Don Demidoff , alias Udo Erlenhardt, was a lot. Textile retailer, editor-in-chief, innkeeper, witness of the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) in the Kießling affair and thus renamed Father. And now Don Demidoff is also becoming webmaster. On his dispatches page he complains about the old communists, the decadence of the West , the western democracies with their new leftists and the Romanian Orthodox Church. Now the Don has launched over 10 new domains on which he wants to express his thoughts in several languages. He has big plans for this, but it will certainly be good for his increased ego. What's not so good, of course, is that he finances all of this with his donations, which is proven by the invoices that have now appeared

Permalink Comments Off From the depths of the mirror August 21, 2008 at 8:36 (Don Demidoff, Udo Erlenhardt) We became aware of an old article from “Spiegel Wissen”. In 1983, the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) investigated allegations that General Kießling was homosexual and frequented gay bars. These findings were based, among other things, on investigations by the Cologne criminal police. In the “TomTom” and “Café Wüsten” bars, several people identified Kießling’s photo as “Günter or Jürgen, definitely something with ü, from the Bundeswehr.” The colorful witnesses of the then Defense Minister Wörner were the businessman Udo J. Erlenhardt, the insurance agent Gerhard August, the “Tom-Tom” buffet man Micha Lindhahr and his boss Hans-Albert Wichert. In this old report from 1983, the witnesses are examined again in detail. After it became clear that the allegations against Kießling could not be proven, the affair was ended through the intervention of the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1984: Kießling was returned to active service for a short time and immediately afterwards was honored with the Great Tattoo retired. The then Defense Minister Wörner was immediately “exposed to ridicule”. Permalink Comments Off Don Demidoff's anonymous laughing stock May 7, 2008 at 8:22 (Don Demidoff, Dr. Roland Giebenrath, bullying, Udo Erlenhardt) Today we want to report on a very funny website and his story about anonymity. Udo J. Erlenhardt through his lawyer Dr. It is well known that Giebenrath tries to intimidate critics. And in Germany it is not particularly difficult to deal with legally due to the warning system. The operator Robert Schlittenbauer had to close his critical website http://www.sekteninfo-bayern.de at the instigation of Dr. Close Giebenrath. But this campaign did not go quietly in the blogging scene. So other blogs started dealing with the hate preacher? to employ Don Demidoff. Since these blogs are now becoming increasingly difficult for German censors to reach, the Don can no longer intimidate his critics so easily. And so it was through Dr. Giebenrath tries to blame all new internet reports about the Don on Robert. When all of that didn't work, you now show yourself to be a very bad loser. Under a pseudo-anonymous Internet address http://www.schlittenbauer-versuchte.org , Don Demidoff is now slandering the whole thing. Pseudo-anonymous because, funnily enough, the webmaster, in pre-emptive obedience or in the heat of the moment, has a domain http://www.schlittenbauer-versuchte.deregistered with Denic in order to have it deleted again as quickly as possible. Well, with Denic you just have to provide all the information. Thus, by providing your email address from

31/10/2007 - In war-torn regions in both Chad and Sudan SOS Children's Villages provides psychosocial care to children and women suffering from trauma and trauma-related symptoms. It is especially in emergency and crisis situations such as these that exceptional care should be taken to prevent the separation of children from their families. SOS Children's Villages regrets the situation in which the 103 children in Chad find themselves and we hope that every effort will be made to reunite them with their families and that their well-being be protected at all times.

SOS Children's Villages aims to support children and families in need. The central principle of our work is that every child should grow up in a family, where possible in his or her own family and in his or own familiar environment. It is our aim and conviction that children should grow up learning their native language within their own culture. When a child is at risk of losing parental care we seek to strengthen the support system through programmes aimed at strengthening their coping skills, ensuring their access to essential services, and providing medical, educational, and psycho-social support. A second line of support stems from the extended family and the community.

When parents are unable to take care of a child in spite of interventions, in first instance a solution is sought within these spheres. A child may be considered for admission to an SOS Children's Villages when there are no possibilities for long-term care within the extended family or the community. By rule SOS Children's Villages works with local and national youth welfare authorities. Not only do we depend on this cooperation with and support of the government, we consider the building of local capacity for long-term family based child care a vital element of our work. In our work with children who have lost parental care, in most cases the legal guardianship over children is not with SOS Children's Villages but with the parents, some other relatives, or the youth welfare authorities.

SOS Children's Villages principally has a positive attitude towards adoption as it is one channel to find good care for a child. International adoption can offer a good solution if and when the local possibilities have been exhausted, the proper legal channels have been followed and the fundamental principles of international adoption, as established by the Hague Convention on Intercountry adoption, have been met. The same principles apply for adoption as for admitting a child to an SOS Children's Village: one has to consider whether it is the best way to care for that particular child. One important principle in our work is that siblings should not be separated. This can be problematic in cases of adoption as it is usually considered for individual children.

Lilian Thybell

Lilian Thybell is a nurse and midwife. For 25 years, she has worked and lived in various Asian countries, including Vietnam. In the years 1996 – 2002, she worked for a SIDA-funded project aimed at reaching vulnerable groups in remote villages in northern Vietnam. Lilian specialized in teaching illiterate ethnic women. It was like breaking ground, no one believed that non-literates could learn anything and the perception was that they were less intelligent. The program was a success, Vietnam's Ministry of Health adopted the curriculum and continued to develop it further to reach more women among the minority groups. Lilian has been a valued tour guide for both study trips and holiday trips in, among other places, the Philippines, Thailand, India and Israel. During her six years in Vietnam, she built up a network of contacts which she maintained.

"Was my mother paid to give me up?" Looking for government recognition for mistakes in adoption


Eight adoptees from Sri Lanka are holding the Dutch state liable for abuses during their adoptions. Sam van den Haak, one of them, explains the extent of the damage and the questions she has struggled with all her life.

Anneke StoffelenJuly 25, 2023, 6:43 PM
In a personal interview in the newspaper, it is customary to mention the age of the interviewee. In the case of Sam van den Haak, who was adopted from Sri Lanka, this is not easy. If you base it on the date in her Dutch passport, she would have celebrated her 42nd birthday at the beginning of this month. Or do you, like Van den Haak herself, follow the version of her later found Sri Lankan grandmother? She said that her granddaughter was born on December 17, 1981. In that case, Sam van den Haak is now 41.

A date of birth is an obvious detail for others that you rarely think about. For Van den Haak it has become a crucial part of her story. 'Every time I request a repeat prescription from the pharmacy, I give an incorrect date of birth and am reminded that I am a victim of adoption fraud.'

Van den Haak published a book about that turbulent history last year with the telling title Not born on my birthday. Together with seven other adoptees, she is now starting a collective lawsuit against the Dutch state. The adoptees argue that the government, as supervisor, is liable for the abuses during their adoptions, which were arranged by the Flash foundation. Since the late 1970s, Flash has been publicly associated with baby trafficking and adoption fraud. But according to lawyer Mark de Hek, the government deliberately looked the other way.

About the author
Anneke Stoffelen is a reporter for de Volkskrant and writes, among other things, about the multicultural society. For the podcast series A Kind of God, she investigated how people end up in a cult.

As a result, some of the Sri Lankan adoptees will probably never manage to find their biological family again. The adoption files are missing all kinds of basic documents, such as waivers from the biological mothers. Personal data is also regularly falsified.

Little information in adoption file
When requesting her adoption file, Sam van den Haak discovered that 'there's actually not much in it'. It does not contain the details of her biological mother, let alone a document in which the woman declares that she is renouncing her daughter. Her birth certificate is also missing. Strangely enough, her Dutch surname is already mentioned in the Sri Lankan passport with which the adoption was arranged at the time. "So that must have been forged," Van den Haak concludes. On the handwritten document, the numbers have been scribbled with a pen, so it is not entirely clear which day of birth is meant - in her adoption file it was April 7, in her later Dutch passport it was July 4.

Also missing is a report from the Child Protection Council showing that her adoptive parents were screened before they were allowed to pick her up from Colombo as a toddler. That's strange, Van den Haak thinks, because the couple who adopted her already had three sons, two of whom have severe multiple disabilities. "In the 1980s, relatively little was known about the consequences of adoption, but was there no one who could have imagined that there was no room in this family for another child with special care needs?" she wonders.

As a lively little child, she ended up in a Hoorn household where, in her memory, it always had to be quiet. 'I used to, and still do, prefer to do things together with someone else. But in our family it was always every man for himself. One was doing a puzzle and the other was reading the newspaper. I didn't fit in there at all.'

Sexual abuse
Van den Haak saw little love in the marriage of her adoptive parents. In her opinion, this was the reason why her adoptive father sexually abused her from the age of 6 onwards. As a girl who craved attention and affirmation, she often crawled into her adoptive parents' bed in the morning, looking for cuddles. Once her adoptive mother left, those hugs turned into "things an adult should never do to a child."

For years, Van den Haak was under the impression that this was normal. 'I thought this was the way you, as a parent and child, show that you love each other. Until I was 14 and started having boyfriends, and discovered that you're not supposed to do these things with family.' Years later, when she wanted to file a report, she heard from the police that the case had already expired. Her adoptive father has always denied the abuse. Her adoptive mother kept a low profile and did not support her daughter. Van den Haak therefore no longer has contact with them.

Her unhappy childhood made the question that almost all adoptees ask themselves at some point even more pressing: how would my life have turned out if I had not ended up in a strange country, with strange parents?

Address on a note
Van den Haak traveled to Sri Lanka for the first time in his twenties. An intermediary there initially had bad news: based on the scant information in her adoption papers, it seemed impossible to find her biological family. But there was a blessing in disguise: when her biological mother gave her daughter to the Dutch in 1984, she had placed a note in the hands of Van den Haak's adoptive mother with her address scribbled on it. The note had been kept all these years. And although her biological mother died of cancer in the 1980s, Van den Haak was able to use that information to find her grandmother, plus a brother and a sister.

'At the first meeting I was sceptical. The intermediary who had helped me with the search told me that relatives of adoptees often ask for money very quickly. So I had planned to keep an appropriate distance. But when I arrived at that little old house without electricity, it turned out that my brother was even more skeptical. The first thing he did was take my hand and study my fingers. I thought: what is he doing? Until he discovered the scar he was looking for. “Nangi,” he said, which means little sister.”

The scar was proof to him that Sam was who she said he was, he said later. 'He could still remember me helping him cut bamboo as a small child. I then had to hold the stems. He once accidentally chopped my finger, that's what left the scar.'

In the passport photos he showed of their mother, she immediately recognized the woman from the photos from her own scrapbook, taken by her adoptive parents. Then all doubts were gone.

The meeting with her brother and grandmother was warm (with her sister, whom she only meets later, the contact is more complicated). This caused Van den Haak to wonder how necessary it actually was for her to be given up, if there were family members who would have wanted to care for her. Her grandmother, now deceased, said that her mother harbored a secret. She is said to have feared that she would be expelled from their village if the truth about her daughter's conception came out.

Compensation
But Van den Haak was never able to unravel the complete story surrounding her adoption. 'Was my mother paid to give me up, temporarily or otherwise? I do not know. My file does show that my adoption cost more than 10,000 guilders, a large part of which went to mediation organizations.'

In the upcoming lawsuit, adoptees will demand compensation for the costs they have had to incur in the search for their family - searches that in many cases have not led to anything. In addition, it will also involve compensation for the psychological suffering: growing up in an environment in which you find little recognition and the feelings of uprooting that follow some people for the rest of their lives.

Yet Van den Haak wants to emphasize that as far as she is concerned, it is not an exclusively gloomy story. 'I've been through a lot and there was a period when I didn't even want to live anymore. But my story shows that you can get out of it.' As a former Dutch teacher, she has written her book especially in understandable language for young people, so that they may find hope in it when they are going through a difficult time. 'I believe that you can always choose to make something of your life. I am now very happy with my son. I am also proud of the company I founded, with which I organize pub quizzes for companies.'

For her, the lawsuit is not about compensation. However, she does want the government to acknowledge the mistakes of the past, so that these problems are prevented in the future. And what would be the best and most important outcome for Van den Haak: that a passport would one day be arranged for her with her real date of birth in it.

Former social worker Thea Ramirez has developed an artificial intelligence-powered tool that she says helps social service agencies find the best adoptive parents for some of the nation’s most vulnerable kids

Some are orphans, others seized from their parents. Many are older and have overwhelming needs or disabilities. Most bear the scars of trauma from being hauled between foster homes, torn from siblings or sexually and physically abused.

Child protective services agencies have wrestled for decades with how to find lasting homes for such vulnerable children and teens –- a challenge so enormous that social workers can never guarantee a perfect fit.

Into this morass stepped Thea Ramirez with what she touted as a technological solution – an artificial intelligence-powered tool that ultimately can predict which adoptive families will stay together. Ramirez claimed this algorithm, designed by former researchers at an online dating service, could boost successful adoptions across the U.S. and promote efficiency at cash-strapped child welfare agencies.

“We’re using science – not merely preferences – to establish a score capable of predicting long-term success,” Ramirez said in an April 2021 YouTube video about her ambitions to flip “the script on the way America matches children and families” using the Family-Match algorithm.

Annabel is geadopteerd door een Nederlands gezin vanuit Palestina, maar dat is niet helemaal volgens de regels gegaan, vertelt ze aan Nordin en Vonneke. Daarnaast vertelt Annabel dat ze elke dag meeleeft met haar Palestijnse familie en heeft ze een inzamelingsactie opgezet om de mensen in Gaza te helpen.

ANNABEL

Annabel vertelt dat ze samen met 200 à 300 andere Palestijnen is geadopteerd in de jaren '90. "Mijn Palestijnse ouders waren christenen en hun wens voor mij was dat ik bij een gezin terecht zou komen die ook Palestijns en christelijk waren", vertelt Annabel. Haar Palestijnse ouders kregen te horen dat dat ook zou gebeuren, maar niets bleek minder waar. Er heeft namelijk interlandelijke adoptie plaatsgevonden. "Ik ben samen met honderden andere Palestijnse kinderen geadopteerd door Nederlandse, Noorse en Zwitserse gezinnen", gaat ze verder. Annabel kwam erachter dat haar Palestijnse ouders zijn voorgelogen. "Tien jaar geleden heb ik mijn Palestijnse ouders voor het eerst opgezocht en ze vertelden mij dat ze hier niets vanaf wisten", zegt ze.

PALESTINA

Annabel heeft nu nog regelmatig contact met haar Palestijnse familie, maar merkt dat dat steeds moeizamer gaat. "Recentelijk had ik nog wel contact met mijn Palestijnse ouders en halfbroer, maar dat is nu wat minder. Mijn familie en kennissen daar vertellen dat ze niet makkelijk de deur uitgaan en geen Arabisch durven te praten. Ze hebben het gevoel dat ze in de gaten worden gehouden door de Israëlische overheid en er hangt een gespannen sfeer op dit moment", aldus Annabel.
 

I am a Chinese intercounty (International), transracial adoptee. I reunited with my biological family five years ago, going on six years soon. Some days it still feels surreal and other days it feels like I have always known them.

Six years ago, if you had asked me when my birthday was, I would have said December 5 with an uncomfortable feeling; a painful reminder of my unknown past. Now I answer the same question with a pause, wondering whether or not to share that my birthday is July 16. If you had asked me six years ago how many siblings I have, I would have said half the number I now know to be true.  

As a child, and even in my teenage years, I was told (and believed) that if I was still in China, I probably would not have made it through school. I would not have the same opportunities I have in America. I might have been hidden or, even yet, may not be alive. I would not have had access to some of the medical care I needed. I was told that being deaf, I would have been rejected by society. I would have been poor, simply because my family was assumed to be poor, and I would not have a “successful” or “happy” life. I wrestled with this supposed “truth” and “luck” I had over the years.

The questions I had and beliefs I held continuously changed through different seasons of life. I did not have the language to express the complexities of my thoughts, and I did best when all of my feelings were tucked away and hidden. Sometimes, I could only hold anger because there was no other identifiable feeling. I often became numb and would find myself conforming to the statements around me: “lucky”, “chosen”, “grateful”, “fortunate”, “blessed” and so on. I would agree with a smile, though internally I did not necessarily concur with these beliefs. In other seasons of life, I missed, grieved, and carried the weight of these many ambiguous losses alone. 

  The experience of the unknown often leaves uncertainty, anxiousness, fear, and confusion. As a child, the unknown and undisclosed were not concrete thoughts or information. The inconsistent answers about my birth parents and my past were all I had to make sense of why I was here. My understanding of my past was based on many different theoretical situations, intentional/ unintentional assumptions, and imaginary scenarios of what might have possibly happened. There were a few documents containing almost no helpful information. Not even my birthday was known to be correct.

A sweet 8-year-old creature, a victim of domestic violence at the Kallithea Police Department , experienced an unimaginable adventure a few days ago . The 8-year-old girl was kept in the Department from the afternoon until the next morning, and was forced to sleep fasting in the AT yard on plastic chairs and in a corridor.

According to the foster parents of the 8-year-old girl, the Service Officer claimed that he could not find anyone in the prosecutor's office to indicate further actions, so the child was detained in the Department.

As kallitheaonline.gr reports , it has not yet been clarified why someone was not informed immediately to pick up the 8-year-old girl so that she would not spend the night at Kallithea Police Station. At the same time, according to the same information, no one cared to offer the little girl a meal, and her foster parents and biological mother were all incarcerated and could not get out.

At the same time, sources from the Prosecutor's Office report that a verbal prosecutorial order was given to notify a person in the family environment to pick up the child from the Department, which was not done until the next day.

KOCHI: Petition of a couple from Thiruvananthapuram in the High Court to cancel the adoption as they could not get along with their adopted daughter. The High Court directed the Thiruvananthapuram District Legal Service Authority Secretary to give a detailed report after talking to the girl. The plea will be heard again on November 17. Retired Justice Devan Ramachandran is considering a petition filed by a government official and his wife.

The only son of the petitioners died in a car accident on January 14, 2017  The petitioners say that the death of their 23-year-old son left them weak and they decided to adopt a child to overcome the grief. A 13-year-old girl was legally adopted on February 16, 2018, from Nishkam Seva Ashram in Ludhiana, Punjab due to a delay in adoption from Kerala. They provided educational and all other facilities to the child. The petition also states that the girl from North India is unable to accept them as her parents. As there was no reconciliation, the child was placed under the care of the Thiruvananthapuram Child Welfare Committee on 29 September 2022. When the girl grew up, she was transferred to the Swadar home. The couple's demand is to cancel the adoption process and send the child back to the ashram in Ludhiana. A petition was filed earlier in the High Court for this purpose. However, the petition was disposed of on December 12, 2022, directing action to be taken under the Adoption Regulations, 2017. This year the central government revised the adoption regulation. According to this, action should be taken to cancel the adoption through the District Collector. An application was made to the Collector but no action was taken. The Ashram in Ludhiana was also unwilling to take the child back. The couple approached the High Court again. The government counsel informed the High Court that the girl said that she was staying at the Swadar home because her parents did not want her to stay with them. The High Court then ordered the district legal service authority secretary to talk to the girl and submit a report. 

Grief of the couple Sometimes the child shows violent behaviour and will close the room and sit inside without eating. The child herself has said many times that before we adopted her, another North Indian family adopted her and they cancelled the adoption and returned her to the ashram. She had told us that she was not interested in studying in Kerala and wanted to study in the Hindi region. We took her to a higher secondary school run by Malayali teachers in Madhya Pradesh. The violence continued there also. Finally, we brought her back as requested by the principal. In 2021, she attacked my wife and tried to leave the house. After that mental health treatment had to be given. (From the application made by the parent to the chairperson of the Child Welfare Committee for adoption of the child)

Taking all the necessary legal steps, they officially welcomed the child into their lives in 2018, having adopted her from the Nishkam Seva Ashram, an institution under the Government of Punjab.

KOCHI: After the untimely demise of their only son in a car accident in 2017, an elderly couple from Thiruvananthapuram found themselves grappling with intense loneliness and emotional trauma. Seeking solace and a new purpose in life, they made the difficult decision to embrace parenthood once again through adoption.

Realising the complexities and intricacies involved in the adoption process in Kerala, they approached a centre in Punjab, where they discovered a 12-year-old girl who captured their hearts. Taking all the necessary legal steps, they officially welcomed the child into their lives in 2018, having adopted her from the Nishkam Seva Ashram, an institution under the Government of Punjab.

However, their hopes took an unexpected turn as the adoption process brought them immense mental anguish, ultimately leading them to contemplate returning her to the place of adoption. 

The reason: The girl, hailing from North India, struggled to accept the couple as her parents. 
Driven by an unwavering desire to return to her roots, the girl’s firm stance left the couple with no choice but to make the painful decision, placing her under the care and protection of a child care centre in Thiruvananthapuram. They moved a petition before the Kerala High Court seeking a directive to the Thiruvananthapuram district collector to take steps to annul the adoption.