Those horrifying images of
tsunami-traumatized children in South and Southeast Asia kept
Dana Florentino awake at night. She organized a bake sale at her
church and sent the proceeds to the American Red Cross, but still
she felt helpless and unsatisfied.
Then, last week, the San Jose, Calif., housewife also learned
from her doctor that she'd probably never be able to conceive
a child. After she and her husband wept, he thought of an answer:
They should adopt one of the thousands of children said to be
orphaned by the disaster.
"It seemed like the perfect solution," said Florentino,
35. "They need homes; we have one that needs children.
It's something real that we can do."
Yet the Florentinos, like many Americans who have inquired,
discovered it's not that simple. Adopting children from the
tsunami zone won't be a practical prospect for many months,
if ever. And those offering to do that are being urged by the
United States as well as impacted nations to find other ways
to help.
"It's an incredible situation that's taking place down there,
and Americans are reacting in a variety of generous ways, but
what's needed now is the relief effort," says Bill Strassberger,
spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship
and Immigration Services "Adoption may be an option in the future,
but not today."
Strassberger says a number of factors make speedy adoptions
of these children unrealistic:
* It will be months before it can be ascertained whether these
children's parents perished and whether there's family to take
them in.
* Documentation required by the U.S. government, such as birth
certificates, may be hard to find or may have been destroyed.
* Most tsunami-stricken nations are Islamic and, thus, bar
foreign adoption on religious grounds. Malaysia and Indonesia
permit it but require two-year stays by prospective parents.
Only India, Thailand and Sri Lanka allowed Americans to adopt
last year, and the combined total of those adoptions was fewer
than 1% of the 11,000 babies adopted from China and Russia.
Amid fears of baby trafficking, in fact, officials in Sri
Lanka said Thursday that they have banned adoption of any tsunami
orphans until further notice.
Relief workers are attempting to register children who come
into camps in impacted countries so the governments can help
protect them from being kidnapped or sold to desperate would-be
parents abroad, says John R. Miller, a U.S. ambassador-at-large
who directs the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons. "Registering or identifying children
in camps is a safeguard for many ills, including illegal adoptions,"
Miller says.
The tsunami has brought unprecedented interest in foreign
adoptions, says Virginia Appel of Adoption Alliance, a non-profit
adoption agency based in Denver. Calls to the agency are up
80%, she says.
Appel says the only other events to prompt such a response
were the 1975 airlifts of Vietnamese children whose mothers
sent them to America after the fall of Saigon and the 1989 execution
of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, which led to reports
on the miserable conditions in orphanages in Romania.
Some question whether adoption by Americans would be in the
children's best interest. Losing parents and seeing towns destroyed
is terrifying enough; being uprooted into a new culture could
be another blow to a fragile psyche, say Appel and John Fairbank,
co-director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress
at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. "Very little
is likely to be familiar to the child even in their own country
and then they'd experience this radical change in culture, too,"
Fairbank says. "That is a major stressor on top of the original
trauma."
