone would want children who aren’t their own. The median age in Congo is 17 years old while the life expectancy is 40 years old. This village needs Jesus. The Lord has called us to share the Gospel with these precious people and children and we do not want to be like Jonah who ran when the job didn’t look appealing.
– Do we have all the answers? No.
– Is it risky? Yes.
– Do our American kiddos want to go? Two weeks ago, no. Now, yes.
– What changed in our kids’ hearts? I have no idea. We have been talking about surrender and following Jesus no matter the cost, but as far as making the jungle sound glamorous or fun, we’ve NOT been doing. Ella was most concerned about not having a toilet. Ari was most concerned about not having communication with family and friends. Now Ari’s talking about making her own dolls and doesn’t care that there’s no store to buy toys at. Ella’s most excited that there really ARE toilets! In a firm resolve, two days before her daddy came home, Ari notified me that she thought God was putting on her heart that we should move to Congo. I laughed at the time and brushed it off, but as we’ve prayed and laid surrendered hearts before the Lord and watched as He has continued opening doors, we’re realizing that the Lord is preparing the hearts of our little girls as well. Ariana has not wavered in her conviction to go. Nor has Ella (I mean, they have TOILETS, what more could you need!) .”
bringinghomejaxxncruz.blogspot.com
Re: “… The median age in Congo is 17 years old while the life expectancy is 40 years old. This village needs Jesus….”
*shudders* No, this village needs increased access to clean water, health care, AND economic development aid to bring it out of poverty. IOW, they need people who follow the mandate of what Jesus actually said while he was alive, not a forgery penned decades after his death.
They also need PAPs who ask hard questions about the ethics of continuing to fund orphanage staff who are NOT spending the money they’re being given on its intended purpose. Plus “orphan advocates” who don’t ask desperately-poor parents to do something we don’t ask American foster parents to do– like take in children without receiving funds to cover the cost of their care.
What they DON’T need are PAPs who promise children things they may not be able to deliver, because it’s out of their hands. For example, telling kids that they WILL come back and adopt them. That’s not “showing faith in the Lord”– that’s hubris. It’s also immoral, and cruel.
I’ll give this guy credit for being sincerely empathetic to the plight of these woebegone kids, but he needs to educate himself about the reality of “orphanages”. They’re built by westerners to separate poor children from their poor parents, based on the Victorian ideology about the “deserving poor versus the undeserving poor”. Children are presumed Deserving by definition; adults may or nay not be. Rather than trouble themselves with sorting out which category the grownups belong to, a lot of do-gooders prefer to restrict their efforts to children ONLY. Making parents place their kids in orphanages as the only means of securing charity for their kids is an efficient way making sure no possibly-undeserving poor person gets any help. 90% of the kids in “orphanages” have living parents.
They’re also built to facilitate the profitable business of child trafficking for international adoption. Transferring children to a different orphanage without telling their parents is a way of “child-laundering” for the adoption trade. If it happened to affluent American parents, we’d call it “kidnapping”.
The LAST thing a tiny little Congolese village needs in selfish, over-entitled PAPs who think it’d be “neat” to have a destitute widow as slave labor!
Ages ago, I used to work in international development and learned first-hand about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
In a remote area of a country on the west coast of Africa, there were basically no doctors and no way to get doctors to move/stay there.
Phase 1 of project: Train the local RN nurses to BScN level in order to improve the quality of health care (even without doctors). Worked great!
Phase 2: Train now-BSCNs to Master’s (physician assistant) level, to improve healthcare even more (without doctors).
The nanosecond the nurses got their Masyers’ they quit their jobs in the remote region in order to get BETTER jobs that paid 20x more — working for embassies in the capital city.
End result: $300k over 4 yrs DECIMATED the health care system in a part of a country that didn’t really have much of one in the 1st place
Carlee,
Re: “…End result: $300k over 4 yrs DECIMATED the health care system in a part of a country that didn’t really have much of one in the 1st place…”
Bummer. 🙁
Perhaps including in the budget money to raise the healthworkers wages to what they could earn in the city is a better plan? I mean, is it reasonable to expect women to volunteer to work for one twentieth of what they COULD be earning?
Another possibility is to require recipients of the training to agree to work in an assigned underserved area for four years in lieu of paying tuition. America has such programs– remember the television show ‘Northern Exposure’?
The bilateral agency I worked for didn’t pay the nurses — the local government did. Having “outsiders” (bilateral, multilateral, NGO, etc) procure and pay healthcare providers tends not to work very well, as 1) they stop getting paid when $$ from outsiders stops coming in AND, more importantly, 2) stops the local government from building/strengthening is *own* healthcare infrastructure. Particularly in rural regions, where there’s a dearth of staff to begin with.
No, it isn’t reasonable to expect the local women to work for 1/20th of what their skills are “worth” in the capital of their country. I don’t blame those women for using their skills to make better lives for their families in the capital – not one bit!
Whether or not some sort of “Northern Exposure”-style could be implemented would’ve been up to the local government. (50+ yrs of the “telling the local govt what to do / “ignoring the local govt and funding individual projects willy-nilly” approach to development assistance had failed miserably for least developed countries, so various bilateral agencies were trying a “country-led” strategy instead. On the theory tat even if it failed, it’d do so in a new and interesting way vs how it always did before!
Carlee,
Ah. I see now.
Well, you’re correct– failing in a new and original way IS better than “repeating the same old thing and expecting different results this time”! ;-D
The scary thing about the project that decimated a health system? An independent evaluation was done after the first phase. It occurred to nobody (myself included) that the second phase was a reeeeeeally bad idea.
I’m also pretty sure a 20x raise would NOT have stopped the nurses for moving to the capital – the MOST coveted “perk” of being a locally engaged staffer at US/UK/Canadian Embassy was getting to send your kids to the (truly excellent, super-duper expensive) British School / American School / Lycée for free.
(If I was one of those nurses who had that opportunity? I’d do the exact same thing).
*sigh*
No easy answers, then.
Maybe economic development to grow the local economy to the point that they can pay nurses a competitive wage AND provide good schools for the kids?
OR how about a program that offers locals training to BScN level, with the condition they have to work in an assigned underserved area until they’ve served for a set number of years, or pay back the cost of their training?
I think it’s, fundamentally, a governance problem — not necessarily a financial one.
In order for development assistance to “work”, you need a population that is willing to submit to the authority of a central government — to collectively agree to allow an imperfect justice system to settle disputes (instead of taking matters into their own hands), to respect pieces of paper (eg deed that says Bob owns this house, so you can’t arbitrarily take it away from him if you’ve got a gun or come from a prominent family, etc), to have faith that if you put $10 in your bank account it’ll still be there 10 min, 10 mos or 10 yrs later, etc. This tends to happen in countries that have had terrible gov’ts for not all that long — 1-2, maybe 3 generations, max.
The Haitis, Afghanistans & DRCs? Their citizenry has ZERO faith in any sort of central government — with good reason! And nobody, as far as I know, has figured out how to do that.
So there’s this awful irony — there’s an inverse correlation between the amount of help a country needs and the ability of the international community to provide it.
*sigh*
I switched to doing humanitarian assistance — it was a (proverbial) bandaid, but really quite satisfying in that the assistance provided made an actual difference, measurable in the short-term: you can calculate the effectiveness on the basis of lives saved per dollar. My fave was school feeding — if you feed kids free lunch, parents will send them to school, since it’s one less mouth to feed. If you feed kids free lunch AND give every girl take-home rations (read: dinner for their family), parents will send their GIRLS to school. You can literally increase female attendance in schools by, like, 90% in a matter of weeks.
Carlee,
Good for you! Hopefully, all that education will result in a stable government down the road.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
;-D
“They thought that we would be coming to eat them,” that’s some straight up ignorance right there. Seriously, NO ONE thinks that. Maybe someone said it as a joke and her husband took it as a fact, but that’s so ignorant.
Everything that’s wrong with the evangelical adoption “culture”, by Renee Alan (who is adoptive mommy to nine unrelated high needs SN Ukrainian kids, FIVE of whom she adopted simultaneously last year):
a get it!!
“I haven’t posted anything like this in a while, but please, if you enjoy anything I’ve ever shared, please take the time to read this.
The kids in this FSP, to me, look a whole lot like Annabelle and Jake. In fact, they’re about the same age and size that my two were, when we got them in 2012. When Charlie and Lola were listed, a whole bunch of you guys on my friends list PM’d me and said “go get them, they look like they belong with you guys!” and we seriously prayed about them- but felt at the time that the answer was no, it wasn’t us.
Another family stepped up- a family that had already experienced heartbreak in the Russia shutdown. Serious heartbreak, knowing that a child they loved, was lost forever behind the bans of a political quagmire.
But they stood firm for Charlie and Lola. Not everyone steps forward for kids with obvious FAS. In fact, just the whisper of “FAS” often sends most people running for the hills. Not the Boyer family. They again, stood firm.
When we were in country getting our last adoption done, Donetsk was shut down, as Russian invaded. We were in Kharkiv, getting Drew and Cy, and saw troops at the railway tracks as we came into town. We heard the whispers, saw the protesters. It was there, folks, just 30 minutes from the Russian border, and bordering Donetsk.
And so, the Boyer family has held strong. Do you know how hard it is to fundraise for kids you know you may never get to travel to meet? How limiting it can be to try to ask people to help you, when legally, at that point, there was no way to travel to get them? So they were somewhat frozen, stuck in time. Unable to do much.
BUT THERE IS A WINDOW OPEN. It may be a very, very small window. But it is one- they can go get these precious children, the loves of their hearts, but they have to go NOW. Mom is going alone- to a region occupied unofficially and officially by Russian fighters, to a place where the airport just got torched, to where the orphanage has been hit by fighting.
She needs $7K. She needs a miracle. I can’t give her a miracle. But I can give her $50. This may be the only chance that Charlie and Lola have for adoption, in this region that is hanging on by a thread to Ukrainian freedom. I’m not asking for our adoption- I’m asking for hers. Will you join me?
Can some of us get together, maybe with Anonymous Angels, or Julia Arnold Nalle’s followers, to put together a matching grant??? Can we call on our churches, our friends to help? I honestly don’t know what any of us can do. The community is tapped out, and people are busy, going into the holidays. But they need help and this is laying heavy on my heart. Can anyone join with me? I would be happy to use the $50 I can share as a matching grant, or maybe 9 others can chip in the same and we can have a $500 matchng grant?
Thoughts?
This is their FSP. It needs to read $22K to fully fund them, including her husband to come over and help them get safely home at the end.
http://reecesrainbow.org/72181/sponsorboyer-2
CHARLIE and LOLA for the Boyer — FL|Reece’s Rainbow Adoption Grant Foundation
On May 26, 2012 Dennis & Cindy committed to adopt a little girl named Adalyn. Adalyn had the same birth defect as 3 of their children. In December they traveled to meet Adalyn, while in country the threat of the ban was happening. On December 23 they returned home hoping to travel quickly back in Ja…
reecesrainbow.org
Ever wonder about APs who intend to disrupt? The comments on Shecki ‘s VILE blog are howlers!
One amommy has been told to expect 5000+ inquiries regarding the “exceptionally beautiful” internationally adopted girl she intends to dump.
“IF the time comes to find her a home, we already have an agency we can use and were told we could expect around 5000 families to inquire. She is exceptionally beautiful so there will be much interest and to go down this road, we plan to be very very picky in who we choose. Its bad enough to even think of doing this, so we want to make sure we are picking the right family for her. I feel we have a really nice family ourselves and we are struggling, so the next family is going to need to be awesome to even make the final cut if we do readopt her out. She deserves nothing less then the “best”, ya know?”
Her friend and fellow amommy Shecki thinks her not-so-fetching adopted from China son will be harder to place.
“That’s wonderful that you think there will be so much interest in her! Our SW told us at our post placement visit, “Luke would be a very hard to place child.”
http://bit.ly/1yZIajM
I can’t see that they intend to disrupt Luke. They still have him, and they’re still trying to get a correct diagnosis for him.
http://grtlyblesd.blogspot.com/2014/10/update-on-luke.html
Go to chinaadopttalk and search for “grtlybsd” or ‘babysean’.
I Googled and found http://chinaadopttalk.com/forum/index.php, but I can’t find a way to search within the site.