Guatemala900

New Guatemalan Adoption Decree Brings Hope to Some Waiting Children and Families: Guatemala900 Executive Committee Requests Timeline and Transparency Clarification for all Stalled Adoption Cases.

Just before the new year the U.S. Department of State, Division of Children’s Issues announced the creation of a new agreement with the Guatemalan Central Authority on Adoptions (CNA).   The agreement brings hope for some families and children who have been waiting for over 4 years by creating a new Guatemalan CNA process for approximately 40 selected adoption cases that were started before 2008. The new procedure will require waiting families to submit additional documents and undergo an “in country empathy study” that then must be adjudicated by USCIS and the Guatemalan authorities.  A subset (6 or 7) of the CNA cases will be used as “pilot” cases and will be the first to navigate the new process.   As we understand, no additional cases will be started until the pilot cases are all complete.

The Guatemala900 believes that there are hopeful signs with this new agreement.  It is certainly good news for some of the children who have been wrongfully detained outside the care of a permanent family for the first 4+ years of their life, as there now exists a path for them to be adopted.  We are encouraged by the fact that     meaningful communication between the U.S. Department of State and the Guatemalan CNA helped enable the creation of this new policy. This is also potentially good news for the approximately 350 additional stalled cases waiting in the wings outside the CNA (at the PGN, MP, and Guatemalan Courts), as it could serve as a future path for them as well.

The Guatemala900 Executive Committee respectfully requests clarification on a timeline and transparency for the new plan and for all in-process cases that continue to stagnate within all Guatemalan authorities.

These children continue to suffer outside the security of a permanent family for their 5th year (at a minimum) and according to expert pediatricians, have already experienced significant developmental delays that are most likely permanent.  The science says that children continue to lose one IQ point every month of institutionalization, and many are developing significant behavioral and attachment disorders that may be irreversible.  Any plan that lacks an aggressive timeline does not acknowledge or respect these serious developmental consequences that the waiting children continue to endure.

Lack of transparency has plagued the adoption process since the system came to a grinding halt without an interim plan for the children whose cases had been initiated prior to January of 2008.  A definition of all new and current adoption processes as well as necessary milestones to complete the process must be identified.  They must be transparent and accessible to waiting families.  The possibility that children will continue to lose months or years of their family life because there is no tangible way to verify their case is reaching milestones in a timely manner is a very serious issue that must be addressed by all parties immediately.

As human beings, we are hard wired to be part of a family. Every one of the approximately 400 children who have been denied their intrinsic right to a loving, permanent family needs our attention now! They must be served with a transparent process and an expeditious deadline!

Freedom Now…Family Now!

*Views expressed by the Executive Committee are not necessarily shared by all waiting families affiliated with Guatemala900

An Orphanage is not a Family:

Effects of Institutional Care on Child Development.

by Dr. Dana E. Johnson

I remember standing in the courtyard of an orphanage in mid-summer watching the children play. It was hot and one of the caregivers was handing out glasses of juice to the thirsty kids. My attention was drawn to two young boys from the community looking in from outside the fence. They wanted a glass of juice and they wanted to play with the toys on the orphanage playground. It occurred to me that looking in from the outside it’s easy to imagine that institutionalized children have it made. They have food, clothing and shelter in countries where the basics of life are often scarce and difficult to afford for many families. It’s no wonder that many parents feel that their child may have a better future within an institutional care setting.

Orphanages have been a major part of the fabric of child welfare for the past 700 years and often played a role in child survival when the kindness of strangers failed. However, surviving is vastly different from thriving. Professionals in the fields of medicine and social science have recognized the adverse effects of orphanage care for over 150 years. However we have only recently begun to quantify the impact of institutional rearing on normal child development.

Studies such as the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, the first randomized controlled study of foster vs. institutional care, have provided a wealth of data demonstrating that orphanages, with inadequate caregivers, a regimented lifestyle and little sensitive interaction or individual attention extracts a fearful toll on the developing child. Within an orphanage during the first years of life growth slows, the electrical activity of the brain diminishes, cognitive abilities decrease one IQ/month, language development lags, children fail to form a primary attachment relationship to caregivers and the likelihood of future mental illness increases dramatically.

I’ve been in pediatrics for over 35 years and of course I knew that a family was important but did I really know how important? Result obtained over the past two decades from a variety of scientific studies can be summarized simply by saying the without the individual nurture that a family provides, a child’s body and brain literally withers away. The opposing situation is an equally powerful lesson on the value of nurture. Children taken from institutions and placed within family care exhibit dramatic catch-up growth, brain electrical activity returns to normal, IQ improves and attachment bonds form. However, within these data there is a powerful message-time matters!! The earlier a child is removed from an orphanage and enters a family the better the outcome.

The children who remain in Guatemalan orphanages continued to experience this adverse environment and have been deprived of the chance to recover within their waiting families. The clock is ticking!!! Deficits and delays become worse with each passing day and we can only hope that policymakers will respond to this progressive loss of human potential as promptly as they would to comparable natural disasters.

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Dana E. Johnson is Professor of Pediatrics, member of Division of Neonatology and Founder of the International Adoption Clinic at the University of Minnesota which is one of the largest adoption-related medical programs in the world. Over the past twenty-three years, information gathered through this clinic on the medical status of children adopted from dozens of countries and a wide variety of living conditions has helped establish the field of adoption medicine. His research focuses on the short- and long-term effects of early deprivation on child health and early development. Dr. Johnson is an adoptive parent, serves on the Editorial Boards of Adoption Quarterly and Adoptive Families Magazine and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.

On Thanksgiving night The CBS Evening News aired a report entitled “Foreign Adoption Rules Place Lives on Hold.”

We thank our G900 families that contributed to the piece with lengthy interviews about their experiences.  Though not aired in the report directly, these interviews helped educate and shape the general message of the piece :

“To the hundreds of American families waiting for pending legal adoptions, the crackdown on corrupt adoptions was the right decision, but the shutdown of whole countries to do that was wrong. They believe it slowed down legitimate cases and sentenced the children to indefinite stays in an orphanage.”

You can view the CBS Evening News report at the following link :

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57331060/foreign-adoption-rules-place-lives-on-hold/

Please click here to view an excellent documentary about the failure of international adoptions policies, led by UNICEF, in Guatemala.

Senator Landrieu has returned to Guatemala in an effort to advocate for the children who have been living outside a permanent family for their entire lives.  The Guatemala900 is fully behind the Senator’s efforts and has provided her coalition vital information we have from the ground in Guatemala from the past several months/years.  The Guatemala900 also is optimistic that the CNA has taken action with this decree in an effort to help the children with transition cases who have long standing relationships with potential adoptive families.  The following is the AP article announcing the decree :

GUATEMALA TO RENEW ADOPTIONS HALTED MIDWAY BY BAN

MEXICO CITY — Guatemala has issued a decree that could speed up dozens of adoptions by U.S. couples that have been stuck in limbo since the Central American country suspended adoptions in 2007 amid allegations of fraud and even baby theft.

The decree says that parents whose adoptions were halted midway by the ban can complete the process if they prove a “prolonged” relationship with the child and that they were not responsible for any fraud, among other requirements. The possibility of a domestic adoption must also be ruled out.

But it might not go far enough to solve all pending cases, says Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who will visit Guatemala this week to, among other things, push to expand the program to more U.S. adoptive parents.

One goal of the trip “is to establish that there are approximately 400 families still in transition, and to work out a process so that each of those cases can be resolved, and that includes the 44 that are subject to this immediate accord,” Sen. Landrieu told The Associated Press on Sunday.

She said that the decree may include more than 44 cases, although those are certain to be resolved, and perhaps even in the next few weeks. The decree, which was issued Friday, states that it will remain in effect for one year.

The senator added that 900 unresolved cases in 2007 have already been reduced to about 395.

The US State Department is also sending its Special Advisor for Children’s Issues to Guatemala this week, where she will consult with the government on the decree.

Guatemala’s quick adoptions once made it a top source of children for the U.S., leading or ranking second only to China with about 4,000 adoptions a year.

But the adoptions were suspended in late 2007 as a result of widespread fraud, including falsified paperwork, fake birth certificates and charges of baby theft. Though the country still allowed many adoptions already in process, hundreds remain unresolved.

The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a U.N.-created agency prosecuting organized crime cases in Guatemala, reviewed more than 3,000 adoptions completed or in process and found nearly 100 grave irregularities.

Guatemala later announced a small, reformed program of international adoptions in 2009.

That pilot program, however, has yet to get off the ground, says Kathleen Strottman, executive director of the nonprofit Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. She is also traveling to Guatemala this week.

The United States initially expressed interest in participating in the program but later declined, saying that more safeguards for children need to be put in place.