Blogging Again

I have followed Reece's Rainbow for 13 years now. I started following RR when I was working in South Korea as an English teacher. While I was living in Korea, I became involved with Animal Rescue Korea (ARK), an organization made up chiefly of foreign teachers like myself that rescued cats and dogs from Korean shelters and worked to rehome them. I took in various pets, some with special needs. I still have two old dogs I rescued from Korea, Jack and Benji. I lost my last two Korean cats in 2021 when Suzy was euthanized because of cancer and her sister Jasmine died 7 weeks later. Unfortunately, my mother died 8 days before Jasmine passed away. When I was in Korea, I was thinking about how much I wanted to save animals, yet I then thought to myself "How about saving children?" Myself, along with the other ARK members, would often try to get pets out of the shelters before their time was up. We would sometimes have a Korean veterinarian call the shelter to find out about an animal, only to find out they had already been euthanized. I still think of some animals I saw on the website and wished I had been able to save them. There were some animals that were too sick to save. Some were taken out of the shelter, only to soon die because they needed medical help sooner. Unfortunately, Parvo Virus was also very common in the shelters, as there was a lot of mismanagement in them. I had some cats die soon after I rescued them, and I hate to think about those situations more than a decade later. It was then that I began to think about rescuing human orphans. What could I do to help children in need? I searched "special needs adoption" and I found Rainbowkids.com. They are an international adoption resource site. I looked at their adoption programs. I knew I could not adopt a Korean orphan because Korea only allows married couples to adopt. I looked at photos of children on Reece's Rainbow and Rainbowkids. There were some children I wished I could bring home. I even contacted someone from Children's House International because I wanted to learn more about two girls with cystic fibrosis. One was 6 years old, the other a little younger. I still remember those precious photos and short video of a nun interacting with one of the children in an orphanage. I was happy to find out that the older girl was adopted by her Polish foster family and the younger girl was adopted by a family in Pennsylvania. I had the paperwork from Children's House International at home. I knew I could not adopt anytime soon. I was told I would have to show them a family photo (I only had myself) and photographs of my house (I was living in a tiny hovel of an apartment in Gangnam). I would have to find a husband and get a nicer home together. I also needed a better job. Well, I have advocated hard to get some kids adopted. It did work. I know of at least three children who were adopted because of my efforts to advocate for them. Yet, the blogging culture that existed a decade ago just isn't here anymore. I do wonder what to do next. https://adeyesalem.com/i-left-my-heart-there/

"Sadie" With FOP

"Sadie" is a child with Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, or FOP. She is a young girl in a small Eastern European country. Because of her disability, she is an orphan, as her biological family cannot support her needs. She is in a foster home. https://reecesrainbow.org/childgrant/sadie-2

Adoption Freezes

Right now Ukraine is not processing adoptions due to the ongoing war. I am very sad about that situation because there are literally thousands of orphans in Ukraine. I had some online friends who adopted 3 boys from Ukraine, and thankfully they were able to get them all home. Two of them were allowed to go home just before the conflict started, but the last boy had to stay behind because of paperwork issues. He was escorted to Poland with other orphan refugees, and his American adoptive family had to go to Poland to find him. He was located and his adoption was finalized. He is now home. China is also not processing adoptions, citing COVID restrictions. As the rest of the world has lowered their COVID protocols, China is still not relenting. I do understand because after all, the virus did start there. Unfortunately, the orphans are still not being adopted out. I hope that changes soon. I would think that with COVID, they would want to process adoptions all the more, so that the orphanages will be less crowded. Russia has not had any adoptions processed for a decade now because of Putin's anger at the Magnitsky Act. It is ia tragedy that children are being used as political pawns. Many orphans have since aged out and been turned out to the streets. Some lucker ones got adopted domestically or were united with family members. Those orphans with special needs are typically still in institutions.

Blog History

For a few years this blog address belonged to someone else. This blog was written by a troll who wanted to stop international adoption, or at least put an end to certain adoption charities and agencies. The person wrote post after post about certain adoptive families he or she would find online, criticizing those families for adopting these children from other countries and about their practices. The person sometimesposted personal information about these families.

To this day I do not know who this individual is. I have an idea that it must be a person who was adopted internationally and is bitter about their experience as an adoptee. It could also be an adoptive parent who is angry at their experience of adopting. Maybe they were matched with a child and were not able to adopt that child after all. They could have also brought a child home and the adoption did not work out. Whatever that person's situation is, that individual had a lot of bitter feelings. He or she thought that by putting other families down and working to shut down adoption charities and agencies, the person's frustrations could go away. None of that worked. The adoption charity that person criticized so much is still running all these years later. Those agencies are nearly all still working. With Russian adoption closing at the end of 2012, some agencies did close as a result, because much of their income came from Russian adoptions.

Some things that the troll and some other trolls complain about online:
1. Criticizing adoptive families for bringing home 2 or more unrelated children home at the same time.
There are many adoptive families who have taken 2 or more children home at once, often from the same orphanage, and they have successfully raised those children.
2. Criticizing adoptive families for using more than one charity to raise funds for their adoption.
That is the business of those charities to decide how they feel about that. It is also not cheap to bring childre home from overseas.
3. Criticizing adoptive families who disrupted their adoptions.
Nobody adopts a child to decide later on that they cannot raise that child after all. Sometimes things do happen that makes a family need to dissolve the adoption. That could be when the adopted child is abusive to other children in the home. Some children have RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder) which makes bonding difficult. Whatever the reasons are, it is the business of the adoptive family and not anyone else.
4. Showing anger at families adopting children they hosted from Ukraine.
Ukraine does not allow holds on orphans before the adoptions go through court. That means that a family cannot choose a child to adopt before going to Ukraine to adopt the child and expect that the child will definitely be theirs. However, that does not mean that a family cannot have a child in mind before going to Ukraine. They just have to remember that the child could be adopted by another family first, or else go into foster care first. There have been many families who hosted Ukrainian children and later traveled to Eastern Europe to bring them home. There is nothing wrong with that at all.
5. Blaming families when their adopted child with special needs later died from their medical problems.
This former blog owner shamed families who had children die. There is nothing worse than having to bury a child. These families do send their kids to doctors and have had surgeries and treatments done on them. Sometimes the child's medical needs are too great and their body can no longer keep going. Unfortunately, the institutions where these children came from were places of abuse and neglect. Even though they get better treatment in their new countries, the neglect and malnutrition they dealt with before cannot be fully reversed.
6. Saying that some families have too many children at home.
That is for the family and social services to decide.
The truth is, that is none of that troll's business. That person obviously has a miserable existence. When all people can do is criticize other people, then they have low self-esteem. When we are hurt by other people and circumstances, we have to heal and move on. We can't keep trying to hurt other people in revenge. Often, it does not work anyway and we can hurt ourselves even more in the process.
I do hope this person has moved on, hopefully gotten some help, and is doing well now.

Latvia Adoption Closes

Unfortunately, Latvian adoption to the United States has closed. Latvia made it a rule to only approve international adoption to countries who have signed the Hague convention on international adoption and also the United Nations' Convention of the Rights of the Child. The United States is part of the Hague agreement, but has not signed the UN's convention. The United States should sign the agreement, as it is about children's rights. So far, the United States is the only UN countries that have not signed the agreement. I do hope the USA will sign that soon. For more information: https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child

Two Girls With Deafblindness

Here are two girls who are deafblind. They live in the same country. That means they have significant hearing and sight impairment. There are many resources for children who are deafblind today. Some schools for the deaf or schools for the blind have deafblind programs. There is even some school programs specifically for deafblind children, such as the program at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. Kendall and Penelope both have vision impairment as well as hearing issues. Both girls need families. Kendall and Penelope are older girls who are living in China.

https://reecesrainbow.org/childgrant/kendall

https://reecesrainbow.org/childgrant/penelope

Albania Adoption

The tiny country of Albania has a small adoption program. There are 31,000 orphans in Albania. Nightlight Christian Adoptions has a great program for adoptive families. Albania has a rich culture and travel should be easy. Married heterosexual couples must be married at least 2 years to be accepted into this program. Single women are allowed to adopt. Nightlight's Albania Adoption