Thank Goodness Lack Of Referrals Is Our Only Dilemma

During this time of slow incoming referrals, I am reminded how lucky we are to be adopting from Korea. I have placed several examples below as to how corrupt and horrible overseas adoptions can be....like Vietnam was and probably still is. The two countries under scrutiny right now are India and Somoa but children in many countries are at risk of these crimes.


"On February 18, 1999, the day Sivagama last saw her son Subash, he was still small enough to balance on her hip. Sivagama—who, like many in the state of Tamil Nadu, has no last name—lives in Chennai’s Pulianthope slum, a place about as distant from the American Midwest culturally as it is in miles. Children play cricket in bustling streets swathed in the unbearable humidity that drifts in from the nearby Indian Ocean. Despite the hubbub, it’s considered a safe area. Unattended kids are seldom far from a neighbor’s watchful eye.

So when Sivagama left Subash by the neighborhood pump a few dozen feet from their home, she figured someone would be watching him. And someone was. During her five-minute absence, Indian police say, a man likely dragged the toddler into a three-wheeled auto rickshaw. The next day, Subash was brought to an orphanage on the city’s outskirts that paid cash for healthy children.

It was every parent’s worst nightmare. Sivagama and her husband, Nageshwar Rao, a construction painter, spent the next five years scouring southern India for Subash. They employed friends and family as private detectives and followed up on rumors and false reports from as far north as Hyderabad, some 325 miles away. To finance the search, Nageshwar Rao sold two small huts he’d inherited from his parents and moved the family into a one-room concrete house with a thatched roof in the shadow of a mosque. The couple also pulled their daughter out of school to save money; the ordeal plunged the family from the cusp of lower-middle-class mobility into solid poverty. And none of it brought them any closer to Subash. (Years later this family found their son. He had been adopted by an American family.) It wasn’t too difficult, though, to obtain the American family’s address from the rec­ords of Chennai’s High Court—it’s listed on the legal document that makes the adoption official. When I tell Nageshwar Rao that I’ll be traveling to the United States to make contact with the family, he touches my shoulder and eyes me intently. He was greatly relieved when the police told him his son was adopted, not trafficked into the sex trade or sold to organ brokers as he’d heard. Now he just wants some role in Subash’s life. With the few words of English at his disposal, he struggles to convey his hopes. Gesturing into the air, toward America, he says, “Family.”
He then points back at himself. “Friends,” he says."

From Voices of Integrity Adoption: What if the traffickers weren’t so brazen as to grab a child off the street, but instead just convinced the parents that they could leave their child in the care of a local center for a while? Consider it as a government run boarding school, or a way of providing daycare while the parents work. Only when they return, their child is gone.

In another country: As one mother explained, local officials … and communal authorities had come to the village offering help to the children. After some discussions and visits, several households agreed to send their children to the institution… These were supposed to be short stays, but now apparently many of the children were gone and had not come back … One mother explained how she had become worried and gone to town to see her children, only to be informed that they were gone. “Do you know if my children have been sold?”, she had asked me. She had received a photo picturing what seemed like a ceremony of her children being handed over to foreigners and was now seriously worried about the fate of her children. Others told me that some villagers had received money, apparently as “poverty alleviation” support. Figures mentioned were between 500.000 VND (some 31 USD) and 1.000.000 VND (some 62 USD).

From a Vietnam adoption website: We can’t deny it and we can’t hide from it. Serious corruption existed in Vietnamese adoptions the whole time American adoptions were open. It wasn’t just a few officials skimming extra “fees” off the top or orphanage officials pitting one agency against another in hopes of making a little more money off each referral. As hard as it is to think about, the truth is not every child adopted by Americans was an “orphan” - some children came from intact families. While some of those families made the “choice” (a questionable word, given the amount of coercion likely involved) to relinquish, others may still not know where their child is, to this day.

Shocking and heartbreaking-but this reminds me how lucky we are that Korea has been free of such corruption in their 50 year adoption history. So, the referrals are slow but the system works and ensures the safety of all children within Korea. I wish all countries could work as efficiently then all adoptions would be as beautiful as they are supposed to be.