I wish I could just have hobbies like everyone else.

Instead I am obsessing about adoption again. Some short messages to people I don’t know personally: 

To adoptees who are happy to be adopted: The love shared in your adoptive family is real and important. Indeed you have had many opportunities given to you through your adoption.  However, the more we know about the past, the more we know that the system that brought you to your loving adoptive family is and has been corrupt. Yes, even in Korea. You will never know the real story of your relinquishment until you find out from your birth family. The ends do not justify the means.

To adoptive parents on message boards: What’s up with giant pictures of your adopted kids? Any other message board in the world, people use small photos of themselves or cartoon characters, etc. to identify themselves. Posting giant pictures of your kids as your own identity is creepy and weird.

To gay adopters: To rip off the idea of a friend of mine who probably doesn’t want to be named, the problem is not that you’re different. The problem is that you’re the same. If you have some idea about oppressive systems already, what are you doing feeding the international adoption system?

To adoptive parents who think I’ll stop criticizing everything after I become a parent:  Parenthood is optional. The beauty of feminism is that it gives us choices, e.g., women do not have to be mothers. (Now we have to work on the problem of women who do want to be mothers, but have their children taken away from them instead.)

And in general, it seems that international adoption is sort of like communism, in that it seems like a great idea in theory, but in practice it is not working out so well.

Guatemalan villagers riot, burn police station after alleged child kidnappings

AWESOME. Thanks to Hilbrand Westra for sending this AP story. I wonder if the children were going to be sent for international adoption.

GUATEMALA CITY: About 1,500 residents of a remote Guatemalan village rioted on Monday over the purported kidnappings of two children, burning down a police station and holding their mayor and another man hostage.

The confrontation erupted when 10 police officers tried to stop the villagers from seizing an 18-year-old man whom they accused of the kidnappings, Cunen police spokesman Carlos Calju said.

Overwhelmed police fled, and the mob torched the station and the house of a woman who allegedly tried to buy the children, Calju said.

A special forces team was being sent to restore order, said police chief Mynor Delgado of the nearby town of Santa Cruz del Quiche.

The children, ages 6 and 7, were abducted on Thursday in Cunen, police said. Both were recovered unharmed within two days.

Crowds frequently take justice into their own hands in remote areas of Guatemala, killing at least 350 people since 1996 in acts of vigilante justice.

On June 16, a mob in another Guatemalan village killed a woman whom it accused of trafficking abducted children.

Millennium Villages

You can affordably help far more people — where they live now —  by supporting The Millennium Villages than you can by adopting a single child. I designated my donation to be used in Tanzania because they need more funding there. Here’s the remarkable economic breakdown.

The Millennium Villages are based on a single powerful idea: impoverished villages can transform themselves and meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 if they are empowered with proven, powerful, practical technologies. It is simply a “bottom up” approach to lifting villages in developing countries out of the poverty trap that confines more than one billion people worldwide.

The concept? Doing all of it at once. Goals can be achieved by bundling critical yet straightforward solutions in a comprehensive investment strategy and working directly with the poorest of the poor.

By investing in health, food production, education, access to clean water, and essential infrastructure, these community-led interventions will enable impoverished villages to escape extreme poverty once and for all. Once these communities get a foothold on the bottom rung of the development ladder they can propel themselves on a path of self-sustaining economic growth.

The concept was developed by a team of scientific experts at The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the UN Millennium Project. Millennium Promise is working in more than 75 villages in ten different countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.

Here’s a new and really entertaining article from Vanity Fair on the brilliant economist Jeffrey Sachs, the mastermind behind the whole thing. Angelina Jolie calls him “one of the smartest people in the world,” so I guess we can agree on that one thing. ^^