It has been brought to my attention that some yahoos gnawing on an anti-adoption bone are taking a scrap and passing it off as a meal on groups around the adoption community.

Apparently, having heard that an 'orphanage' in Cambodia is closing down, said yahoos ... who we'll refer to as yahoos -- no caps -- for the duration of this post since I am so veddy-veddy polite, you see, and other more appropriate titles might offend ... have managed to mutate the information into something that nicely fits the narrow little agenda they have handy and would so like to fill with something.

For those not in the Cambodian adoption world, here are the facts, some of which I included in this recent post ...

Elizabeth Mallory, adopted mom to Cambodian-born kids, has been running an organization called NCLO, No Child Left Out, for more than five years. It has done some great stuff, and this has taken a lot of work. Elizabeth's time commitment to NCLO has taken its toll on her family and she's been looking for a way to provide some sort of help or relief for a couple of years now, without luck.

Recently, funding resources have dropped away.

With ten orphans in care at the NCLO Children's Home, when an opportunity arose for those ten to be taken in by an institution Elizabeth considers to be one of the best in the country, she decided the kids would benefit from the move and began the process to close down operations.

Here is the explanation from the NCLO website which will be up only until the end of the month:

Effective September 30, 2007, after more than 5 years of providing food, education, health care and supplies to orphaned and impoverished children, NCLO is ceasing all operations. NCLO had been facing a steady decline in donations as well as the inability to secure long term onsite volunteer manpower to help with our work in Cambodia. As a result, we had been gradually shifting our programs and focus to the children of the NCLO Children’s Home. The decision to cease operations was made when a wonderful opportunity arose for the children of the NCLO Children’s Home to transfer to another facility that could provide them an even greater and more secure future than NCLO.

Elizabeth has said, by way of explanation, that her experience has shown a decreasing number of true orphans in Cambodia, and that many of the children in care do have a living mother, father or both.

So, just to recap, facts are 1) an orphanage in Cambodia has closed, and 2) the person who ran that now-defunct institution has said that the number of orphans in the country has dropped.

Got that?

Now, back to yahoos ...

Continued in the next post.