Over 143,000,000 orphans around the world struggle to survive every day. As a leader in international adoption, Agency has witnessed the struggle of individual children. Viewed collectively, the struggle becomes a silent, worldwide crisis. Agency is now beginning to work with like-minded organizations to give these orphans a voice and say to the world: THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.
Together we are developing a plan to 1) reduce the orphan population, and 2) improve orphan care, consistent with Agency's mission of Creating Brighter Futures around the World by finding permanent families for children and caring for the children left behind. Our plan involves building coalitions with other adoption agencies, legislators and policy-makers, the academic community, churches and synagogues, UN and NGOs, as well as religious, community and government leaders overseas. And it involves YOU. You can become the orphan's voice.
Consider the combined network of these like-minded organizations - hundreds of thousands of families. In this age of social media, that's quite a start in an effort to communicate a compelling message. In order to broaden the ownership of this undertaking to include each of you, we will provide periodic updates as to our progress in collaboratively confronting the world's orphan crisis, including occasional calls to action.
There is an awakening in this country to the plight of the orphan and a drumbeat of concern to take up their cause and not turn a deaf ear to their cry any longer. With your involvement, we can relegate the word "orphan" to the history books. Maybe not in our lifetime, but we can plant the seeds today.
On June 10, 2010 at 9:15 am, I replied to this big honcho with the following:
Dear Mr. G,
As the mother of an Ethiopian adoptive son, I am very intrigued to have received this email from Agency. The mention that Agency will be engaged in coalition building with legislators and policy-makers in particular to reduce the world orphan population is especially interesting to me. In the vein of working with legislators and policy-makers, I wonder if Agency has plans to lobby Congress, directly or indirectly, to reintroduce federal foreign-policy legislation promoting democracy in countries that have questionable political structures or regimes that influence or bear on the orphan crisis there (as in at the best the way those regimes function maintains the orphan crisis status quo or it worsens it), in a country like Ethiopia for instance.
Examples of the legislation, which died and never became law, I refer to are, specifically:
The Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-2003
and
The Ethiopia Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights Advancement Act
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-2228
Ethiopia is a beautiful country, with a fascinating history and exquisite culture. Unfortunately, however, the citizens of Ethiopia toil and struggle beneath a totalitarian and oppressive regime, that which virtually reinstated itself by means of a sham national election on May 23, 2010, indicating to the world it has no desire to entertain the idea of relinquishing its power.
http://nazret.com/blog/index.php?title=obama_administration_snubs_ethiopia_over&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
On January 6, 2010 the Ethiopian Parliament, no doubt at the behest of the immoveable Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, passed a law entitled the Proclamation of Charities Act which limits the financing allowed to non-governmental organizations with civil and social justice objectives.
Though the Zenawi government touts statistics that indicate it has improved Ethiopia's economy in the past several years, it is increasingly hostile towards democratic efforts in Ethiopia, or downright rapidly snuffing democracy out. One example of this is the imprisonment of democratic political group opposition leaders such as Birtukan Mideksa.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/individuals-at-risk/write-for-rights/birtukan-mideksa
Amnesty International reported that at the end of 2009, Ethiopia remained one of the world's poorest countries with some 6.4 million people suffering acute food insecurity. Without a democratic government system, the citizens of Ethiopia will increasingly wrestle and meet with extreme difficulty to change important things that will have positive economic repercussions in their lives, and that of future generations, such as changing or at least improving upon agricultural practices and being able to vote for representatives who instead of thwarting efforts towards civil and social justice will welcome and build upon those efforts. Upward mobility for most families is going to become impossible whereas it is obviously already incredibly challenging, if not impossible. When families are poor and cannot feed their children, their children can and do become orphans.
I hope that lobbying for foreign-policy legislation that could have an effect on minimizing the number of orphans in the world is what Agency means, at least in part, by collaborating with, or building a coalition with, legislators and policy-makers in efforts to reduce global orphan numbers.
Any response to this email is sincerely welcomed. I also look forward the periodic updates on the efforts described below in Agency's email.
On June 16, 2010 at 6:29 pm, I received the following response:
Many thanks for your response. I’ll be honest with you on two fronts. One is that we are in the infancy in terms of developing our strategy to take a comprehensive, integrated approach to addressing this massive problem. So, I can’t exactly tell you what our coalition-building efforts with legislators and policy-makers will look like. Secondly, my gut was that it would be focused on legislation like the Families for Orphans Act. I had not thought in terms of federal foreign policy legislation. But that’s part of why I sent the email – to get responses from people like yourself who have thought about things that I haven’t !
I will be in the nation's capitol twice in the next month and will be trying to move the needle a bit.
Thanks again for weighing in with your comments.
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I stumbled upon this exchange the other day, the printed version, which I'd kept in a box chock full of adoption / transracial /country news/conditions documentation that I've been intermittently accumulating over the years.
With its initial announcement email, the agency just seemed so damn passionate in its conviction to tackle the lamentable matter of world orphans from a holistic approach. So passionate, notwithstanding the infancy of its program, that it completely glossed over foreign policy! (in spite of the actual mention of "policy-makers")
Mind you, this is the exact same agency whose chief development officer, in attendance at an adoption agency family event, once announced that the agency was looking into new "markets". This he said in reference to the agency establishing a relationship with new countries so peeps from the U.S. could adopt those countries' kids. I swear to God. I witnessed the (White) man issue these very words from his very mouth with my very own eyeballs and heard the words with my very own bloody ears.
I should really email this big honcho guy to see how far their as-of-then unrefined tactical amalgamation has come.
I think I will.
Afterall, the agency has had three years to strategically move forward on its flowery-languaged mission. In three years passage of time, Meles Zenawi has croaked, Birtukan Mideksa miraculously was released from prison while Eskinder Nega was tossed in, Prime Minister Desalegn took the wheel and has continued Zenawi's legacy of democricide, and, most recently, everyday law-abiding Muslims are suffering religious repression, disenfranchisement, as well as being harassed, attacked, killed, and accused of terrorism. Meanwhile, the United States maintains its geopolitical BFF status with Ethiopia and continues to dump a whopping approximately 800 million dollars a year into the country*.
*Some of that is used for HIV initiatives, with which I do not take issue in isolated terms.
