US DOS: Frequently Asked Questions on Adoptions in Nepal

Taken directly from the US Department of State website:

Frequently Asked Questions on Adoptions in Nepal

July 25, 2007

Q. What is the current status of adoptions in Nepal?
A. The Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare (WCS), which is the ministry in charge of international adoptions in Nepal, has informed the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu that the Government of Nepal has suspended all intercountry adoptions pending approval of reforms of the adoption process by the Nepali Cabinet. The Government of Nepal, which initiated this suspension on May 8, 2007, has given no indication about when it will be lifted.

Q. What is the U.S. Embassy in Nepal doing for American parents in the process of adopting a child from Nepal?
A. We see adoptions as a win-win situation for parents and eligible Nepali children. We are sympathetic to the emotional hardship that this decision by the Government of Nepal has caused American prospective adoptive parents. We have urged the Government of Nepal, while undertaking its reform efforts, to continue processing cases in which prospective adoptive parents have already been matched with a child. The Consular Section at the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu is, as always, available to speak with American prospective adoptive families and to assist them when possible.

Q. What is the U.S. Embassy in Nepal doing to address the suspension of adoptions by the Government of Nepal?
A. The Embassy is working with other international missions, U.S. adoption agencies, other international agencies, and the Government of Nepal at the highest levels. The U.S. Ambassador has addressed the processing of international adoptions with Nepal's Foreign Minister. The Embassy continues to meet regularly with contacts in the Government of Nepal, including the Social Welfare Council and the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, to advocate on behalf of American prospective adoptive parents.

Q. What will happen when the Government of Nepal resumes the processing of intercountry adoption cases in Nepal?
A. The U.S. Embassy is working closely with American prospective adoptive parents and U.S. agencies to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays once the Government of Nepal resumes processing of intercountry adoption cases. There are, however, several complicating factors that make adoption cases more difficult and thus more time-consuming in Nepal. Procedures for foreign adoptions in Nepal are unpredictable and the Government of Nepal’s requirements are not enforced in a uniform manner. Fabricated documents or genuine documents that are fraudulently obtained are readily available and often at variance with the facts of the case. The complete facts of many adoption cases are uncertain and the U.S. Consular Officers must often conduct lengthy investigations. In Kathmandu, as in many places around the world, Consular Officers have been granted the authority to adjudicate I-600 petitions on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) but only if the petitions are "clearly approvable." Some cases must be sent to the DHS regional office in New Delhi for review. Other delays are beyond the control of the U.S. Embassy, as the approval of adoption cases by the Government of Nepal is unpredictable and varies in length from six months to two years.

Frequently Asked Questions on Adoptions in Nepal, US Department of State, Intercountry Adoption News, 25 July 2007

US DOS: Nepal Suspends Intercountry Adoptions

As of May 14, 2007, Nepal is closed for intercountry adoption:

"The Nepali Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare (MWCS) has informed the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu that the Government of Nepal has suspended all intercountry adoptions pending approval of reforms of the adoption process by the Nepali cabinet. The Nepali Government has given no indication about when the suspension will be lifted.

The U.S. Embassy is working with the Government of Nepal to urge that they continue to process cases of American adoptive parents already matched with orphans to prevent undue delays of adoption cases already in process."

This action follows months of press reports detailing the corruption plaguing international adoption from Nepal.

"Nepal Suspends Intercountry Adoptions," US Department of State, Intercountry Adoption News, May 14, 2007

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Nepal: Orphanage Director Arrested for Sexual Abuse

In February, Henk Molhuysen, the Dutch director of a Nepali orphanage was arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing children in his care.

Local Nepali police investigating the case reportedly believe that Molhuysen may have abused "almost all of the 48 children" in the home.

A few weeks after his arrest, press reports confirmed that this man had had earlier convictions for child abuse including one in Spain in 1995 for child rape. He had received an eight year prison sentence for this crime, but apparently did not serve the whole term. Instead, he was returned to the Netherlands where he was released by Dutch authorities two years later.

Molhuysen founded the orphanage--a home for Nepali street children--in Nepal six years later, in 2003. The home is financed by a Dutch foundation.

Initially there was worry that the abused children would end up back on the streets after Molhuysen's arrest, but Childright, another NGO, said that it would keep this from happening. A 19 year old Dutch volunteer assumed directorship of the orphanage after Molhuysen's arrest.

NL charity in Nepal child sex abuse probe, Dutch News.nl, 02/16/07

Abuse suspect has previous convictions, Dutch News.nl, 02/28/07

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Conor Grennan and Next Generation Nepal

In one of my detailed items under "What To Do About Corruption," I talked about how each of us needs to find a way to apply our own unique talents and interests to making a difference in the lives of vulnerable children and their families.

This entry is about one man who has been doing just that. Conor Grennan, not sure what to do with his life and wanting to do something cool, decided to travel--travel around the world. Apparently he didn't make it--around the world that is. But he is doing something cool and important. He got stuck in Nepal working with children in an orphanage. Then that work kinda evolved into something else. A mission to learn the truth about where these trafficked children--who eventually landed up in an orphanage--came from and how they came to be separated from their parents. He wanted the whole story.

And so, Conor's current work.

Backed by a small NGO he created called Next Generation Nepal, Conor has walked mountainous backroads into remote villages looking for the families of 24 children who were allegedly trafficked.

Carrying his own food, accompanied by a small party of translators and guides, and armed with photos of the children whose first parents he is seeking, Conor is having quite an adventure. And he is writing about his adventures, but more importantly, his work--the truth he finds--in his incredible blog.

Here is an exerpt from Conor's blog. Click on the link below the quote to go to Conor's actual blog.

The purpose of going was to trek through the mountains with photos of the children and any information we had – usually limited to a village name and the name of a father – and try to find the families of children taken by traffickers years ago. It would be the first step in a long process of reuniting children with their parents.

(By the way - this is a long entry, in case you’ve got stuff you need to be doing.)

The three-week search was both extremely difficult and extremely successful. Believe it or not, of the 24 children we knew who had parents somewhere in the mountains of Humla, we found 24 families. Crazy. It was substantially higher than my original estimate of finding zero families. I just didn’t know how we would be able to do it. My four-man team and the four-man team of my colleague, DB, who had profiles of many more children for a separate organization with the same mission, ended up traveling a large team. Together we were eight: seven men from Humla plus me...

Twenty four families. That means twenty four times, I sat with Rinjin, my translator, on a rough carpet outside a simple mud home in some small mountain village and handed a mother or a father a photo of their child who they haven’t seen in years. Then I simply watched their faces. It was instant recognition. If it was a mother, she would touch the photograph to her forehead, treating it as a sacred thing, then just stare at her son or daughter in the photo. I waited long minutes before intruding on these moments, the hypnotized smiles or the flood of tears or chattering with the crowd of villagers gathered around for what they sensed was a historic event, and then very carefully ask them if they knew where their child was. Very few had any idea.

Those moments were nothing short of astonishing. For me, it would begin even a few minutes earlier, when I would see the parents walking towards me through the village. They knew I was here – everybody in the village knew I was there, they gathered on low rooftops to watch our team approaching – but there was uncertainly as to what this white guy was doing in a place like this.

He was amazing, Min Bahadur – tall and lanky for a Nepali, always cheerful, exceedingly strong, and sure enough, he knew everybody we passed on the trail. So it was never a surprise to see him walking towards me with a mother and father following him, with a proud smile on his face. He would say something to Rinjin (my equally excellent translator), and Rinjin would turn to me and say “This is the father and mother of Chandra.” But I would know it already – the resemblance was uncanny, it was always uncanny. This was Chandra’s father and mother, Chandra grew up here, he was a baby at one point then learned to walk and to talk with these two people, in this village, around these animals and these fields and on the floors of these mud houses. Then they lost him. To see his real parents with my own eyes, the two people who were meant to be caring for him the way that we had been trying to do for two or three years, was quite honestly like a miracle.

We all had a lot of questions for each other, but I asked mine first. I asked the whole story of what happened with their child as far as they knew, what they had heard, when was the last time they had news about him or her. I asked what the traffickers had promised (it was always the same – to put the child in a boarding school in Kathmandu) and how much money they had charged the parents for this service. That was heartbreaking, hearing how much they had paid these bastards, how much they’d had to borrow, what they had to sell, seeing how incredibly poor they were. Typically, they may have heard from the trafficker soon after giving up their child before being cut off completely. The trafficker would always tell them that their child was in boarding school and was doing great, at the very same moment that I was finding this same child somewhere on the street half starved to death. It’s sick.

I asked about their families, their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. I asked about their economic conditions, how much land they had, how many animals, everything to get a sense of their financial security, how poor they were. The easy answer was “very poor” but there is more to it than that – all of Nepal is very poor, after all. We want to get a sense of how to allow children to safely come back to their families.

Connar's incredible blog:
How Connar is Spending All His Money: A BootsnAll Travel Blog

Now these particular children had not (yet) been adopted out, but their stories are important for understanding how children--some of whom are trafficked for adoption and some of whom are adopted out after being trafficked and landing in an orphanage come to be separated from parents and to be presented as "orphans"--kids who are or seem to be without parents who care for them. Starting to understand the vulnerabilities of these families and their children is the beginning step to understanding how adoption corruption works in impoverished countries.

Please also check out Conor's organization: Next Generation Nepal. Incidentally, his organization operates entirely on donations. And those donations are what allows Conor to do his work in Nepal.

Hats off to fellow fleas, Conor and Next Generation Nepal.

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Nepal: Adoption Looks Like Trafficking

On the eve of an international adoption conference beginning today, Sunday March 11, aimed at "promoting Nepal as a destination for adoption and [at making] the [intercountry adoption] process [from Nepal] easier," The Nepali Times has published a very hard-hitting article about international adoption from Nepal.

I strongly recommend that all who are interested in adoption corruption read it in its entirety:

Adoption from Nepal is beginning to look like trafficking, Nepali Times, 03/09/07

Unlike many on-line newspaper sources that remove their articles to publicly-inaccessible, fee-generating archives, the Nepali Times makes its articles free and publicly accessible for several years. This link should therefore work for some time to come.

In view of the long-lived nature of this link, I will not attempt to summarize the entire article here, but rather give you a flavor of what it alleges about Nepali adoption by quoting a few of its lines and summarizing a few of its ideas. I hope by doing so to convince you to take the time to read the whole article.

On the sourcing of children, the Nepali Times says:

"Children are often put up for adoption without their parents' knowledge or consent"

"...an increasing number of children are being falsely declared orphans or taken away from their parents on false pretexts to be handed over to adoptive parents for a hefty fee. Employees of top hotels say confrontations between new adoptive parents and birth parents in parking lots and lobbies are increasingly common."

Children are sometimes taken from parents on the pretext that they will be given a free education, but then those children disappear and end up in the adoption industry stream.

Once they are in this stream, children are allegedly moved from home to home and even across the border into India as they are processed through the system.

Though adoptive parents pay hefty "orphanage donations" that ought to more than ensure that children in these orphanages are well cared for, the orphanages caring for these Nepali children allegedly often provide poor care--"the standards of health, nutrition, and cleanliness are abysmal, and few orphanages provide the stimulation that children need for healthy development."

Children thus come from these orphanages into adoptive care suffering from malnutrition, suffering with skin diseases, and adjusting from a life where "toddlers [are] confined to tiny, dark spaces [where they] sit all day, clutching at the bars of their cribs, rocking back and forth."

Meanwhile, according to the Nepali Times Article, the administrators of such places "display signs of increasing wealth."

On the reason that no action is taken against traffickers:

A senior Nepalese child welfare official says, "We have to be careful about taking action because powerful people are involved."

"'The system is completely rotten,' says an outraged child welfare official, 'and it goes all the way to the top.' The bribery starts from small local police stations and district administration offices, which are encouraged to certify children as orphans or produce perfectly legal, and perfectly false, documents claiming parents' consent to giving up their child for adoption."

Not all children end up in the adoption stream against the will of their parents.

Some Nepali children--like the child offered the British couple posing as prospective adoptive parents at the beginning of the Nepali Times article--end up in the adoption stream for other reasons. That child--who was still in the care of his parents when offered for adoption and whose first parents met with the prospective adoptive parents to discuss arrangements--was being offered for adoption in a bid to give him (and presumably themselves, since they requested that they be allowed to stay in touch with him as a condition of placing him) a "brighter future" than his apparently relatively well-educated, middle class parents could offer.

In these situations, parents gamble a child away in a bid to give him immigration into a land of opportunity. What better way to buy immigration into a prosperous country than with an attentive, invested, caring adoptive family to look after your child's interests, ensure he has the best opportunities, ensure that he is not alone, and is given an excellent education?

This sacrificing in "adoption" of a child or two in a larger family--with the hope that a family's calculated "casting [of] the bread upon the waters" will eventually come back to them with big rewards, not just for the child but for the entire family, has been going on in various countries, like Vietnam, for some time now--incidentally, to the extreme consternation (and emotional and relational pain)of the sacrificial child.

Other articles about the same subject:

This is the online arm of the newspaper that sent the British couple undercover in Nepal to pose as prospective adoptive parents. In large part, it summarizes the same information as in the Nepali Times article:Orphanages in 'children for sale' racket, Telegraph.co.uk, 03/10/07


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