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 requires frequent visits to info-wells that are darned uncomfortable to dip into, and so full of ugliness and horror that turning a blind eye could seem a sensible tact.

So it goes. Pretending all is roses and rainbows only helps the pretenders, and the more choosing that route, the less likely it is that any progress will be made. Change only happens when people are uncomfortable, and that often requires sticking a leg into the boiling tar of misery that is the real life of other people.

With that thought, I offer just a few of the stories making the world's news providers lately.

From Uganda, this about how peace is threatening children there. Refugee camps are closing, and with them the only home many orphans of war have ever known, along with the support systems the camps provided, as weak and sporadic as those may be.

Of course, life has not been easy in the camps with prostitution ... a tit-fot-tat that earns some the equivalent of eleven cents a throw ... abuse, theft and drugs the daily themes. No knowledge of "home villages", no living adult family members and such, however, leave other alternatives unlikely.

In Lesotho, there are some darned lucky kids. Some have some family ... only about half the students are double orphans, meaning both parents died, and of AIDS, and in this part of the world that's a hefty percentage of kids with parents ... and they go to school. It has no electricity and few desks or supplies, but the kids pack it out day after day.

The problem here is that there isn't enough food to go around.

"Drought has robbed the children's families of their crops this year. They come to school on empty stomachs. I honestly don't know where or when they are fed. These are the ones who nod off during class; they have no energy," the school's principal Francis Adewale, 39, a Nigerian national, told IRIN.

Some orphans live with relatives who refuse them food. Some have no one. School is great, but starvation pays little attention math skills.

In Angola and other countries, some orphans are accused of being witches when their parents die suddenly or someone has an agenda that makes such accusations convenient.

In parts of Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are accused of being witches, and then are beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families, often as a rationale for not having to feed or care for them.

The officials in one northern Angolan town identified 432 street children who had been abandoned or abused after being called witches. A report last year by the government’s National Institute for the Child and the United Nations Children’s Fund described the number of children said to be witches as “massive.”

Sadly, this can be what happens to kids with living parents, parents who are unable to feed themselves and their families, often with fathers heavy into alcohol, who look for "any justification to expel them [children] from the family".

In addition to torture, death is frequently the outcome of being cast as a witch. There are shelters for some kids, all boys, if they manage to escape. There are no options for girls, however.

Children in orphanages can be subject to miseries heaped on them by those in charge, as this story from Zambia shows, and figuring out what happens to the millions of dollars supposedly marked for orphans isn't easy, either.

Across the board, virtually none of these children would be considered available for adoption. International families are not an option for the nine-year-old Ugandan prostitute, the 12-year-old Angolan "witch", the starving students in Lesotho. There is no shortage of people who from the comfort of their safe and well-fed lives claim vehemently that these kids must stay where they are, that removing them from the circumstance into which they were born amounts to nothing less that "cultural genocide", and that any efforts to open a path between them and foreign families would be some sort of ploy to create a market.

That's a handy dodge, but I wonder what the kids would have to say if anyone bothered to ask.

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