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The slug-fest (and I’m talking the cyber version of balled fists, not banana-like slimy mollusks … is “slimy mollusk” redundant?) that is the back corner of the Cambodian adoption sandlot is once again gaining popularity as a venue for opening old wounds and pounding
a jagged point into new ones. Possibly, I’m a bit tender and quick to bruise after spending last Sunday surrounded by the living, breathing proof of just how wonderful Cambodian adoption can be, but I can’t help jumping into this again.
Sorry to say, but it seems to be the present situation in Guatemala that is bringing the topic up again and again … a very frightening turn for those with Guatemalan ties, as the Cambodian miasma is not something anyone would want to spread, being that it seems it may never dissipate.
I’m coming across the same did-sos / did-nots that have been clogging cyberspace since the US suspension of Cambodian adoptions more than five years ago, and although a Niagara of words has flowed, I don’t know of one person who’s been swept from one shore to the other.
Still held up as the period … or should I say, exclamation point … at the end of the “Cambodian adoption is a bad, bad thing” thought, the link to the Richard Cross lecture continues to be posted, apparently as evidence that nothing was ever right about Cambodian adoption, and that five years later the suspension remains valid.
In addition, anecdotal information is again sprouting up in groups and forums, planted like kernels of truth and wisdom, encouraged to grow by those who’ve cultivated the same views and propagated by many who may not take the time to understand there is a difference between belief and fact, as well as between now and then.
I’ve had email in response to the Cam News post from last Friday suggesting that there have been so few babies entering Cambodian orphanages since the ban that the only logical conclusion would have to be that every adoptable infant was come by through nefarious means, and that once the means no longer led to profitable ends nary a one has been abandoned.
Much reference is made to the Holt survey of orphanages, suggesting that the small number of infants found during that process proves that Cambodians “rarely place healthy newborns in orphan care”, a conclusion I do not think follows logic that comes with information about what life is really like in that country.
Continued …
