Adoption News - Tragedy in Haiti

Eleven days ago Haiti suffered a massive earthquake. Before the quake hit there was an estimated 380,000 orphans in Haiti. There were some adoptive families in the U.S. and Europe already matched with children waiting for their paperwork to be finalized and visas issued. Thankfully the government expedited many of these adoptions so these children could be relocated to their new homes. The horror now is the fact that there are even more orphans due to this disaster. Haiti has halted all new adoption requests as authorities search desperately for biological family members for children who have lost their parents. Sadly, Haiti's infrastructure was not the best before the earthquake. It's even worse now. many orphanages were destroyed. The rebuilding process will be a long and arduous one for sure.

This tragedy made me reflect on my own adoption process. In May 2008 there was a massive earthquake in China. It registered 7.9 in the Sichuan Province. According to an article in the New York Times over 70,000 people were killed and 18,000 missing. Thousands of the quake's victims were children crushed in shoddily built schools, inciting protests by parents. Local police harassed the protesters and the government criticized them. At least one human right advocate who championed their cause was arrested.

The Chinese government refused to release the number of students who died or their names. But one official report soon after the earthquake estimated 10,000 students perished in the collapse of 7,000 classrooms and dormitory rooms. Reports also emerged in July of 2008 that local governments in the province had begun a coordinated campaign to buy the silence of angry parents whose children died in the earthquake.

Most parents of these victims took a payment of about $8,800 for their silence plus a guaranteed pension. In December the same year Chinese government officials acknowledged
in the most definitive report since the earthquake that many school buildings across the country are poorly constructed and that 20 percent of primary schools in one southwestern province may be unsafe.

These tragedies have struck a chord with me. I think about my life in the privileged suburbs of New York. I will never take my good fortune of being born in America for granted ever again.