Postcard from Bishkek

When preparing these postcards, I tend to consult a number of calendars to see what events are coming up or if there are any special commemorative days in the near future which might merit a postcard.  Earlier I saw an entry on a calendar which I thought was a suitable candidate for attention: National Adoption Day.

On the other hand, as I started doing a little research, I came across a number of “problems” …

The first was that there didn’t seem to be a set date.  National Adoption Day comes from the States, (and so, strictly speaking, it is not really connected with Kyrgyzstan), and the reason that the date changes from year to year is that it is commemorated on the Saturday before Thanksgiving – so this year it was last Saturday – the 17th.

A number of courts and communities in the States focus on this date as a sort of deadline to finalize thousands of adoptions of children who are in foster care.  The idea originated in 2000 in just nine jurisdictions but this year arrangements had spread to all fifty states – and in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam – and in those twelve years … over 40,000 adoptions have been finalized as part of the “celebration”.

The designation of November as National Adoption Month, (when all adoption related issues but especially the adoption of children in foster care, is the subject of particular focus for activities and events), has origins that can be traced back to an Adoption Week declared by the Governor of Massachusetts in 1976 …

 

Another issue was that as National Adoption Day comes from the States, strictly speaking it is not really connected with Kyrgyzstan.  On the other hand, both adoption and fostering have played a significant role in traditional Kyrgyz culture:

Adoption was commonly practised. It could even take place in adulthood. All that was needed was to bring the child’s face to the breast of the adoptive mother in the presence of witnesses and for the child to promise to be an honest son of his new parents. The adoptive parents took full responsibility for their child, paying “fines”. They retained the right, however, to return to their own tribe at any time.

Normally, in the event of a father dying, then the widow would marry one of his younger relatives – who would adopt the children of the first marriage. If the husband had no close relatives then the wife could return to her own family. If a child was then brought up in his mother’s family after his father died, then he retained his membership of his father’s tribe a member of his father’s clan – and in adulthood was expected to return to it.

In the opening scene of the film Beshkempir, an infant boy is given to a childless couple to adopt.  He is given the name Beshkempir, which is Kyrgyz for “five grandmothers” - a name which is sometimes given to adopted children to signify the role played by a council of old women of the village, deciding where a child from one family may be bestowed on another which is infertile.  When he learns of this in his adolescence, and confronts his grandmother about it, she denies it and insists that he is “of her blood” and tells him that he was given the name as a charm: “To protect you from the evil eye.”

Fostering:  Because of the high infant mortality rate, special customs developed to help preserve the newborn infant.  For example, in families where children did not usually survive, they might give a newborn child to another on the understanding that the biological parents would “buy” the child back shortly afterwards - 3, 7 or 40 days later … and sometimes even one year later.  To all intents and purposes, for this period the child was regarded as belonging to the foster family.  They informed everybody that they had a new baby and would organize the dje-entek toi.  The biological mother, upon meeting the foster-mother would ask: “How is your child?”  When the time for “buying back” the child arrived, the biological parents would pay the foster parents a “redemption” fee, comprising of nine objects – usually inexpensive things like potholders, (tutkuch), dishes (tavak), a sickle (orok), a knife (bychak) and so forth.

 

In recent years, however, the issue of adoption, (specifically, “international adoption”), has attracted a certain amount of controversy and which was the subject of an interesting analysis in the Washington Times last Friday.

 

According to official statistics, there were 1200 children  adopted in Kyrgyzstan in 2011.  According to an official spokesman, there are many citizens who want to adopt children, “and their number is growing”.  There is a database of about 300 children available for adoption and there are procedures for anyone seeking to adopt one of them.

It seems that there were 236 adoptions of children from Kyrgyzstan by foreign parents between 2004 and 2008.but the rest  The children went to eight countries: most of them (30%) going to the States, but others to Switzerland, Sweden and Germany … two even found homes in South Africa.   In February 2009, however, a moratorium on the procedure was imposed – following allegations of forged documents, (health certificates indicating the children needed treatments not available here in Kyrgyzstan) and concerns about the fate of children once they had left Kyrgyz supervision … arising from stories appearing in the press reporting supposedly reporting the “experiences” of Russian children that have been adopted only to be “abandoned” and sent to “ranchos” where there is no access for supervision of their welfare..

The moratorium caused delays for the 65 families and children that had already been in the final stages of the process, (for example, waiting for court decisions), and could not proceed causing emotional stress and hardship on both sides.

Consideration of the issues which led to the moratorium was delayed by the revolution of April and despite the question being subject to some considerable diplomatic and public pressure, it wasn’t until May 2011, after Kyrgyzstan ratified the relevant Hague Convention on protecting the rights of the child,  that the moratorium was eventually repealed and a new system put in place.  The process of accreditation of foreign agencies began in October and it was reported in March this year that there were four international adoption agencies had been approved to operate in Kyrgyzstan, (from the USA, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands), although some 24 applications had been lodged.

In the short period between the moratorium being raised and then reimposed, there were three children adopted by families living abroad, out of twenty that were being processed with seven awaiting final court decisions.

Not everyone was happy, however, with one politician, for example, complaining that there weren’t enough children available for adoption to satisfy the need felt by local families.

Another politician has expressed concerns that the current procedures make it possible for children to be “sold” abroad on the basis of forged documents … This is denied by officials in the Ministries which oversee the process … but there has been much debate about the whole selection procedures employed.

According to the Ministry, there are some 11000 children resident in state institutions, (such as an orphanage or children’s home), many of them, (as many as 80% according to the Washington Times article), being classified as “social orphans”, (i.e. where one or even both parents are living but unable, or unwilling, to care for them).  An official at the Health Ministry said that where children lived in a state run institution then attempts were always made to find close relatives who might care for the child and that permission to adopt was only given when there were no other alternatives – “for children who were orphans and had been abandoned by their mothers”.

According to the official, it was customary that only healthy children were given to local families for adoption although the question of allowing the adoption of sick children had been raised and some cases where a sick or invalid child had been adopted by a family abroad.

More problematical was the arrest of the Deputy Minister responsible for international adoptions and her assistant on corruption charges arising out of allegations of bribes being received from international adoption agencies in order to allocate the appropriate licenses.  As a result of the arrest, the whole process has been put into limbo once more – the four certificates that had been granted were invalidated and six more that were under consideration were suspended.

The case has already come before the courts and we are still awaiting a final verdict …

It is unfortunate, (but probably understandable given the nature of the topic), that most of the discussion has been emotional – on both sides – and the whole idea of National Adoption Month (and, of course, National Adoption Day), of focus attention on the needs of the children seems to have been lost … especially those 17 cases that were already at various stages in the process and have found themselves suspended in a state of uncertainty through no fault of their own.

 

Tags: Expat, Kyrgyzstan, Life_in_Kyrgyzstan