NAIROBI — When Leroy Blessing went missing, his family panicked. The autistic 9-year-old could not talk to strangers easily, and police in his native Kenya scoffed when his desperate parents sought help, saying he was old enough to look after himself.

“They said ‘he’s a big boy, he will come back home,’” Ketty Omondi, Leroy’s mother, recounted. “They never received me with kindness or pity.”

Then Maryana Munyendo stepped in. She heads Missing Child Kenya Foundation, an alliance of voluntary sleuths tracking down missing children. She plastered up posters and blasted social media. A stranger called two days later with the boy’s whereabouts.

Since setting up the group in 2016, Munyendo said she and her two-person team have reunited 1,055 children with their families out of the 1,551 missing children that parents have reported to her. Another 153 were sent to government homes and 28 were declared deceased, leaving 315 active files.

Munyendo, 41, set up the group after a 10-year-old girl went missing in the neighborhood near her office. Locals spotted the lost child after Munyendo put up posters, and the girl was reunited with her family after two days. More families reached out. Buoyed by early successes, Munyendo and her friend Jennifer Kaberi set up the foundation, running it on a shoestring out of Kaberi’s living room. Many of the children were runaways or the victims of parental abductions or traffickers. Some were simply lost and unable to tell strangers where they lived.They started with posters, social media and the introduction of online hashtags and the keywords “MissingChildKE” to bring up names and posters. Then the group expanded, setting up Kenya’s first toll-free number for tracing missing children and badgering local news organizations to air features on the missing.

International foster care means that a child living abroad and for whom child protection measures have been taken, is placed in a foster family or an institution in the Netherlands or vice versa. To arrange this carefully, there is a procedure that must be followed. The conditions that this procedure must meet are laid down in Article 82 of the Brussels II-ter Regulation or Article 33 of the Hague Child Protection Convention (1996).

The Ministry of Justice and Security has drawn up the International Foster Care protocol in collaboration with the VNG (Association of Dutch Municipalities) and Youth Care Netherlands. This contains the procedure, the legal framework, the responsibilities of the parties involved and the working method for international placements from abroad to the Netherlands. The protocol uses a clear step-by-step plan to explain what needs to be arranged and whose turn it is at what point in the procedure. One of the conditions for an international placement is that the Central Authority of the requesting and receiving countries must give prior approval for the placement. See the protocol below for the other conditions and more information:

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Centrale autoriteit Internationale Kinderaangelegenheden’s Post

There are almost half a million minors living outside their families in reception institutions in Europe and Central Asia. What are the possible interventions to counter this situation, always with a view to the supreme interest of the minor?

According to a recent UNICEF analysis  , nearly half a million children – 456,000 – live in reception facilities, including large institutions, in Europe and Central Asia.
This is double the global average and a painful legacy to overcome.

The children most affected

The report shows that children with disabilities are most affected by this situation, while some countries have made progress in deinstitutionalization and kinship care. Western Europe, however, has the highest rate of children in reception facilities, partly due to the arrival of unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers.

A welcome based on family and community

EMERGENCY

Children without families: Aibi, "500 thousand in the Old Continent and Central Asia". Griffini, "a law on European adoption is needed"

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January 29, 2024 @ 2.45pm

Reader's letter: DR is currently uncovering a documentary about ten Indian, adult "Danes" who were adopted to well-intentioned, loving Danish adoptive parents without the knowledge that they were illegally robbed of their own biological parents in India. A corrupt and probably well-paid adoption center in India is behind the crime - certainly without the knowledge of the Danish adoptive parents.

I understand the frustrations of the Indians. They feel robbed of their Indian identity, their maybe-life in India, their association with biological parents and siblings. I just think the story lacks a little nuance and gratitude.

The Danish adoptive parents have given their adopted children a dignified, good, loving upbringing in a safe environment here in Denmark. They have been given the right conditions for a good life. The alternative in India has been extreme poverty without the possibility of either education or the possibility of just a tolerable existence in a huge country with so many poor people. I would think that the adoptees had to live with a red dot on their forehead as either belonging to a low caste or possibly casteless. A life of poverty and perpetual despair.

I understand the Indians' frustration; but I miss a certain form of saying thank you for, despite a forced adoption, that they have landed in happiness-land Denmark compared to India.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK — 

A Danish report on Thursday said adoptions of children from South Korea to Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s was "characterized by systematic illegal behavior" in the Asian country.

These violations, the report said, made it "possible to change information about a child's background and adopt a child without the knowledge of the biological parents."

The report was the latest in a dark chapter of international adoptions. In 2013, the government in Seoul started requiring foreign adoptions to go through family courts. The move ended the decadeslong policy of allowing private agencies to dictate child relinquishments, transfer of custodies and emigration.

The Danish Appeals Board, which supervises international adoptions, said there was "an unfortunate incentive structure where large sums of money were transferred between the Danish and South Korean organizations" over the adoptions.

Norway has already stopped adoption from the Philippines. Now the Swedish authorities are considering doing the same.

Last week it became known that Bufdir recommends a complete halt to all foreign adoptions to Norway.

It also became known that all adoptions from Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines have been stopped.

This happens after a year in which VG has made a number of revelations about illegal adoptions to Norway.

Among other things, VG has told about how babies are sold in the Philippines - and that fake birth certificates are a big problem.

Musician Samuel Vekeman was adopted from Congo as a toddler with a hereditary disease. He made a play about it with Dimitri Leue. “Ban international adoption? No, it saved my life.”

Sam Renascent is the stage name of musician and producer Samuel Vekeman (30), aka “the Antwerp reincarnation of Kanye West and Stromae”. There is a special meaning behind it. “Renascent comes from the Latin verb renascere which means 'to be reborn',” Vekeman explains. “I see my adoption as a rebirth. In Congo I might never have been able to turn my passion into a profession. Here I was given the opportunity to build a new life and I am very grateful for that.”

As a drummer and actor, Vekeman has often appeared on stage with his mentor Dimitri Leue (49). Now the duo is making a theater performance together for the first time. One of the first about adoption in Flanders, they claim. In Loos , in which actresses Clara Cleymans and Inge Paulussen also play, the life of a couple with a fervent desire to have children intertwines with that of a sister and her adopted brother, who take stock after the death of their father. Copywriter Leue talked to numerous adoptive parents and children. At what price can you tear a child away from his homeland? And can the love between parent and child ever truly transcend the blood bond?

It has become a piece that Vekeman would have liked to have seen when he was 16, to better understand why he always felt “between two worlds”. Not from here, but not from there either. When he was 2, he was given up by his parents in Kinshasa. He ended up with a warm family in the Catholic community of Sant'Egidio in Antwerp. The man who took him to Belgium by plane disappeared at the airport with the northern sun ("I was his one-way ticket to Europe"). But otherwise, Vekeman's story bears little resemblance to the abuses that made the news in the autumn, when it emerged that several Ethiopian children had not been voluntarily given up and that there were errors in their files. In anticipation of the new adoption decree, Minister of Welfare Hilde Crevits (CD&V) imposed an intercountry adoption stop .

Dimitri Leue and Samuel Vekeman have worked together before. — © Ksenia Kuleshova

Pune, 27th January 2024: The sun was setting as young Kumari (name changed) settled down on her mat among other children to sleep at the Child Care Institution (aka child shelter) she had come to know as home over the years. Her story, though unique in its details, echoes the haunting refrain of many children within India’s shelters (https://www.punekarnews.in/indias-adoption-paradox-why-thousands-of-eager-familiescant-find-waiting-children/).

Orphaned early on, losing both of her parents to sickness, Kumari biological relatives were unable to look after her so her aunt Nalini (name changed) placed her in a child shelter. Kumar was shuffled from one shelter to another as she grew older. Emotionally, she became detached as she watched other children at the shelter come and go, some of them reunited with biological families and others celebrating their adoption by adoptive families. Eight years went by and nobody ever visited nor came for Kumari, leaving her to wonder if she was truly forgotten by everyone.

 “Almost every day, she’d ask if anyone was going to come for her. Her hopeful eyes searching for a family, a connection,” recalls a caretaker from the institution. Kumari was not placed in the legal adoption pool because she had relatives on paper, even if they never cared for her in real life.

 All over India, stories like Kumari’s reveal a silent, overlooked crisis. In a small village on the outskirts of Maharashtra, two sisters, aged 9 and 11 respectively, found themselves grappling with a heart-wrenching reality. Their laughter, once echoing through their family home, now resonates within the walls of a children’s shelter. Their mother, after the tragic demise of their father, found solace in another relationship and remarried. Hopes of a blended family were quickly shattered when their new stepfather showed no interest in integrating the girls into their new family. While their mother’s visits became sporadic at first, they soon ceased entirely. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and the shelter to a loving home, lack of clear laws around their gradual abandonment has kept them trapped in a system, unable to join the legal adoption pool, and thereby, kept away from the embrace of a family that might cherish and love them 

“People think shelters house only orphans, but the reality is many kids have families, who, though not strictly orphaned, are effectively abandoned. We see cases where families have left the children for care, and do not visit them but either do not want to surrender the child for adoption or are not aware of the fact that there is an option for these children to be adopted by waiting families. It leaves them in a heart-wrenching limbo,” says Protima Sharma, Co-founder and Director of Where Are India’s Children. 

Stopping foreign adoptions deprives children of their right to a family.

A childhood in an institution. Without parents. Without family. Without the unconditional love and the close, secure care that only parents can provide. This will be the reality for many children if Norway stops adoption abroad.

That could also have been the situation for my two boys. They are both adopted from South Africa.

Adoption regulations in South Africa require social workers to first provide advice and guidance with the hope that biological parents or someone else in the family can care for the children.

If this does not lead to success, they try to find adoptive parents in their home country. But in South Africa it is difficult to find parents for children over one year old, children born prematurely and children who have been exposed to drugs during pregnancy.