American families represent the 400 adoptive families of Congolese children express their happiness to live with their Congolese children and will celebrate in Kinshasa "the recent news of the 72 children who have been reunited with their adoptive families".

American families who have adopted Congolese children met on Tuesday, November 17 at his office with the Congolese Minister in charge of Relations with Parliament, Prof. Tryphon Kin-kiey Mulumba to whom they explained, on behalf of all the other adoptive families - a total of 400 families - the love they have for their little ones and the happiness they hope to be close to being grouped under the same roof in their country of origin, the United States. Some parents have mastered one of our four languages, Lingala, a sign of attachment to their children. They delivered a public letter to the minister.

These families, who are very active on social networks, represent the four hundred American families who have adopted one or more Congolese children. Parents have made the trip to the Congo and some have been staying there for several months, far from their spouses but alongside their adopted children according to the legislation in force. But they cannot cross the national border with these young Congolese, departures having been suspended by the Government which suspects cases of trafficking in human organs taken from adopted children or, starting from the precautionary principle, it wants to shed all the light around the allegations which report cases of children falling into networks of prostitution or pedophilia.

The Government is examining a new updated legal framework expected in Parliament. A preliminary social inquiry into the moral aspects of the candidate family in the candidate's country of origin would be required. Similarly, the question of nationality and the right of visit of biological parents appears to be at the center of the debates. Meanwhile, in the United States, families are mobilizing, President Barack Obama and the State Department are sensitized. Just like in the Congo. Friday, December 20, these families will give a dinner in Kinshasa at the house of one of them - Lee and Bercky Ward - in the presence of the ambassador for children, our compatriot Solange Ghonda. Members of Parliament, senators, ministers, diplomats, trade representatives, etc., will be present and will “interact with several adoptive families and their children”.

At the end of October, the government announced that 72 files of adopted children had been released and that the parents were now authorized to leave the country with them. It was the Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals Alexis Thambwe Mwamba - a sign that the file is eminently political and no longer falls within the family sector - who made the announcement to the ambassadors of the countries of origin.

I adopted my daughter and her best friend. Then my daughter reunited with her identical twin — separated at birth and raised 9,000 miles apart.

Keely Solimene adopted a Vietnamese girl, and then her best friend.

Then she discovered that one had an identical twin.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Keely Solimene. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A few months after I adopted my two daughters from Vietnam, I found a seemingly innocuous document buried in a pile of paperwork that I planned to sort and put in a cabinet with the other records.

I’m cleaning the basement, dismantling the piles that have been collecting dust since we moved into this house almost three years ago. When I tire of wading through a container of old toys, broken crayons and stray Lego pieces, I wander over to a box of photos.

The basement is full of boxes, filled with detritus, each one demanding that decisions be made. Donate, toss or keep? Does this item “spark joy?” But nearly every object I touch, no matter how dirty or worn, evokes a memory and leaves me wavering. I reach into the stack of photos and catch my breath when I pull out a snapshot of Haseena, taken a decade ago, when I was trying to become her mother.

She stands on the threshold of St. Theresa’s Tender Loving Care Home, a 3-year-old dressed in a donated red turtleneck and matching red-and-white skirt, with the purple sneakers I bought for her at Shoppers Stop in Hyderabad strapped on her feet. It’s a hot day, and she’s clutching a bottle of water. The morning sun is bright, giving the photo an overexposed quality. Some ayah, one of the orphanage caregivers, has rolled her sleeves up above the elbow. Haseena’s dark hair, cut pixie style, appears damp and freshly combed, hinting that I must have just arrived for my daily visit. She looks straight into the camera, her brown eyes wide, a swath of bushes and a line of coconut palms in the background. She’s not smiling. I probably didn’t give her time to pose.

The photograph is unremarkable, really. It’s the 2×2-inch piece of white paper taped over the photo’s right corner that makes me gasp. The image of a bird in flight, holding an envelope in its beak, floats in the center of the vellum square. I spent hours dipping a rubber stamp in ink and pressing the image of that bird over and over again as John and I were making our wedding invitations, long before we dreamed of adopting a child.

I’d forgotten about attaching the bird to Haseena’s picture, a bit of superstition meant to bind the three of us together. Indian activists tried to stop international adoptions from the region, an anti-Western outcry that flared just as our case went to court. At the time, I imagined that bird flying our hoped-for daughter all the way from India to California, much like the robin that carried Thumbelina to safety on his back in a book I’d loved as a child.

While being taken into these adoption agencies and CCIs can mean foster care for some, it is the first step on the road to adoption and a new lease of life for others.

VISAKHAPATNAM: With gloomy eyes, peeking from behind the rusted window bars of a cramped children’s home, Kyathi, 12, can’t recall much of her early years. All she knows is that she was found on a bench at a crowded railway station when she was just five months old and was taken to the children’s home in Visakhapatnam. Since then, the children’s home has been a band-aid help on her bullet wound. “I sometimes feel it would have been a bit comforting had my parents left any memory of theirs with me,” says a shy Kyathi (name changed).

Carrying a sense of loss, fear of being left out, and, a pain too overwhelming at times in her tender heart, Kyathi is one among 360-odd orphaned, abandoned and surrendered children Andhra Pradesh is currently home to, across 14 Specialised Adoption Agencies and all Child Care Institutions (CCI) under the Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) of the Women Development and Child Welfare (WDCW) Department. Kyathi’s story is the picture that almost all adoption agencies and child care institutions present.

Amid the calm yet dreary milieu of orphanages that bustle only on special occasions, children yearn for parental warmth. Behind their innocent smiles and awkward silence are bottled up emotions. An hour of interaction with kids in an orphanage offers a glimpse into their daily routine, a part of which usually looks like this: they study with none to guide them; they eat, with no say in what they want to have; they go to bed, with no one to tell them bedtime stories.

While being taken into these adoption agencies and CCIs can mean foster care for some, it is the first step on the road to adoption and a new lease of life for others. On the other side are couples, who have long been waiting to be blessed with a child, but for most of whom adoption is the last resort, and for which, the reasons are manifold.

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Day 1, Mar 25, 2022

09:00AM - 10:30AM

Friday Morning Breakout Sessions

09:00AM - 10:30AM

I would like to introduce myself to you! My name is Lotte Ghielen and I have been working as an assistant coordinator for the Better Care Network in the Netherlands since July 1. I am happy to answer all your questions and comments. If you have news or publications that are also of interest to others and could therefore possibly be placed on the Better Care Network website, I would like to hear from you. You can reach me by email at info@bettercarenetwork.nl

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Al veertig jaar hopen Braziliaanse moeders op vergiffenis na schimmige adoptieprocedures - NRC (For 40 years, Brazilian mothers have been hoping for forgiveness after shady adoption procedures - NRC)

Foreign adoption Brazil For years, foreign adoptions took place in Brazil under shadowy and illegal circumstances. The Brazilian-Dutch foundation PDBH uses DNA testing to help Brazilian mothers and adopted children in the Netherlands find each other.

With a cotton swab, Liza da Silva-Alijaj carefully scrapes some mucus from the inside of Raimunda Aparecida Vieira da Silva's (54) mouth. She hands the DNA swab to her colleague, who carefully puts it away. “Parabens mamae! Congratulations mom!” exclaims Alijaj. There is loud applause and cheering and Raimunda sighs deeply. “I suddenly feel much lighter, like a weight has been lifted off my shoulder,” she says. "This DNA test is my last hope to find my son."

The next mom sits down, opens her mouth, and gets the swab pressed against the inside of her cheeks.

In the auditorium of the parliament building of the state of São Paulo, Brazilian women who gave their child for adoption in the 1980s and 1990s come and go these days. They were often underage, poor and had unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is forbidden in religious Brazil. Under pressure from family or authorities, they renounced their child – sometimes without realizing it themselves. There are also cases in Brazil of children being stolen from hospitals. For years, foreign adoptions took place under shadowy and illegal circumstances where shady organizations and individuals earned a lot of money, as a subsequent investigation has shown.

The ministry, we learn, is calling the families that previously adopted children from the Congo and announcing the visit of social workers

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On Monday, adoptive parents of children from the DR Congo started receiving calls from the Ministry of Labour, Pension System, Family and Social Policy announcing the visits of employees of the Centers for Social Welfare in the coming days. These social workers should see for themselves the conditions in which the children who were adopted from the Congo live, that is, how they coped after arriving in Croatia.

This is a new move by the Ministry after the affair with the adoption of children from Africa broke out.

Advancing a Child Rights Informed Approach to Antislavery Policy and Practice

Event date

24 April 2023

Event time

13:00 - 14:30

Minister Nasser Bourita of Foreign Affairs, African Cooperation and Moroccans living abroad has explained the "kidnapping" of Moroccan children by Swedish social services to place them in Christian or gay foster homes.

Member of Parliament Abdellah Bouanou of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) posed a written question to Minister Nasser Bourita about "the agony of the Moroccan diaspora in Sweden, with regard to discrimination and the 'kidnapping' of children, to bring them into Christian or homosexual foster homes." The head of Moroccan diplomacy replied that, according to unofficial estimates, these are the children of several dozen Moroccan families. Only two children of Moroccan families were taken away from their families by Swedish social services and placed in foster care, Hespress reports .

Bourita assured that his service has been following the file "with great interest" and through the Moroccan embassy in Sweden, which is in contact with the Moroccan diaspora in the country, to inquire about the cases of Moroccan children removed from their families. "In addition, the Moroccan representation has contacted the two families involved, as well as their relatives in Morocco , to follow them closely," the foreign minister added. The Moroccan diplomatic services' investigation found that the phenomenon is explained by "the non-assimilation of the country's laws by a significant number of newcomers to Sweden."

The written question to the head of Moroccan diplomacy follows a controversy stemming from accusations against the Swedish authorities by Muslim associations. According to the latter, the Swedish authorities kidnap Muslim children and place them with Christian or gay families. The allegations have been denied by the Swedish authorities and the ambassadors of the Muslim countries involved.

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