The Regional Development Council (RDC) recently passed a resolution endorsing to the local government units (LGUs) the Adopt-a-Malnourished Child Project.

The project is originally a brainchild of the provincial government of Southern Leyte . Because of its success and easy replicability in other areas, Governor Lerias has thought of seeking RDC endorsement of the project to other LGUs through the Social Development Committee (SDC) of the RDC. Earlier, the SDC deliberated on the project and after agreeing to its laudability, the project was then elevated to the RDC for further deliberation. The RDC, during its ExCom and Advisory Committee meeting last March 15 in Pasig City , also found the merits of the project, concurred with the SDC endorsement, and passed a resolution endorsing it to the LGUs for adoption regionwide.

The Adopt-a-Malnourished Project is an alternative way of helping solve the malnutrition problem in the region. Recognizing the government’s limited resources, it seeks sponsors who are willing to adopt a malnourished child. By “adopt”, the sponsor shoulders expenses for the deworming, supplementary feeding and micronutrient supplementation of a severely malnourished child.

The project is implemented following six simple steps: 1) The Provincial Nutrition Committee (PNC) selects the children to be adopted based on the latest results of the Operation Timbang (OPT), 2) Funds are solicited from potential benefactors using a leaflet with built-in sponsorship form, 3) The PNC treasurer receives the money from the sponsor and issues receipt then deposits money in a trust fund for the Project, out of which food supplements and other medical supplies are bought, 3) The PNC turns over the supplies to the Municipal Nutrition Committee (MNC), which is in-charge of distribution to the target beneficiaries, 4) The Barangay Nutrition Scholars (BNSs) do the supplementary feeding, supervised by the rural health midwife, 5) The Municipal Health Officers (MHOs), assisted by the midwives, make a monthly monitoring and physical examination of the children, and finally 6) A progress report on the growth and development of the children is submitted to the MNC, PNC and the sponsors. A working committee must be organized to run the project.

For Southern Leyte , the Project has already helped 19 malnourished children since it started implementation in 2004.

The RDC hopes that the project will be copied by the LGUs throughout the region, especially because as of the 2001 survey of the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) , 32 percent of our preschoolers in the region are underweight. The government and private sector should join hands in bringing this figure down since malnutrition is a threat to the development of the region and the country.

A child being deserted by his parents can cause a severe trauma that will mirror through every aspect of child’s life. The baby will experience the mother’s loss as psychological death of his mother.  There will never be closure.

The baby feels he is abandoned and results to a lifelong inability to trust anyone. This experience will gradually affect him all through out his life. That is the reason why most of the adopted child fails to trust anyone because of the fear that he may be left alone again.

The baby perpetually  bothers as to why he wasn’t kept by his mom and will blame himself for not being good enough to be loved. Many adopted adult has this kind of burden that deters a good relationship to others. The child may also feel melancholic and remorseful as if he did something bad that decides his mom to leave  him.

As days pass by and as the child grows up, he may feel that he doesn’t belong to the family where he currently resides and will suffer self-esteem. He may decide not to get involve to any family activities and may prefer to be alone all by himself. He will feel like an outcast within the family who adopted him.

The child thinks of his mother and the reason behind why he was abandoned. This makes sense because the child longs for his mother and misses her terribly!  There is a wound there that can never be filled by anyone other than the mother!  This could cause the child to have trouble concentrating on his school work.  The child may be labeled a “dreamer” or a “bad student” which will harm his chances to succeed in life.  the adopters might not understand the reason for the child’s lack of concentration and this might cause him to be misdiagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).  If misdiagnosed, the child will be forced to take medication he will not need.

The child will loose his true identity while the adopters will try to force him to be like them.  The reason for this is so that the adopters won’t be reminded that the child isn’t really theirs.  The adopters would want the true traits that the child inherits from his family to go away.  The child will not be allowed to be himself.

The child will have no sense of his past which will make it difficult to envision his future.

The child may suppress his real feelings and live an emotionally-numb life in order to survive the tragedy of the separation from his mother compounded by his adoption.

As the child becomes an adolescent he will have great difficulty establishing a sense of self because he will have no sense of his true history or heritage.

As the child becomes an adult, he may have trouble choosing a career and a mate due to his fear of committment and abandonment.

The child’s adopters may not acknowledge that raising an adopted child is different from raising a child of their own.  The adopters want to pretend that the child they raised is not adopted but their own child so they force the child to live a lie by wiping out his past and changing his name and forcing the child to become like the adopters rather than being allowed to be his own person. They will further burden the child by telling him that he should forget about his natural parents and be greatful that they adopted him and gave him a home because the natural parents did not.

Nothing anyone says or does can ever make up for the loss of the child’s first family!

The mother will not be able to change the past and undo the lifelong adverse effects of adoption on her child!

LILONGWE – US pop star Madonna will not be allowed to adopt a second child from Malawi, a 4-year-old girl named Mercy James, the African country’s High Court ruled on Friday.

“She came in a convoy of four vehicles and used the cargo terminal to take-off in her jet,” the official at Lilongwe’s international airport told AFP.

The ruling will please campaigners who say authorities have given the singer special treatment. Malawi’s government, which came under fire after Madonna adopted a 13-month-old Malawian boy, had said on Thursday it would support a second adoption.

Court registrar Ken Manda told reporters Madonna’s bid to adopt Mercy had been rejected because the star was not a resident of Malawi.

An AIDS epidemic in the impoverished southern African state has produced more than one million orphans.

In her ruling, Judge Esimie Chombo warned against celebrity adoptions, saying they could lead to child trafficking.

“Anyone could come to Malawi and quickly arrange for an adoption that might have grave consequences on the very children that the law seeks to protect,” she said.

Madonna’s lawyer, Alan Chinula, said she would lodge an appeal with the Supreme Court on Friday. Her London spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.

Madonna has entertained millions around the world with sexy high-energy performances and songs like “Material Girl” and “Papa Don’t Preach,” and created controversies along the way.

In 1989, the video for “Like A Prayer,” with its links between religion and eroticism, was condemned by the Vatican and caused Pepsi-Cola to cancel a sponsorship deal with the star.

Madonna surprised fans in February by dedicating another of her hits, “Like a Virgin,” to the pope at a concert in Rome.

Malawian rights groups, who accused the government of skirting residency laws when Madonna adopted David Banda in 2006, opposed the latest adoption attempt as well.

Malawian Information Minister Patricia Kaliati told Reuters on Thursday that Madonna had helped in the country and was a worthy mother who was supporting over 25,000 orphans here.

Madonna, accompanied by David, arrived in Malawi on Sunday ahead of the court examination of her application.

The star, who was divorced last year from British film director Guy Ritchie, is one of the most successful singers of all time, with album sales of more than 200 million.

Child abandonment is the practice of abandoning offspring outside of legal adoption.The abandoned child is called a foundling or throwaway. According to a reliable statistics, one baby is abandoned every week. A figure that has trebled in the past decades. Causes include many social and cultural factors as well as mental illness.

One factor that leads to child abandonment is teenage pregnancy. Teenage pregnancy is defined as a teenage or underage girl becoming pregnant.This pregnancy of teenagers are a mere result of the gratification of sexual urges. That pregnancy might not happen only if studies were prioritized rather than having relationships with the opposite sex. No premarital sex, no early pregnancy. Worst thing about this is that it is the child that will suffer. If not aborted, they are abandoned by their biological parents.

Another factor is the family break-up. Family break-ups happen after a long period of misunderstandings, fighting and unhappiness. Sometimes they happen suddenly and it is hard to understand why there needs to be change at all. Children are mostly affected by this kind of situation. If both their mother and father decided to a divorce and one cannot raise their child alone, tendency is that they will abandon their child. This child will become homeless and found himself alone.

Poverty is also another factor that fates to child abandonment. Persons in cultures with poor social welfare systems who are not financially capable of taking care of a child are more likely to abandon him/her. Political conditions, such as difficulty in adoption proceedings, may also contribute to child abandonment, as can the lack of institutions, such as orphanages, to take in children whom their parents cannot support. Societies with strong social structures and liberal adoption laws tend to have lower rates of child abandonment.

Psychologists believe that even short-term abandonment can damage a child’s emotional and social development. “Even short separations could have a negative effect on the child’s ability to form close relationships,” said Dr Michael Boulton, a child psychologist at the University of Keele. “Babies often form attachments with their mother before birth. They know their mother’s smell and turn to them when anxious or distressed. If they suddenly find they have gone it can be very damaging.”

Dr Boulton said that mothers who abandon their children normally do so under desperate circumstances. “Having one’s first child is the most stressful experience someone can go through. Young mothers can be vulnerable, especially if they are alone and do not have the experience or social support to cope.”

Children who are permanently or temporarily deprived of their family environment for various reasons such as poverty, armed conflict, labor exploitation, child abduction and trafficking, are entitled to special protection and assistance from the state. But what are the measures for special protection for these children and what are the measures of assistance provided by the legislators or the judges for them to be placed with nurturing environments away from the domestic abuse and neglect to which the children had been most seriously exposed and have traumatizingly experienced on a daily basis? What really is the governmental approach to the street­children phenomenon—well, the criminal justice approach, meaning children are put behind bars, in secure centers or in dilapidated shelters unfit for human habitation, where they are conveniently forgotten, without their personal documents being cleared for adoption purposes. Oftentimes, whenever there are international conferences and beauty contests held in the country, there are corollary round-ups of children and street vagrants who are imprisoned in city jails and shelters as they are traditionally looked upon as eyesores.

In promoting the adoption of children, promoting a higher level of assistance to and protection of children, which means that the child who has been abandoned and abused should be permanently placed in loving and nurturing families. When families experience the tedious, inconvenient and expensive procedures that child adoption entails, no matter how encouraging the Social Welfare Secretary can be in this regard, the prospective adoptive parents are often discouraged from pursuing their plans to adopt a child.

The United Nations Country Report has emphasized the “double standard” involved in the adoption system. It appears that intercountry adoption, which is administrative in complexion through an Intercountry Adoption Board (ICAB) endowed with quasi-judicial powers, is faster and easier than domestic adoption, which is judicial in nature, thus litigious and adversarial with traumatizing cross-examinations conducted by prosecutors, over-solicitous solicitors, and over-enthusiastic and power-craven Family Court judges. Adoption should be a single continuum, meaning that a child need not wait a minute longer for a permanent placement because of the divisive procedure. When one single Adoption Authority endowed with quasi-judicial powers, such as an expansive ICAB, is legally provided to assume jurisdiction over all adoption and family placement cases, whether intercountry or domestic adoption, guardianship or foster parenting, then the placement of a child with a suitable and nurturing family can be expedited and enhanced. Family dossiers and social case study reports need not get lost in the transmission from one agency or office to another or to a court when the creation of one Adoption Authority would no longer require transmittal of records because it becomes a central repository of all adoption records, and not the various Offices of the Local Civil Registrars or the National Statistics Office.

For a husband and a wife who remain childless their top option to refute their longing for a child is to adopt. Fear, however, comes their way upon going through an adoption. Conflicts arise between the adoptive parent and their non-biological child who become exasperated and depressed upon knowing that they are adopted. To reduce the pressure, here are some guidelines on how to handle the baby you hope to adopt.
The prevailing agreement among child experts is for adoptive parents to let their adopted child know about their adoption – and not other people. It is advisable that at age two or three is the best time telling him the reality about his status. This early telling is to be followed up periodically throughout his childhood. Studies reveal that in this way, negative reactions are minimized if adopted children are informed about their adoption before age five.
Keeping adoption a secret is difficult. Family members, relatives and friends could let it slip unintentionally. Or perhaps the adopted child discovers his true identity through his birth certificate, letters or other documents accidentally. Without firsthand information, this child might become irritated from the tease he hear from his friends and classmates, he might even get emotionally upset and disturbed, resulting in a strained parent-child relationship.
It is an obligation to adoptive parents to be open and honest so that the adopted can be free to discuss any topic regarding his adoption. When parents responses are dishonest and evasive, the child may think or sense something for worse than the truth.
Make your child understand that he didn’t come from your body but to someone else. Though it’s like that, tell him you want him and will always love him. You may not have the right answers to his questions, but remember that your emotional tone is as important as the words you say. Your feelings of love, understanding and respect have a greater impact on him.
To be adopted is a privilege. It means that one is desired, wanted and most of all loved. To adopt someone is a decision and that decision is not easy.