VMFC Picnic

After the daring duck rescue yesterday we did manage to make it to the bi-monthly Vietnamese Midwest Family Circle picnic at the home of Lloyd & Jennifer Komatsu in Inver Grove Heights.

There were eight families there, a much smaller turn-out than the inaugural dinner in late March due largely, apparently, to conflicting graduation parties of many nieces, nephews and neighbors.

We have joined this group because it is a good chance for us to occasionally see many of the families that participated in the Children's Home Society Yahoo forum that kept us going through the tougher parts of our adoption. We've become friends with a number of the families and are hopeful that we can keep some of these kids connected with each other over the years.

This was a weird picnic, though, in that there were only two families with kids there; the rest of the folks were people whose adoptions are caught up in the diplomatic snaggle that currently threatens to again stop adoptions from Vietnam to the United States.

The USCIS (successors to the INS) were quite undiplomatic this past spring when they issued a pretty unbalanced and rudely-worded review of the Vietnamese international adoption scene. The Vietnamese responded by saying that they would not be renewing the agreement that allows the countries to pursue international adoptions, which expires 1 September and for which negotiations were just starting.

They added that if a family doesn't have a paper referral for a child by 1 July, the adoptions would not be allowed to go through.

Now, if you are familiar with the world of international adoption you know that children are often brought to a family's attention through indirect ways: a child is on a medical needs list; a set of "institutional siblings" need to be adopted together; an older child without any hope of domestic adoption is listed.

Most of the families at the picnic had been receiving information about their proposed children for months and months because they had learned of the child through one of these methods. This is called a "soft referral" and a soft referral is never a sure thing.

Most of the families had been expecting a formal referral, called a "paper referral", this summer and were already worrying about the agreement expiring in September and whether it would be renewed. Now many of them are afraid that the paper referral for their child will not take place before the new deadline and they will lose the child(ren) they have been falling in love with over the last 1, 6 or 12 months. It's a desperate situation for them to be in.

After having been through what we consider to have been an ethical international adoption -the reassuring part being the additional 8 months we waited for Thành after our referral (the point at which the orphanage and provincial government deemed him legally available for adoption) while the federal authorities verified that he had been legally placed for adoption- I will be the first to suggest that the system is in serious need of overhaul. The money simply has to be taken out of any equation whose end result is the transfer of a human being from one entity's custody to another.

There are many suggestions and great organizations working on the problems inherent in the process and both Ted and I have felt that we are still too close to what was a horrendous experience for us to become involved, but still, it was painful to sit and eat pasta salad with these folks and understand that as bad as we thought our situation was, these families have it worse.

They have lots of money and all of their reproductive and emotional eggs in one basket and there is a cadre of snippy diplomats and career administrators having a pissing match over who wants to feel more insulted by the other. This is not a win-win situation.

The Komatsu's have been very outspoken and have been in the local media and in the NY Times, offering to be the family that will stick its neck out to get something to move. The media, however, has chosen typically to portray them as sad-sack childless people with dashed hopes. It's rather disappointing but not surprising. The fact is that they are a couple who has chosen intentionally not to reproduce (they also run Minnesota Greyhound Rescue) and yet they are portrayed as "those poor people with no kids".

At any rate, the picnic was fun for Louis and Thành because the Komatsu's have, in addition to 8 dogs of their own and 15 to be adopted on their 5+ wooded acres, an ENORMOUS Rainbow play structure that they installed never imagining that it would take them so long to get their girls home. The boys made good use of it.

It was also nice to see the family that will adopt a little boy that we met in Bên Tre when we went to pick up Thành. They have a four year-old boy now and will be adopting this little boy that they have named Wyatt just as soon as the CIS finishes the paperwork. We held this little boy and played with him when we traveled, so we feel a thread of connection to them.

Otherwise, there was no one there that we knew well other than the Komatsu's, who we met in our Vietnamese class in St. Paul in late 2006. None of the other three families that were in that class has yet to bring home a child. We feel luckier every day.