Fly Away Children

I watched the report 'Ethiopia - Fly Away Children' last night on Foreign Correspondent. Again, it raised critical issues around child harvesting and trafficking for international adoption. I encourage you to take half an hour out to watch it (the video is online as well as the story).

I am disgusted at the footage of the worker from adoption agency Christian World Adoption going into villages and asking parents who among them might like to hand their children over to live in America.

I struggle with removing children from a country when they have a known parent there. There is a difference between relinquishment due to poverty and abandonment. The problem is, some agencies feed lies to adoptive parents, who truly believe they are adopting an orphan.

These are tough issues for many prospective adoptive parents to deal with, but they must be addressed. We cannot pretend these issues do not exist. We need ethics in all areas of adoption, and as horrible as the program was to watch last night, I commend the ABC for broadcasting it and raising awareness.

ONE YEAR LOGGED IN!

It's our first year LIDverasry today. Let's look how far we've come in the past year.

When we were logged in, there were 948 days worth of log-ins in front of us.

There are now 899 days.

That makes it a grand total of 49 days referred in the past twelve months.

The most recent referrals were logged in for over 41 months.

Working on an average of 3.1 days of referrals a month, we are due to receive our baby some time in January 2019. (See the calculations)

Ha!

Even if things speed up 10x (what are the chances?) and CCAA starts referring month for month, it will still be 30 months more of waiting, or February 2012 before our referral.

I'm still optimistic that things will speed up after we get through the May 2007 files (when the rules changed). When people ask I tell them we expect it to be another three or four years wait. Surely it won't be ten.