I am so hoping I wasn't in the minority of news watchers coming close to ralfing my waffles over the brand-new,shiny and spiffy UN Secretary General's visit to Sudan.

Hearing that Ban Ki-moon is "shocked" by the state of the country is about as terrifying ... and shocking ... as it gets in this mess of a world, and when the phrase, "Time is of the essence" popped out of his mouth, I snarfed hot tea up my nose and spent the next ten minutes choking.

Who IS this guy? And, more importantly, why does he have this job?

Okay, the job is the job, and it's all about nice suits and flying around the world in plush accommodation ... did anyone else catch a glimpse of the convoy? ... and it is the UN, so not really about doing more than pushing their own PR machine further down the road to big-time funding, but you'd think someone would have done something to keep Ban from insulting the world.

At least Kofi Annan looked the part of epitomized grace and humility and would have thought twice before labeling himself shocked, but it was on his watch that the bodies started piling up.

And another thing ...

How long have we been hearing "200,000 dead, 2.5 million displaced" as a tag to any Darfur-related stories? There's been no change in those 'official' numbers for a very long time. Does anyone think this means that there have been no more dead, nor more displaced since way back before George Clooney was there?

According to UNICEF, there are around 1.8 million children affected by conflict in Darfur, but figures on orphans don't appear to be available. Can there be any doubt that there are thousands? Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands?

None are available for international adoption.

Here is what the State Department has to say, in part:

The U.S. and international media have occasionally reported on the difficult situation faced by Sudanese children, and it is completely understandable that some American citizens want to respond to such stories by offering to open their homes and adopt these children in need. However, it is a generally agreed international principle that uprooting children during a war, natural disaster or other crisis may in fact exacerbate the children's situation. It can be extremely difficult in such circumstances to determine whether children who appear to be orphans truly are. It is also not uncommon in a hostile situation for parents to send their children out of the area, or for families to become separated during an evacuation. Even when it can be demonstrated that children are indeed orphaned or abandoned, they are often taken in by other relatives. Staying with relatives in extended family units is generally a better solution than uprooting a child completely.

Excuse me for mentioning this, but I'm thinking the extended family unit thing just may have broken down a bit over the past years of starvation, disease, forced migration, murder, rape and all the other non-comfortable, horrendously unsafe conditions.

And how difficult can it really be in "such circumstances to determine whether children who appear to be orphans truly are", when it's not much work to count corpses.

Wouldn't you think that there would be some attention paid to orphaned children especially? Shouldn't we be hearing the numbers, seeing the faces, counting the bodies?

What will it take for someone like Ban Ki-moon ... like him, but far less irrelevant ... to count the orphans who have missed the safety net?

Sorry for taking up a whole blog post with a vent today, but I am SO MAD and I need to release some of my anger.

Thanks for listening.