When we travelled to Romania to build an orphanage 30 years ago, none of us could have been

prepared for what we witnessed, writes Anneka Rice

Anneka and Monica McDaid in a therapy room at the orphanage

uring lockdown we’ve been turning in on ourselves. It’s been

quite the thing in TV-land to take a nostalgic look at past shows

Filmmaker Huibert van Wijk has won the Karen de Bok Talent Prize 2020 with his film plan Kind van de Tijd. He will receive 25,000 euros for the development of the film, in which he, together with his father Lex and his brother Tim, who was adopted from Indonesia, look back on how that adoption went in the 1970s.

“Through the personal story, the documentary maker addresses social issues, such as the makeability of the composite family, illegal adoption and the tension between good intentions and white saviorism,” said the jury. Van Wijk managed to hit all jury members with his plan. “The plan is convincing because form and style as well as expressiveness are well thought out.”

The Karen de Bok Talent Prize was awarded on Thursday for the fourth year in a row to the winning documentary plan of the IDFAcademy & NPO fund workshop. The winner can continue to develop the plan together with a broadcaster, after which an application for a production contribution can be submitted to the NPO fund.

Former winner Marina Meijer won the Golden Calf for Best Short Documentary this year at the Netherlands Film Festival. She won the prize with the film Carrousel, for which she received the Karen de Bok Talent Prize in 2017.

Karen de Bok was a program maker and editor-in-chief of Television at VPRO for many years. She passed away in January 2017.

Six children had been staying at an adoption centre in Mumbai for over a year after they were rescued by the police last July. The rescued children were all boys and aged between 18 months and seven years.

Two months after a city civil court allowed five couples to adopt children allegedly purchased by them as part of an interstate child trafficking racket, the custody of the children was handed over to them late Monday.

Six children had been staying at an adoption centre in Mumbai for over a year after they were rescued by the police last July. The rescued children were all boys and aged between 18 months and seven years.

A Delhi-based couple, who took custody of the now four-year-old boy – separated from them last year – said they are delighted. “We are on our way to Delhi. He is too young to understand what has happened since last year. It may take some time for him to adapt but we are glad that his ordeal has finally ended,” the father said.

Since the past year, while the couples were allowed to meet the children for a limited period at the adoption centre, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, they were only allowed to speak with them through video calls.

The phone call was unexpected. Navya took it at her home in northern Italy, 11 years ago. The caller said that her birth mother, whom Navya believed dead, might still be alive somewhere in Kerala. She decided to find her mother, and began a search with the handful of details her adoptive Italian parents passed on. But over a decade and a visit to Kerala later, she hasn’t had much luck.

“All I know is that her name is Sophia and she was 19 years old when she gave birth to me. She came to stay at an orphanage in Kozhikode two to three months before the delivery. There was a woman with her, by the name of Thankamma. I don’t know how they are related to each other. On March 31, 1984, she gave birth to me and then she was gone. I was raised in the orphanage for two years before being adopted and taken to Trento in Italy,” Navya says.

As a little girl of three or four, Navya noticed how she looked different from her Italian parents. Why was she dark and they white, why was she not similar to them, she asked them. When she was old enough, they told her what they knew. She has since been curious about her birth mother, the person she hopes to be more ‘similar to’.

“I am not at all mad at her. I am thankful to her for giving birth to me. We don’t know what her situation might have been back then. And I have had a good life. I am very thankful to the people at the orphanage for giving me so much love and care. One of the nuns kept in touch with me all through my life through letters we wrote to each other. I am also thankful to my parents who adopted me and gave me a good life in Italy. But my mother doesn’t like it when I thank them. She says she needed a daughter and I needed a mother and we were there for each other,” Navya says, laughing.

Soon after learning that her birth mother was alive, Navya visited Kerala, but only for a few days. “I wanted to spend time with the nun at the orphanage who was quite aged by then. She passed away last year; today is her first death anniversary,” she says on Wednesday, showing a picture of the late nun.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V-NdDXSix7ZrS-u6Rd6OB8Euynr7wViD/view?usp=sharing

A woman who was adopted at birth into years of abuse has shared her story in the hope that no children will ever have the childhood she did.

During the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care hearing, Dallas Pickering told of the physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect she experienced, and how nobody had ever been held to account.

Pickering was put into a "white, middle-class P?keh?" family after her 16-year-old P?keh? mother gave birth, in a closed stranger adoption.

Her father, recorded as having "brown eyes" and a "light olive complexion", never knew of her existence.

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INTRODUCTION III

Membership of the Committee iii

Terms of reference iii

Consultation with stakeholders iii

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY V

Woman from Bihar fights mental instability under Magsaysay Awardee's care to realise film director foster father won't let go of her child; CWC in spot after kid picked up from govt orphanage by fosters against law

The woman's loving but aggressive behaviour around her child was spotted by the police at Borivli station

The woman's loving but aggressive behaviour around her child was spotted by the police at Borivli station

A toddler has become the centre of a custody feud between his biological mother, recovering from mental illness, wanting him back and his influential foster family, who took him back after being ordered to give him up. While doctors treating the mother are worried that she will slip into depression without the child, the foster parent, a well-known Bollywood director, after taking good care of the child, has become emotionally invested. But what is in the child's best interest? These questions and the possibility of a court case are looming before the two parties and related stakeholders.

The first five years of a child’s life are the most crucial in terms of development and should preferably be spent with biological parents, especially the mother. Representation pic

Amid requests for music and advertisements, the radio announcer announced: “A 15-year-old boy donates a girl for adoption. Whoever is interested, look for Radio Educadora to get the address ”. It was 1988, the same year as the birth of the Federal Constitution, which provided for the adoption process mediated by the government, but it was born disrespected.

The girl announced on the radio was 4 months old, later to be named Vanessa Oliveira Gomes. Now, at the age of 33, she, like thousands of other people, is looking for her biological family. The children illegally adopted from yesterday are now adults who look in the mirror and wonder where they came from, anyway?

On the other hand, mothers are looking for children who were once taken from them. Reports circulating in groups formed by those adopted by the Brazilian - as this practice is popularly known - give the dimension of the drama experienced by countless people. Because of the way in which the proceedings took place, and still take place, outside the law, it is not possible to officially estimate how many cases like this exist in Brazil.

For seven months, Metrópoles followed searches in three of these groups, one of them, on Facebook, has 1,600 members. These are reports by thousands of people like Sérgio Leonardo, who is also looking for his biological mother. All that is known about her is what the foster mother said: she was a teenager, a black domestic worker, who became pregnant with the son of the white boss and was forced to hand over the baby for clandestine adoption.

The profile of mothers who report having had children stolen, or taken under pressure, is diverse, but statements about poor, black women and domestic workers, most of whom were very young when they gave birth, are repeated.

Father Eugene Homrich, a prominent American Holy Cross missionary priest who spent six decades serving and improving the lives of indigenous people in Bangladesh, has died from Covid-19.

He died at Old Holy Cross Priests' Home in the United States on July 26. He was 91.

From 1955 to 2016, Father Homrich was a missionary in Bangladesh and served people in the Madhupur sal (Shorea robusta) forest area of Tangail district in the central part of the country.

Born on Dec. 8, 1928, in Muskegon in Michigan, he entered Holy Cross Novitiate in 1946 and was ordained a priest on June 8, 1955. The same year, Father Homrich joined a contingent of 12 missionary priests and brothers to reach East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by ship and then by airplane.

He learned the Bengali language at Notre Dame College in Dhaka for a year. He then served in two parishes — St. Francis Xavier Church in Golla of Dhaka and St. Elizabeth Church in Biroidakuni of Mymensingh. He moved to Madhupur in 1959.