U.S. Issues Warning of Obstacles In Adopting Romanian Children

By DAVID BINDER

Published: May 24, 1991

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Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Program

Quick Facts:

Formerly known as the Belgian Congo or Zaire, the Democratic Repulic of Congo (DRC) is located near the Equator. Seventy plus million people inhabit this large county in which Western Europe could fit. It shares borders with Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda , South Sudan, Central African Republic, and the Repbulic of Congo. Rich in resources and with the Congo River running through it, DRC has the potential to become a thriving country able to provide for its citizens. That is not its present reality for millions and civil unrest on the borders, lack of infrastructure and social services, diseases, maternal childbirth deaths, and poverty result in many children becoming orphans.

This is a new program for Journeys of the Heart (JOH). JOH has identified an orphanage in Kinshasa, the capital city, which is well managed, well staffed, and which has taken in several dozen children whose parents are unknown. The orphanage was organized and is managed by an ethical and competent director who was educated and obtained a law degree in Western Europe and who has returned to DRC to help orphans.

The children in this orphanage typically range in age from 0 to 5 years old. The staffing includes a pre-school teacher, a nurse who visits every morning to check on the children’s health, an on-call doctor, and others who assess the children’s development. Occasionally there will be siblings available and on a case by case basis, JOH may consider placing unrelated children at the same time with a family.

BOWIE, MD, October 31, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Peter Harry Pfund with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Pfund retired in 1997 after working in the Office of the Legal Adviser (L) of the U.S. Department of State since 1959, with two assignments abroad. He began in 1959 as one of several attorneys working on the Department publication Whiteman: Digest of International Law. Subsequently he was in the part of L responsible for European and Canadian matters, including US-Canadian boundary waters.

1966 to 1968 Pfund was seconded to the Legal Division of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Thereafter he returned to the part of L counseling the Consular Affairs Bureau, working primarily on extradition to and from the United States. Pfund was posted to the U.S. embassy in Bonn, Germany as its legal adviser from 1973 to 1978, focused mainly on issues concerning the status and security of Berlin, as well as legal issues involving U.S. forces stationed in Germany.

From 1979 until his retirement from L in 1997, Pfund was Assistant Legal Adviser for Private International Law in L, responsible for U.S. participation in the private law unification and harmonization work of four intergovernmental organizations, including the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCOPIL). During that tenure, Pfund headed the U.S delegations to sessions of those organizations and the diplomatic conferences at which the final texts of treaties were negotiated and adopted, including the 1980 U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the 1980 Hague Convention on International (Parental) Child Abduction. The United States subsequently became a party to both Conventions. He was also responsible for U.S. participation in the negotiation and conclusion of the 1993 Hague Convention on the Intercountry Adoption of Children, designed primarily to protect the children involved in such adoptions and their biological parent(s). The United States became a party to the Convention in 2007. Pfund retired from L at 65 in 1997, but continued to work part-time until his final retirement in 2004 in the Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs on the provisions of federal regulations for the implementation of the Intercountry Adoption Convention by the United States.

Pfund is a graduate of Amherst College, cum laude (history), and of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is a member of the D.C. Bar, the American Bar Association (ABA), and the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, was on the Board of International Legal Materials and has been a member of the American Society of International Law. He helped to found the Bonn-based Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristen Vereinigung (German-American Lawyers Association) in 1975 and served on its Board of Directors from 1975 to 1978.. He was given the Secretary of State's Career Achievement Award upon his retirement from L in 1997. The ABA in 1987 awarded Pfund the Leonard J. Theberge Prize for Private International Law. In 2000 the National Council for Adoption conferred on Pfund its Adoption Hall of Fame Award.

'It's a story written in heaven,' says the mom of four

BY LOUISE CHAMBERS TIMEAUGUST 17, 2022

After adopting an orphaned boy who had escaped slavery in Ethiopia, a Tennessee mombegan dreaming of a girl child. Coming across a photo of a 7-year-old orphan in need proved her dream had been a premonition, but after traveling back to Ethiopia to adopt the child, a battle began.

The girl, named Favor, was withheld, and feared at risk of being fostered by a known satanist. Mom-of-four Missy Maxwell Worton, of Franklin, refused to leave Ethiopia without her daughter; bolstered by faith, she eventually succeeded.

“It’s a story written in heaven,” Missy told The Epoch Times. “We saw a need. We went and we rescued Favor from a situation that was going to steal her destiny, possibly her life if she had gotten into this man’s hands.

Last month, cops arrested a woman trying to sell a 15-day-old girl; now, a mid-day investigation shows that despite past such cases against her, she ran a baby-selling racket from a Sion nursing home with impunity

Wanted in two human trafficking cases, 35-year-old Julia Fernandez had been brazenly running a baby-selling racket from her Sion-Koliwada nursing home for the past seven-eight years, the police said. She was caught last month selling a 15-day-old girl, after a Pune resident raised the red flag. The Mumbai Crime Branch is now probing whether she conducted abortions.

Julia faces four more human trafficking cases that are registered at Mankhurd police station, Wadala TT police station, Bandra police station and Mahatma Phule police station in Kalyan. On July 31, the Crime Branch of the Mumbai police department arrested her accomplice Shabana Shaikh, 30, too. One of Julia's victims is fighting a legal battle to get back her son, who was snatched and sold about a year back.

“Despite being most wanted in two human trafficking cases, she had been running her baby-selling shop from Sion-Koliwada for seven-eight years. Our team nabbed her on July 31 from her nursing home in Sion-Koliwada,” said an officer.

The rescued child is at Mahalaxmi-based Bal Asha Trust, a charitable organisation that helps abandoned and destitute children in Mumbai. “The baby is healthy. My nurses are taking care of her. We will also do further tests and initiate adoption process, if needed,” Vaishali Bhakte, a social worker from the trust, told mid-day.

(CNN)Jimmy Amisial was walking through Gonaives, Haiti, on his way to a New Year's Eve party to ring in 2018 when he spotted a large crowd and approached it.

"When I got to the place where the people were making noise I saw a baby," said Amisial, 22 at the time and visiting his homeland on a break from school in Texas. "It was in a pile of trash crying, and there wasn't a single soul who wanted to do anything about it."

While the locals were afraid to touch the infant because they feared the child was either cursed or evil, Amisial said, he nervously picked him up.

"He had no clothes on. He had fire ants crawling all over him because he's been there for a couple of hours. When I picked him up he immediately stopped crying."

A bond was made and now, more than four years later, Amisial is trying to make fatherhood official by formally adopting the boy he has not let go of since that night.

As a baby, Daniëlle Schipper (38) was adopted from Colombia. Despite her happy childhood and warm bond with her adoptive parents, she began to suffer from depression around the age of 19. In 2009 - Daniëlle had just become a mother - a floodgate of unprocessed grief opened and she developed a severe depression. "I weighed only 49 kilos and had suicidal thoughts."

'Looking back, I've struggled with my adoption since I was a teenager,' says Daniëlle. “But at the time, I didn't reach the right door for help. When I was again bothered by this all-consuming miserable feeling at the age of 23, I went to my doctor. He prescribed antidepressants and after a few weeks of feeling even worse, it started working happily. The sharpness of the miserable feeling disappeared, but I also felt different, flatter than before. I took that into the bargain because anything was better than a depression.'

'I became a mother and a floodgate of unprocessed grief opened'

'I had no identity'

Daniëlle's life goes on for a number of years until things really go wrong in 2009. 'I became a mother and together with this wonderful event, a floodgate of unresolved grief opened. I struggled with the true story of my adoption, which I had not been told until I was 14. My adoptive parents then told me that I had no identity in Colombia and therefore had received the passport of a deceased child: Beatriz. She was supposed to be adopted by my parents but died before that time.

Tens of thousands of children have suffered the collapse of both their birth and adoptive families. Their pain has largely existed in the shadows, shielded from broad public view and the dominant narrative of a happily ever after.

Though most adoptions remain intact, a USA TODAY investigation found more than 66,000 adoptees ended up in the foster care system between 2008 and 2020. That is an undercount. Many states are bad at tracking adoption failure. And some adoptions break outside the child welfare system’s view, when youth informally move in with other people, are privately readopted, return to their birth countries or live on the streets.

After these adoptees’ adoptive families fractured, they used their experience as fuel to improve the system for others. Here are their stories:

Explore the series: ‘A broken system’ leaves tens of thousands of adoptees without families, homes

Matthew Peiffer

They were born in South Korea, Brazil, Australia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka. They were all adopted. All grew up in France. And today, they tell each other.

Une histoire à soi , a feature-length documentary written and directed by Amandine Gay, in theaters from Friday August 26, for a rare time, gives the microphone to the main stakeholders in matters of adoption. Not the adoptive parents, even less the institutions, but indeed the children… grown up. A step back which makes it possible to propose, beyond the intimate, a downright political angle to the discourse.

“We come from somewhere. We are the fruit of a prior history. We all come from someone”, said one of them, analyzing his career.

“The idea is to show that adoption is not a limited moment in time,” explains the director in an interview. “But let it last a lifetime. »

An idea in tune with the times, exploited earlier this year by Nicolas Ouellet in his web series You come from where , then next year by Phara Thibault in his autobiographical monologue Chokola , on the boards of the Little Unicorn.

International adoptions

Authorized bodies

Authorized adoption bodies have the task of following the path of the couple who want to start an international adoption. They are bodies called, after agreement with the Commission for International Adoptions, to act as intermediaries with foreign authorities and with the Italian court. They have a central role because they are the ones who guide the couple in the adoption procedures, in the organization of the trip to meet the child in the foreign country and in the management of the whole adoption process.

GVS is authorized to carry out adoptions by the Minister of Foreign Affairs in agreement with the Ministry of Grace and Justice with the Decree of 29 September 1994.

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