A post I wrote last week inspired comments having to do with separating the issue of poverty from any equation that might mean adoption.

Hunger and malnutrition are a huge problem all over Africa and the rest of the developing world. However, it doesn't mean these kids are not with family that care for them and love them.

In most cases, these families are attempting to keep it together. They are still sending them to school... they are trying! These kids are not in the streets or in orphanages. Their families haven’t given them up. That is why... more

Almost without preparation, my son Sam will today say good-bye to his first 'real' school, as the year has come to an abrupt ending that snuck up on me completely.

It seems like yesterday that I wrote about his first day in the Baie Lazare Crèche, the local version of kindergarten, but it was almost a year ago that we all went through the drama and trauma of big boy going to big boy school and all that entailed.

He cried every morning for a week when we'd leave him, but soon adjusted well and enjoyed his days.

He has learned to speak Creole over the year, and can... more

Anyone in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin with an interest in possible adoption from Russian might be interested in hosting a child for 10 days. The Russian Orphan Lighthouse Project is looking for host families for 10- to 15-year-old kids in January. Check out their website for details.

I have recently come across an interesting summation of the Romanian adoption mess as it played out over the years. Check it out for a quick review up until July of last year ... the last action ... when the US Senate resolved to urge Romania to "modify its ban on international... more

With a family less than even a remote possibility for millions of African children, those who advocate for international adoption have a responsibility to stay abreast, as much as possible in a world where the mass of information is daunting, to say the least, of the reality of life in Africa.

Unlike some who insist that life is always better lived where begun, people who embrace the idea of a global village and families without borders see international adoption as one way some of the world's children can find love, life and happiness. Making this point... more

Anyone thinking that the United Nations is an upright, honest and honorable organization that can be trusted across the board probably should have been paying a bit more attention when the oil-for-food scandal broke a couple of years back.

If the corruption involved in that mess didn't get people taking a second look toward that big building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, perhaps this confession of years of fabrication and dispensing of false information on the global... more

Much like female genital mutilation being considered little more than a cultural quirk and female infanticide getting little more than a wink and a nudge in many countries, fiddling the books on the numbers of orphans is considered a tolerable dodge in many of the nations of the world.

Making strong differentiations between "adoptable" children and those "not available for adoption" is also something authorities are allowed, and you have to wonder how and why some kids fall one way and others, the other. Do they have anything to... more

Here's a statistic for you today ...

An orphan is created in the world by an AIDS death every 14 seconds; that's more than 4 per minute, 240 per hour, 5,760 per day, and these figures only count AIDS orphans. There are hundreds of thousands orphaned every year by malaria and other diseases, starvation, war, and any number of other causes of death.

This stat comes from an article calling Christians to adoption as part of some call to duty, not an idea I'm particularly comfortable with, but one that nonetheless illustrates the monstrous gap between the number of children in the world for whom parents are even... more

Under a "better late than never" banner, here are some happenings from Cambodia ...

Thanks to a heads up from mom to a Cam-born kid and author of "Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia, Kari Grady Grossman, there is something to share on the good works of another adoptive parent.

Ken McBain, a lovely man I had the pleasure of meeting in a restaurant in Phnom Penh while we were in the country for Cj... more

My daily trawl for blog fodder always presents something interesting, but often some of it at least consists of the make-my-teeth-hurt grating variety. That seems to be the flavor of the day on the international adoption front. Oh, goodie.

Starting out with some very iffy celebrity adoption-related stories circulating around the fringes of what might be called news, this story claiming that Angelina Jolie's daughter Zahara has a birth mother in Ethiopia... more

Back in high school, I had a good friend whose mother when miffed would, for the fifty-millionth time, say, "You know that you're just a placenta, don't you? When you were born, the doctor threw away the baby and wrapped the afterbirth up for me to take home."

My father would tell anyone who asked my full name, actually Sandra Noreen, that it was Sandra No Weenie, "Because she doesn't have one."

I wrapped my son's fifth birthday presents and set them all out in plain view a day in advance with the express intent of torturing him with anticipation.

A quick Internet search just provided such cruelties doled out by parents onto the innocent heads of their adorable children... more