When your life begins in a cot in the orphanage: "That somebody does not care, it stays that way"

She wrote hundreds of applications, had dozens of auditions: Acting is Luminita Arza's life. The job has helped her to understand her life. She started as an orphan in a Romanian hospital.

Luminita is Romanian and means something like "little light". But Luminita Arza spent the first years of her life in darkness: the two years after her birth she spent with other children in a barren room full of cots, which was only entered a few times a day by nurses to bring food. Luminita represents a whole generation of Romanian children left behind by their poor, often Roma-born families just after birth.

Because a German foster mother adopted her, Luminita Arza was able to start afresh in Germany. In her youth, she decided to become an actress. After training at a private school followed a job application marathon - with vocal exercises, countless letters of application and painful rejections.

She wants to live her dream - absolutely

Differences on which body should control adoption in the country has derailed the proposed bill on children to get to parliament.

It has now emerged that the proposed new law on children is still stuck at the Labour ministry, headed by Ukurr Yattani despite being complete and ready to be passed to Parliament.

The proposed law proposes a National Adoption Committee, which will be an independent body to review applications for adoptions.

This takes away the powers from the current regime which is headed by children’s welfare lobby Child Welfare Society of Kenya (CWSK). Among the proposals is to include CWSK in the law.

A top official in the Attorney General’s told The Standard that the draft bill, as currently is, factored all the views of Kenyans, but that the single issue delaying it is whether CWSK should manage adoption processes .

HUGER, South Carolina — The U.S. Department of Justice says a South Carolina couple tried to get around overseas adoption rules by telling immigration officials a baby they adopted in the Philippines was their biological child.

The State reports federal prosecutors indicted 24-year-old Stephanie Jean Locker and 46-year-old Gerald Vincent Locker Jr. on charges of conspiracy and making false statements in a passport application.

The two were living in Japan in 2014 while Gerald Locker served in the Marines.

A Justice Department release accuses Stephanie Locker of saying she’d learned she was pregnant while on vacation in the Philippines, five days before the baby’s birth.

Records allege the two tried to circumvent adoption processes by passing off the Filipino child as their biological baby.

Holt International Children's Services Invites Qualified Candidates to Apply for the Newly Appointed Role to Lead, Launch and Grow Its Adult Adoptee Community and Supporting Initiatives

Eugene, Oregon, July 16, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Holt International Children's Services, the nation's leading international adoption placement agency and not-for-profit child welfare organization, announced its intention to hire its first director of adult adoptee community outreach, beginning with a nationwide search starting today. Holt International first pioneered international adoption in 1956 and today remains the global leader with a long-standing commitment to holistically support adoptees for life – because adoption is a lifelong journey.

The director of adult adoptee community outreach will oversee the planning and implementation of outreach strategies to better understand and support the diversity and voices of within the adult adoptee community. This person will launch, grow and manage a thriving and interconnected community of adult adoptees spanning multiple locations, different lived experiences and many generations. The director will be responsible for building trusted networks and relationships, and informing how Holt can best support, magnify and celebrate a healthy and diverse adult adoptee community.

“The needs of adoptees evolve as they grow older and mature. We have a responsibility to understand this evolution in order to take appropriate action to serve and support them,” said Steve Kalb, LMSW, Holt International’s director of post-adoption services, and a Korean adoptee. “This new hire will allow us opportunities to connect with and support adult adoptees across the country. By engaging with established communities and elevating the voices of those who feel isolated, we can walk beside adoptees as they teach us the best ways to address their changing needs.”

Studies suggest that adoptees benefit from support services into adulthood. The director of adult adoptee community outreach will provide support and opportunities for adult adoptees by directing and managing heritage tours and regional activities and events, offering additional resources for mental and physical well-being support, and giving adult adoptees the opportunity to share their own experiences with younger adoptees. This person will also facilitate the organization’s adult adoptee advisory board, which will provide insight, feedback and recommendations from adult adoptees on how the organization can elevate its adoption services for children and their families.

Responding to a question in Lok Sabha, WCD Minister Smriti Irani gave data according to which the highest number of deaths of children have been reported from Uttar Pradesh. These deaths occurred across 19 specialised adoption agencies in the state.

As many as 776 children, including 124 in Uttar Pradesh, have died at specialised adoption agencies in the last three years, the Women and Child Development (WCD)Ministry said Friday.

Responding to a question in Lok Sabha, WCD Minister Smriti Irani gave data according to which the highest number of deaths of children have been reported from Uttar Pradesh. These deaths occurred across 19 specialised adoption agencies in the state.

Children legally free for adoption are provided residential care at specialised adoption agency(SAA), which are run by both state governments and NGOs.

"As per the Child Adoption Resource Information and Guideline System (CARINGS), 776 children have reported to have died in SAAs during the period from 2016-2017 to 2019-2020 (up to July 8, 2019)," Irani said.

Migrant children, left without a mother by accidents in the Mediterranean, have found a second chance thanks to two Sicilian families

They are called Noelia and Isabel and to unite them is a common past. Both are "orphans of the sea". Two girls, that is, who have lost their natural mothers in the crossing of the desperate in the Mediterranean, from Africa to Italy. Here, however, they found, both, an adoptive family. And, with this, that second opportunity that those who gave their lives did not, unfortunately, have.

Their moving story was told by their adoptive mothers. Both seem to come from Nigeria. Although little is known about their past. Noelia arrived in 2015, Isabel a year later. To take them on a sea journey to Italy, on a boat, on which they traveled with their respective parents. The one on which Noelia was traveling caught fire. She, survived only 23 days old, was rescued by a fishing boat. The 23, however, is a number that is also linked to the history of Isabel. 23 were, in fact, the people, including herself, who were saved among the 100 who undertook that damn trip. The mother protected her as much as she could from the burning sun, which took away her life. Protected by another woman, the child managed to reach Italy alive.

"Of their past - said Margherita and Sofia (the names are fancy), the adoptive mothers - we know practically nothing, we presume the nationality because they were mostly Nigerians on the barge. We don't know the day of birth, the real name, who their mother was, nothing. It was the Court, after medical examinations following the landing, to decide for them. Not even a birth certificate ".

But the documents do not serve when the miracle of adoption comes into play. " It was love at first sight. Yes, they changed our lives ", say the two women who made Noelia and Isabel again" daughters ". Both were placed in a family home for some time before the adoption.

Life Family Saturday 20 July 2019

Scenic: Vietnam is the number one country for people from Ireland to adopt a foreign child1

Eilish O'Regan

July 20 2019 2:30 AM

Vietnam is the top country for people from Ireland who are adopting a child from abroad.

WARANGAL (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/WARANGAL) RURAL:

It’s a curse they live with. The girl child in Warangal

Rural — where only 870 females are born per 1,000 males — is so unwanted that selling her is an accepted norm here, if a tribal

woman fails to abort the foetus. Apart from selling the baby girl, infanticide is also a harsh reality in this part of the world —

largely made of thandas and inhabited by Lambadas.

Most adult adopters are satisfied with their lives

Intercountry adoption evokes both positive and negative responses and the discussion penetrates far into policy. Distance and adoption are major interventions in people's lives. Negative reports about adoption often dominate the media. But does this picture reflect how most of the 40,000 intercountry adopters think about their adoption? To clarify this, a questionnaire study was conducted in 2016 into the satisfaction of a large, varied group of intercountry adoptees in the Netherlands.

Because adoptive organizations, adoptive parents and organizations for adopted persons cooperated, a varied group of adopted persons could be heard: those who are critical of adoption, those who are positive about it and those who do not usually appear in the media. A scientific article about the results of this research has now been published in the magazine "Adoption and Fostering".

Satisfied with their lives

A large group, 1155 intercountry adopters, adopted from 32 countries between 1961 and 1998, responded. And guess what? Despite the often difficult start, the vast majority of adult adopters can build a life that they are happy with. They were even slightly more satisfied with their lives than the average Dutch population.

Inés Madrigal, who was taken from her birth mother in 1969, has located a second cousin thanks to a US company, and says that she has “completed the puzzle that is my life”

The first woman to be recognized by the Spanish courts as one of the country’s so-called “stolen babies” revealed today that she has managed to locate her biological family after 32 years of searching. Thanks to a DNA database in the United States, Inés Madrigal has been put in touch with a second cousin, who informed her that her biological siblings were also searching for her.

Over the last decade or so, it has emerged that during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a network of nuns and doctors at certain hospitals had taken babies from poor families or single mothers and given them to wealthy parents unable to conceive. The irregular scheme is thought to have been in operation until 1990, well after the death of Franco in 1975 and the return of democracy to Spain in the late 1970s.

In October last year, the Madrid Provincial Court found that Eduardo Vela, a retired doctor who is now 86, was the perpetrator of the three crimes of which he had been accused in Spain’s first “stolen baby” trial: child abduction, faking a birth, and falsifying childbirth records and other official documents relating to Madrigal. However, he was not given a prison sentence or any other kind of punishment on the basis that the statute of limitations on the offenses had expired.

At a press conference in Madrid today, Madrigal described finding her “true family” as a “triumph,” although the news for her is bittersweet as she has since discovered that her biological mother died in 2013 at the age of 73.