October 29, 2008

Life in the 1500's

Vintage car
© Photographer: Gmv | Agency: Dreamstime.com
LIFE IN THE 1500'S

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the
water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things
used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500's:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly
bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were
starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the
body odour. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting
married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the
house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons
and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the
babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone
in it. Hence the saying, Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water..

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood
underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the
cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it
rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall
off the roof. Hence the saying. It's raining cats and dogs.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house.

This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings
could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a
sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how four poster
beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than
dirt. Hence the saying, Dirt poor. The wealthy had slate floors that
would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw)
on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added
more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping
outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying
a thresh hold.

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle
that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added
things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat.

They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get
cold overnight and then start again the next day. Sometimes stew had
food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, Peas
porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days
old..

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite
special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show
off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could bring home the bacon. They
would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and
chew the fat.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid
content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead
poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next
400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt
bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top,
or the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would
sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking
along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.
They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the
family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they
would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out
of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take
the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these
coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the
inside and they realised they had been burying people alive. So they
would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the
coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would
have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to
listen for the bell; thus, someone could be saved by the bell or was
considered a ...dead ringer..

October 28, 2008

The Lie We Love


The Lie We Love
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4508&page=0

More info. on international adoption ethics: http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/index.html

By E. J. Graff
November/December 2008 AF

Foreign adoption seems like the perfect solution to a heartbreaking imbalance: Poor countries have babies in need of homes, and rich countries have homes in need of babies. Unfortunately, those little orphaned bundles of joy may not be orphans at all.

ALEXANDER MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Who's your mommy?: Parents might never know if their adopted child is truly an orphan.

Web Extra: For a photographic tour of the global baby trade, visit: ForeignPolicy.com/extras/adoption.

We all know the story of international adoption: Millions of infants and toddlers have been abandoned or orphaned—placed on the side of a road or on the doorstep of a church, or left parentless due to AIDS, destitution, or war. These little ones find themselves forgotten, living in crowded orphanages or ending up on the streets, facing an uncertain future of misery and neglect. But, if they are lucky, adoring new moms and dads from faraway lands whisk them away for a chance at a better life.

Unfortunately, this story is largely fiction.

Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of international adoptions each year has nearly doubled, from 22,200 in 1995 to just under 40,000 in 2006. At its peak, in 2004, more than 45,000 children from developing countries were adopted by foreigners. Americans bring home more of these children than any other nationality—more than half the global total in recent years.

Where do these babies come from? As international adoptions have flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past 15 years—places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Romania—have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping. And yet when a country is closed due to corruption, many adoption agencies simply transfer their clients’ hopes to the next “hot” country. That country abruptly experiences a spike in infants and toddlers adopted overseas—until it too is forced to shut its doors.

Along the way, the international adoption industry has become a market often driven by its customers. Prospective adoptive parents in the United States will pay adoption agencies between $15,000 and $35,000 (excluding travel, visa costs, and other miscellaneous expenses) for the chance to bring home a little one. Special needs or older children can be adopted at a discount. Agencies claim the costs pay for the agency’s fee, the cost of foreign salaries and operations, staff travel, and orphanage donations. But experts say the fees are so disproportionately large for the child’s home country that they encourage corruption.

To complicate matters further, while international adoption has become an industry driven by money, it is also charged with strong emotions. Many adoption agencies and adoptive parents passionately insist that crooked practices are not systemic, but tragic, isolated cases. Arrest the bad guys, they say, but let the “good” adoptions continue. However, remove cash from the adoption chain, and, outside of China, the number of healthy babies needing Western homes all but disappears. Nigel Cantwell, a Geneva-based consultant on child protection policy, has seen the dangerous influence of money on adoptions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where he has helped reform corrupt adoption systems. In these regions, healthy children age 3 and younger can easily be adopted in their own countries, he says. I asked him how many healthy babies in those regions would be available for international adoption if money never exchanged hands. “I would hazard a guess at zero,” he replied.

THE MYTH OF SUPPLY

International adoption wasn’t always a demand-driven industry. Half a century ago, it was primarily a humanitarian effort for children orphaned by conflict. In 1955, news spread that Bertha and Henry Holt, an evangelical couple from Oregon, had adopted eight Korean War orphans, and families across the United States expressed interest in following their example. Since then, international adoption has become increasingly popular in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Americans adopted more than 20,000 foreign children in 2006 alone, up from just 8,987 in 1995. Half a dozen European countries regularly bring home more foreign-born children per capita than does the United States. Today, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States account for 4 out of every 5 international adoptions.

Changes in Western demography explain much of the growth. Thanks to contraception, abortion, and delayed marriages, the number of unplanned births in most developed countries has declined in recent decades. Some women who delay having children discover they’ve outwaited their fertility; others have difficulty conceiving from the beginning. Still others adopt for religious reasons, explaining that they’ve been called to care for children in need. In the United States, a motive beyond demography is the notion that international adoption is somehow “safer”—more predictable and more likely to end in success—than many domestic adoptions, where there’s an outsized fear of a birth mother’s last-minute change of heart. Add an ocean of distance, and the idea that needy children abound in poor countries, and that risk seems to disappear.

But international adoptions are no less risky; they’re simply less regulated. Just as companies outsource industry to countries with lax labor laws and low wages, adoptions have moved to states with few laws about the process. Poor, illiterate birthparents in the developing world simply have fewer protections than their counterparts in the United States, especially in countries where human trafficking and corruption are rampant. And too often, these imbalances are overlooked on the adopting end. After all, one country after another has continued to supply what adoptive parents want most.

In reality, there are very few young, healthy orphans available for adoption around the world. Orphans are rarely healthy babies; healthy babies are rarely orphaned. “It’s not really true,” says Alexandra Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, “that there are large numbers of infants with no homes who either will be in institutions or who need intercountry adoption.”

That assertion runs counter to the story line that has long been marketed to Americans and other Westerners, who have been trained by images of destitution in developing countries and the seemingly endless flow of daughters from China to believe that millions of orphaned babies around the world desperately need homes. UNICEF itself is partly responsible for this erroneous assumption. The organization’s statistics on orphans and institutionalized children are widely quoted to justify the need for international adoption. In 2006, UNICEF reported an estimated 132 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. But the organization’s definition of “orphan” includes children who have lost just one parent, either to desertion or death. Just 10 percent of the total—13 million children—have lost both parents, and most of these live with extended family. They are also older: By UNICEF’s own estimate, 95 percent of orphans are older than 5. In other words, UNICEF’s “millions of orphans” are not healthy babies doomed to institutional misery unless Westerners adopt and save them. Rather, they are mostly older children living with extended families who need financial support.

The exception is China, where the country’s three-decades-old one-child policy, now being loosened, has created an unprecedented number of girls available for adoption. But even this flow of daughters is finite; China has far more hopeful foreigners looking to adopt a child than it has orphans it is willing to send overseas. In 2005, foreign parents adopted nearly 14,500 Chinese children. That was far fewer than the number of Westerners who wanted to adopt; adoption agencies report many more clients waiting in line. And taking those children home has gotten harder; in 2007, China’s central adoption authority sharply reduced the number of children sent abroad, possibly because of the country’s growing sex imbalance, declining poverty, and scandals involving child trafficking for foreign adoption. Prospective foreign parents today are strictly judged by their age, marital history, family size, income, health, and even weight. That means that if you are single, gay, fat, old, less than well off, too often divorced, too recently married, taking antidepressants, or already have four children, China will turn you away. Even those allowed a spot in line are being told they might wait three to four years before they bring home a child. That has led many prospective parents to shop around for a country that puts fewer barriers between them and their children—as if every country were China, but with fewer onerous regulations.

One such country has been Guatemala, which in 2006 and 2007 was the No. 2 exporter of children to the United States. Between 1997 and 2006, the number of Guatemalan children adopted by Americans more than quadrupled, to more than 4,500 annually. Incredibly, in 2006, American parents adopted one of every 110 Guatemalan children born. In 2007, nearly 9 out of 10 children adopted were less than a year old; almost half were younger than 6 months old. “Guatemala is a perfect case study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven business,” says Kelley McCreery Bunkers, a former consultant with UNICEF Guatemala. The country’s adoption process was “an industry developed to meet the needs of adoptive families in developed countries, specifically the United States.”

Because the vast majority of the country’s institutionalized children are not healthy, adoptable babies, almost none has been adopted abroad. In the fall of 2007, a survey conducted by the Guatemalan government, UNICEF, and the international child welfare and adoption agency Holt International Children’s Services found approximately 5,600 children and adolescents in Guatemalan institutions. More than 4,600 of these children were age 4 or older. Fewer than 400 were under a year old. And yet in 2006, more than 270 Guatemalan babies, all younger than 12 months, were being sent to the United States each month. These adopted children were simply not coming from the country’s institutions. Last year, 98 percent of U.S. adoptions from Guatemala were “relinquishments”: Babies who had never seen the inside of an institution were signed over directly to a private attorney who approved the international adoption—for a very considerable fee—without any review by a judge or social service agency.

So, where had some of these adopted babies come from? Consider the case of Ana Escobar, a young Guatemalan woman who in March 2007 reported to police that armed men had locked her in a closet in her family’s shoe store and stolen her infant. After a 14-month search, Escobar found her daughter in pre-adoption foster care, just weeks before the girl was to be adopted by a couple from Indiana. DNA testing showed the toddler to be Escobar’s child. In a similar case from 2006, Raquel Par, another Guatemalan woman, reported being drugged while waiting for a bus in Guatemala City, waking to find her year-old baby missing. Three months later, Par learned her daughter had been adopted by an American couple.

On Jan. 1, 2008, Guatemala closed its doors to American adoptions so that the government could reform the broken process. Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain all stopped accepting adoptions from the country several years earlier, citing trafficking concerns. But more than 2,280 American adoptions from the country are still being processed, albeit with additional safeguards. Stolen babies have already been found in that queue; Guatemalan authorities expect more.

Guatemala’s example is extreme; it is widely considered to have the world’s most notorious record of corruption in foreign adoption. But the same troubling trends have emerged, on smaller scales, in more than a dozen other countries, including Albania, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Peru, and Vietnam. The pattern suggests that the supply of adoptable babies rises to meet foreign demand—and disappears when Western cash is no longer available. For instance, in December 2001, the U.S. immigration service stopped processing adoption visas from Cambodia, citing clear evidence that children were being acquired illicitly, often against their parents’ wishes. That year, Westerners adopted more than 700 Cambodian children; of the 400 adopted by Americans, more than half were less than 12 months old. But in 2005, a study of Cambodia’s orphanage population, commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development, found only a total of 132 children who were less than a year old—fewer babies than Westerners had been adopting every three months a few years before.

Even countries with large populations, such as India, rarely have healthy infants and toddlers who need foreign parents. India’s large and growing middle class, at home and in the diaspora, faces fertility issues like those of their developed-world counterparts. They too are looking for healthy babies to adopt; some experts think that these millions of middle-class families could easily absorb all available babies. The country’s pervasive poverty does leave many children fending for themselves on the street. But “kids are not on the street alone at the age of 2,” Cantwell, the child protection consultant, says. “They are 5 or 6, and they aren’t going to be adopted.” That’s partly because most of these children still have family ties and therefore are not legally available for adoption, and partly because they would have difficultly adjusting to a middle-class European or North American home. Many of these children are deeply marked by abuse, crime, and poverty, and few prospective parents are prepared to adopt them.

Surely, though, prospective parents can at least feel secure that their child is truly an orphan in need of a home if they receive all the appropriate legal papers? Unfortunately, no.

NURSERY CRIMES

In many countries, it can be astonishingly easy to fabricate a history for a young child, and in the process, manufacture an orphan. The birth mothers are often poor, young, unmarried, divorced, or otherwise lacking family protection. The children may be born into a locally despised minority group that is afforded few rights. And for enough money, someone will separate these little ones from their vulnerable families, turning them into “paper orphans” for lucrative export.

Some manufactured orphans are indeed found in what Westerners call “orphanages.” But these establishments often serve less as homes to parentless children and more as boarding schools for poor youngsters. Many children are there only temporarily, seeking food, shelter, and education while their parents, because of poverty or illness, cannot care for them. Many families visit their children, or even bring them home on weekends, until they can return home permanently. In 2005, when the Hannah B. Williams Orphanage in Monrovia, Liberia, was closed because of shocking living conditions, 89 of the 102 “orphans” there returned to their families. In Vietnam, “rural families in particular will put their babies into these orphanages that are really extended day-care centers during the harvest season,” says a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman in Hanoi. In some cases, unscrupulous orphanage directors, local officials, or other operators persuade illiterate birth families to sign documents that relinquish those children, who are then sent abroad for adoption, never to be seen again by their bereft families.

Other children are located through similarly nefarious means. Western adoption agencies often contract with in-country facilitators—sometimes orphanage directors, sometimes freelancers—and pay per-child fees for each healthy baby adopted. These facilitators, in turn, subcontract with child finders, often for sums in vast excess of local wages. These paydays give individuals a significant financial incentive to find adoptable babies at almost any cost. In Guatemala, where the GDP per capita is $4,700 a year, child finders often earned $6,000 to $8,000 for each healthy, adoptable infant. In many cases, child finders simply paid poor families for infants. A May 2007 report on adoption trafficking by the Hague Conference on Private International Law reported poor Guatemalan families being paid beween $300 and several thousand dollars per child.

Sometimes, medical professionals serve as child finders to obtain infants. In Vietnam, for instance, a finder’s fee for a single child can easily dwarf a nurse’s $50-a-month salary. Some nurses and doctors coerce birth mothers into giving up their children by offering them a choice: pay outrageously inflated hospital bills or relinquish their newborns. Illiterate new mothers are made to sign documents they can’t read. In August 2008, the U.S. State Department released a warning that birth certificates issued by Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City—which in 2007 had reported 200 births a day, and an average of three abandoned babies per 100 births—were “unreliable.” Most of the hospital’s “abandoned” babies were sent to the city’s Tam Binh orphanage, from which many Westerners have adopted. (Tu Du Hospital is where Angelina Jolie’s Vietnamese-born son was reportedly abandoned one month after his birth; he was at Tam Binh when she adopted him.) According to Linh Song, executive director of Ethica, an American nonprofit devoted to promoting ethical adoption, a provincial hospital’s chief obstetrician told her in 2007 “that he provided 10 ethnic minority infants to [an] orphanage [for adoption] in return for an incubator.”

To smooth the adoption process, officials in the children’s home countries may be bribed to create false identity documents. Consular officials for the adopting countries generally accept whatever documents they receive. But if a local U.S. Embassy has seen a series of worrisome referrals—say, a sudden spike in healthy infants coming from the same few orphanages, or a single province sending an unusually high number of babies with suspiciously similar paperwork—officials may investigate. But generally, they do not want to obstruct adoptions of genuinely needy children or get in the way of people longing for a child. However, many frequently doubt that the adoptions crossing their desks are completely aboveboard. “I believe in intercountry adoption very strongly,” says Katherine Monahan, a U.S. State Department official who has overseen scores of U.S. adoptions from around the world. “[But] I worry that there were many children that could have stayed with their families if we could have provided them with even a little economic assistance.” One U.S. official told me that when embassy staff in a country that sent more than 1,000 children overseas last year were asked which adoption visas they felt uneasy about, they replied: almost all of them.

Most of the Westerners involved with foreign adoption agencies—like business people importing foreign sneakers—can plausibly deny knowledge of unethical or unseemly practices overseas. They don’t have to know. Willful ignorance allowed Lauryn Galindo, a former hula dancer from the United States, to collect more than $9 million in adoption fees over several years for Cambodian infants and toddlers. Between 1997 and 2001, Americans adopted 1,230 children from Cambodia; Galindo said she was involved in 800 of the adoptions. (Galindo reportedly delivered Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian child to her movie set in Africa.) But in a two-year probe beginning in 2002, U.S. investigators alleged that Galindo paid Cambodian child finders to purchase, defraud, coerce, or steal children from their families, and conspired to create false identity documents for the children. Galindo later served federal prison time on charges of visa fraud and money laundering, but not trafficking. “You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo. “It’s not a crime.”

ROCKING THE CRADLE

Buying a child abroad is something most prospective parents want no part of. So, how can it be prevented? As international adoption has grown in the past decade, the ad hoc approach of closing some corrupt countries to adoption and shifting parents’ hopes (and money) to the next destination has failed. The agencies that profit from adoption appear to willfully ignore how their own payments and fees are causing both the corruption and the closures.

Some countries that send children overseas for adoption have kept the process lawful and transparent from nearly the beginning and their model is instructive. Thailand, for instance, has a central government authority that counsels birth mothers and offers some families social and economic support so that poverty is never a reason to give up a child. Other countries, such as Paraguay and Romania, reformed their processes after sharp surges in shady adoptions in the 1990s. But those reforms were essentially to stop international adoptions almost entirely. In 1994, Paraguay sent 483 children to the United States; last year, the country sent none.

For a more comprehensive solution, the best hope may be the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, an international agreement designed to prevent child trafficking for adoption. On April 1, 2008, the United States formally entered the agreement, which has 75 other signatories. In states that send children overseas and are party to the convention, such as Albania, Bulgaria, Colombia, and the Philippines, Hague-compatible reforms have included a central government authority overseeing child welfare, efforts to place needy children with extended families and local communities first, and limits on the number of foreign adoption agencies authorized to work in the country. The result, according to experts, has been a sharp decline in baby buying, fraud, coercion, and kidnapping for adoption.

In adopting countries, the convention requires a central authority—in the United States’ case, the State Department—to oversee international adoption. The State Department empowers two nonprofit organizations to certify adoption agencies; if shady practices, fraud, financial improprieties, or links with trafficking come to light, accreditation can be revoked. Already, the rules appear to be having some effect: Several U.S. agencies long dogged by rumors of bad practices have been denied accreditation; some have shut their doors. But no international treaty is perfect, and the Hague Convention is no exception. Many of the countries sending their children to the West, including Ethiopia, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, and Vietnam, have yet to join the agreement.

Perhaps most important, more effective regulations would strictly limit the amount of money that changes hands. Per-child fees could be outlawed. Payments could be capped to cover only legitimate costs such as medical care, food, and clothing for the children. And crucially, fees must be kept proportionate with the local economies. “Unless you control the money, you won’t control the corruption,” says Thomas DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services, which represents more than 200 international adoption organizations. “If we have the greatest laws and the greatest regulations but are still sending $20,000 anywhere—well, you can bypass any system with enough cash.”

Improved regulations will protect not only the children being adopted and their birth families, but also the consumers: hopeful parents. Adopting a child—like giving birth—is an emotional experience; it can be made wrenching by the abhorrent realization that a child believed to be an orphan simply isn’t. One American who adopted a little girl from Cambodia in 2002 wept as she spoke at an adoption ethics conference in October 2007 about such a discovery. “I was told she was an orphan,” she said. “One year after she came home, and she could speak English well enough, she told me about her mommy and daddy and her brothers and her sisters.”

Unless we recognize that behind the altruistic veneer, international adoption has become an industry—one that is often highly lucrative and sometimes corrupt—many more adoption stories will have unhappy endings. Unless adoption agencies are held to account, more young children will be wrongfully taken from their families. And unless those desperate to become parents demand reform, they will continue—wittingly or not—to pay for wrongdoing. “Credulous Westerners eager to believe that they are saving children are easily fooled into accepting laundered children,” writes David Smolin, a law professor and advocate for international adoption reform. “For there is no fool like the one who wants to be fooled.”

October 26, 2008

Woman Uncovers Secret And Meets Family


Woman Uncovers Secret & Meets Family

By Terry Hood, The News On 6
October 2008
http://www.newson6.com/global/story.asp?s=9231343
(click on the title of this post (above) to be linked directly to the News on 6 website, where you can view an inspiring video of the entire story)

OWASSO, OK -- Most of us grow up lucky enough to be surrounded by family, sure of our place in the world. But, for some, life is more complicated and sometimes full of secrets. An Owasso woman went on a quest to uncover her own past.

Tammy Franklin knows all about the burden of keeping secrets. She grew up with one. Her parents divorced when she was an infant. Her mother remarried and her stepfather legally adopted her. They did everything possible to make sure Tammy would never know.

It wasn't until she had a grown child of her own that the secret began to unravel. A military check alerted her to a discrepancy in her medical records, and her mother eventually told her the truth.

"Terrified. I was absolutely terrified," said Tammy Franklin.

Terrified, but determined, with the help of her 13-year-old son, Mark, Tammy began a quest to track down her biological father.

"For a year and a half, it was like an obsession. To the point almost that my family suffered, it was such an obsession for me," said Tammy Franklin.

Eventually, Tammy hired an online service who delivered another piece of devastating news. Tammy's father, who had lived within 10 miles of her, had recently died. But, she also got the names of other new relatives.

And then, her story got even stranger.

"I sent a certified letter to this uncle who unfortunately has suffered from a severe brain injury," said Tammy Franklin.

The letter went unanswered for two long months. Tammy says she gave up hope and literally went into a period of mourning.


"I had just kind of picked myself up from it and the telephone rings and it's my aunt. And, she said. She said, ‘this is your aunt and your dad knew about you and your family knew about you and we love you and we want to meet you,'" said Tammy Franklin.

That was July 4th weekend. Tammy soon met aunts, uncles, cousins and to her joy, two new brothers.

They haven't missed a day of talking since.

Tammy's experience has had such an impact on her life; she's turning it into a cause.

She's talking to state lawmakers about changing Oklahoma's adoption laws to make the records more accessible. And, it's not just sentimentality that's behind her effort. Tammy suffers from a rare auto-immune disease that's left her with chronic pain. It was years before doctors could make a diagnosis.

"It went on for 10 years. If they'd caught it even at eight years, I wouldn't be in the condition I am now. And, our dad had it," said Tammy Franklin.

But, Tammy Franklin doesn't spend much time these days worrying about what might have been. She's grateful for what she has.

"It's been a complete blessing. I mean it's been sent from God," said Tammy Franklin.

"I woke up Sunday morning and for the first time in my life, I felt like OK. Everything I'm supposed to have inside of me is here. And, I have it."

October 25, 2008

Do You Smell The Rain?


In Dallas, the doctor, walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. She was still groggy from surgery.

Her husband, David, held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news.
That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency Cesarean to deliver the couple's new daughter, Dana Lu Blessing.

At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature.

Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs. 'I don't think she's going to make it,' he said, as kindly as he could.
'There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one'
Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Dana would likely face if she survived.

She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.
'No! No!' was all Diana could say.

She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four.

Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away.

But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana.

Because Dana's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw', the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love. All they could do, as Dana struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl.

There was never a moment when Dana suddenly grew stronger.

But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there. At last, when Dana turned two months old, her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time.

And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero, Dana went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted.

Five years later, Dana was a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life.

She showed no signs whatsoever of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she was everything a little girl can be and more. But that happy ending is far from the end of her story.

One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Dana was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ball park where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing.
As always, Dana was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent. Hugging her arms across her chest, little Dana asked, 'Do you smell that?'
Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, 'Yes, it smells like rain.'

Dana closed her eyes and again asked, 'Do you smell that?'

Once again, her mother replied, 'Yes, I think we're about to get wet. It smells like rain.'

Still caught in the moment, Dana shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced,
'No, it smells like Him.

It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest.'

Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Dana happily hopped down to play with the other children.

Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along.

During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Dana on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.

Religion is Funny

How to tell if a Catholic is driving too fast


Jewish Olympic Swimmer



Church can be hilarious!










The woodpecker might have to go!

October 18, 2008

our hip, cool nun


'Our hip, cool nun'

CommunityFeature: 96-year-old Little Falls woman is one of the last Orphan Train survivors

by Lisa Peterson de la Cueva, Minnesota Women's Press

She stood in the entryway of the Franciscan Sisters Convent in Little Falls. Sister Justina Bieganek looked like a statue in an expectant pose, as much a part of the vestibule as the ridges along the stone vaulted ceiling.

Then she broke the stillness with a giggle, and didn't stop moving for the next five hours. She traipsed up a small flight of stairs, each sure step belying her 96 years. We landed in a private meeting room where she had laid out neat stacks of memorabilia on a Formica table, among them a three-ring binder labeled "Our Hip, Cool Nun."

Before we began our interview, Sister Justina asked me to write down my name. "Oh!" she cried. She raised both hands over her mouth, her eyes crinkling in girlish pleasure. "Oh, congratulations! Oh, my dear!" Barely able to speak through her excitement, she cupped her hands around mine and nearly whispered, "Peterson was Edith's name too!"

Edith Peterson was Sister Justina's birth name. Little Edith was just 22 months old when she was plucked from a New York City orphanage. The number 41 was tucked under the hem of her toddler-sized dress, and she was put on a train bound for a sleepy Midwestern town.

It would be 57 years before Sister Justina found out her birth name and learned why her mother abandoned her in a basket outside an orphanage.

The birth of foster care
Edith Peterson was born on January 16, 1912, to a Norwegian immigrant mother. Her New York-born father, a seaman, died just before her birth and left Edith's mother and older sibling without income. Three weeks after Edith was born, her mother found her way to the New York Foundling Hospital, where it was reputed the Sisters of Charity took in children. So many orphans were abandoned there that the nuns finally left a bassinet outside its doors with a sensor to alert them when a child arrived.

Nearly two years later, Edith Peterson became one of between 150,000 and 250,000 children (either orphans or whose parents could not care for them) who were shipped on trains from the East Coast to other parts of the United States. The "Orphan Trains," which ran between 1854 and 1929, were one of the largest social welfare experiments in American history.

It was situations like Edith's that worried Charles Loring Brace, a Calvinist minister in New York. By the mid 1800s, New York City was teeming with thousands of immigrant children who were forced to fend for themselves under squalid living conditions. So affected by what he saw, Brace founded the Children's Aid Society, which began the Orphan Train experiment.

According to Stephanie Haiar, curator of the National Orphan Train Complex, 3,258 orphans came to Minnesota through the Children's Aid Society between 1854 and 1910. The overall figure, she said, "is probably at least four or five thousand, if you figure in all the other organizations and the remaining 19 years of the program."

Two new families
In 1913 John and Mary Bieganek, Polish-American farmers with eight grown male children, arrived at the train station in Avon, Minn., to pick up their mail-order orphan. John Bieganek later told Edith that she toddled off the train and walked straight into the arms of the farmer, who had in his hands a receipt with the number 41, the same number sewn into the hem of Edith's dress.

Edith Peterson thus became Edith Bieganek, daughter of John and Mary. Sort of.

Along with the child, the Bieganeks received a document that read "Indenture." The system of adoption and indenture was ambiguous for many Orphan Train riders because the program was in large part a response to an evolving social crisis.

The Bieganeks treated Edith like a daughter until two years later, when Mary died of cancer at age 49. She left 4-year-old Edith behind in a family of grown men who didn't quite know how to care for her.

"These boys, they didn't know what to do with me!" Sister Justina said. "[My brother] Walter took it upon himself to change my clothes and put me to bed, and just take care of me."

While her brothers and father were affectionate, they didn't provide much structure. In fact they didn't think to enroll Edith in school until age 8, when her brother Joseph married a second-generation Polish woman who became Edith's third and final mother.

"As parents they were absolutely impeccable," Sister Justina said. "They were both good, good people. But you know, he was my brother, and now all of a sudden I had to call him 'father,' and I had to call her 'mother.' She insisted I not call her Rose." The tension furthered when Rose spoke exclusively to her husband in Polish and forced Edith to learn the language too. Rose and Joseph eventually had 13 children, which forced Edith into a caretaker role. She became an expert babysitter whose parents depended on her to help raise the younger children.

At age 16 Edith left her home for a boarding school run by the Franciscan Sisters in Little Falls. She was immediately drawn to the order, structure and routine. As soon as she arrived, Sister Justina said, "I thought somehow, 'I wish this were my home.'"

Four months after entering school Edith decided to become a Franciscan nun. A few years later she got her third name when she became Sister Justina Bieganek.

Finally, an identity
"I always had this nagging feeling of 'Where is my mother? How come I don't have a mother?' I had a lot of [anger]."

In 1969 she went to the New York Foundling Hospital. Combing through hordes of microfiche files, she wrote down verbatim the information she found on her birth certificate and other documents; it was information that soothed her anger.

"You're living in a vacuum because you don't know who you are. After '69 I started to breathe. I suddenly knew who I was," she said. Sister Justina began to tell her story to journalists, historians, school groups and other Orphan Train riders.

She will do so again on Oct. 18 when the St. Francis Convent holds its 48th Annual Orphan Train Rider meeting. In past reunions, there have been as many as 40 participants and as few as six. As this year's reunion approaches, many riders and family members know the drill. They come armed with photos and documents and swap stories while an occasional historian or writer tags along.

"When we get to our reunions, people tell stories of being viewed, which was very traumatic," Sister Justina explained. "Sometimes an adult would come up to an orphan and reach their hands into their mouth and check their teeth. ... So [the riders] will tell stories about that ..."

As she spoke, she flipped through her photo album. She picked out a picture taken at an Orphan Train reunion of herself and another rider from Woodbury. The picture of the two elderly women has a label with tidy typewriter font taped to the back in yellowed scotch tape.

It reads, "Ann Shrankler came to visit me in 2004. She told me, 'Now I can die in peace! I met one other orphan who shared my experience as an orphan. And now you are my sister.'"

Sister Justina looked up from the picture and smiled while shrugging her shoulders. "There were many of us, and then there were fewer of us, and soon there will be none."

About the Orphan Trains
An estimated 150,000 to 250,000 children were transported across the U.S. via "Orphan Trains" to new families between 1854 and 1929. Domestic abuse, industrialization and the large influx of immigrants contributed to the need to find homes for children. The system is still considered by many as the forerunner of modern foster care.

It was a controversial system. Some children found loving homes-others were used as cheap labor. The children were transported by train and paraded in front of potential families, where they were inspected as specimens-their teeth checked and muscle tone prodded. Some families wanted to adopt only one or two children, so siblings were often separated. Some of the children were passed from family to family, and it was not uncommon for them to run away from abusive families.

Laws to regulate interstate placement of children began to appear in 1887, although the Orphan Trains continued to run up until the Great Depression. Its peak years were from 1890 to 1900, with the program gradually tapering off after that. A variety of factors contributed to the end of the program, including the Great Depression, improved living conditions in New York City and refusal by the Midwestern states to accept children. Partly as a result of the Orphan Trains, today's foster care system emphasizes the placement of siblings together with biological families, or at least in the same area.

The nonprofit National Orphan Train Complex, Inc., maintains a physical museum in Concordia, Kansas, and provides educational resources and a speaker's bureau. Find its rich array of resources online at www.orphantraindepot.com.

Elvis' Sis?


ELVIS PRESLEY's estate has been hit with a new bombshell - a 46-year-old Texan woman insists she's the late rocker's sister.
Eliza Alice Presley claims to have the DNA tests that prove she's Vernon Presley's secret lovechild.
Presley states she was raised by a Texan couple after her birth mother, Florence Juanita Sharp, gave her up for adoption.
The divorced mother-of-four claims Elvis' father Vernon is her father.
Her representative, Donald Yates, reveals DNA tests carried out in Arizona match the genetic make-up of Elvis' cousin Donna.
He tells America's Globe, "I'm 99.99 per cent sure that Eliza Presley and Elvis Aaron Presley are half siblings."
As well as the scientific proof, Yates reveals his client has "sworn testimony from family members... relating to who her biological father is."
Eliza Alice Presley has filed papers in Memphis, Tennessee, claiming she's entitled to be "recognised as his daughter and allowed to inherit her statutory share of his estate".


Ind. woman seeking her roots lands in Ogden

Thursday, October 9, 2008
By SAM COOPER
Standard-Examiner staff

OGDEN -- Nearly 61 years after she was left for adoption at a New York City hospital, Indiana resident Rosemary Sorensen Hollis found her birth father, Orvil Mural Sorensen, buried in an unmarked grave at Ogden City Cemetery.

Now with some help from the public, she wants to get to know the man.

Hollis, now a grandmother herself, began a 1,500-mile sojourn to Ogden from Indiana last weekend with her husband in hopes of learning more about the father she never knew.

"Never did I ever suspect that my roots were out West," Hollis said in an e-mail before her visit.

"Needless to say, I am very interested in finding out all that I can about him and my Sorensen relatives."

The trip is the result of a search that began in 1992 with a scrap of information from the adoption agency.

"They only told me that I was born in a hotel in Manhattan and my birth mother had gone to the hotel with a soldier," she said.

Hollis said she's been able to piece together part of her family's story through an assortment of records she has collected over the years.

From what she has discovered, her father, known to be a rough-and-tumble kid from Ogden, joined the Army after a stint at a local reform school and met her mother while stationed near Welfare Island, N.Y.

It was in a hotel near there where Hollis was born May 2, 1947, three months premature. Hollis said her then-21-year-old father rushed with her and her mother in an ambulance to the New York Foundling Hospital following her birth.

She isn't sure what happened next, but apparently her father returned to military duty and her mother disappeared.

The only explanation Hollis has received is from the social services department at the hospital, which informed her that while her mother was recovering from labor, she received a visit from her upset mother, who said she couldn't bring the baby home.

"I was at the hospital for six months, and then my grandmother suggested I be sent to the adoption home," Hollis said.

Tracking down her mother has proven fruitless because she checked herself into the hospital under an alias, Hollis said.

Decades later, she was able to find her biological father's name on a baptismal certificate and traced him back to 859 Canyon Road in Ogden.

It was a eureka moment, she said.

"I can't begin to explain to you what finding the name of my dad has meant to me.

"I have searched for so many years. Unfortunately, due to my age and the fact that my father is now deceased, I realize that many of the older people are now gone."

Standing by her father's unmarked grave, Hollis said she had mixed feelings about her discoveries.

"I feel like I finally have found a root, a connection. Everyone needs to have that ... It makes me feel sad that I didn't know him," she said.

Orvil Mural Sorensen, called "Sarge" by friends, would be in his 80s if he were alive today.

Hollis said he worked at Defense Depot Ogden, was very active in CB radio circles and loved to camp in the Monte Cristo area. He also loved to collect records and ride his motorcycles.

She hopes to find anyone who may have known Sorensen, even secondhand, and might be willing to share memories of him.

"I just want people to understand that we're not looking for anything other than to get to know who he was and what he was about," Hollis said.

She said she plans to compile all the information she's learned about Sorensen into a scrapbook for her grandchildren.

"I want to be able to put everything together and eventually give it to them, so they can have it," she said.

Anyone with information about Orvil "Sarge" Sorensen is encouraged to call Hollis at (765) 432-7121 or e-mail her at indianahollis@AOL.com.

She said she plans to stay in Ogden until the end of this week.

Paths cross, lives change
-----------
By Aaron Wasserman/Daily News staff
Even after a 70-year separation, family bonds can be rekindled. Clara Brothers, an 80-year-old who hadn't known a relative since she was a girl, has proved this to be true.

Last January, Clara had a routine meeting with her social workers and the caretaker with whom she had lived the past 14 years.

Clara, 80, had been placed in Viola Michalik's Sutton home by the Milford office of the Kennedy-Donovan Center, a nonprofit agency founded by Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.'s family nurse that serves the developmentally disabled.

She said although she enjoyed living with Michalik, people at the meeting recalled, she wanted to move in with her own family.

The problem was, no one knew of any of Clara's living relatives.

Clara was separated from her eight siblings at the age of 10, when her father died and her mother was ill. All were sent to foster care or, like Clara, a state institution for the mentally disabled. Records said everyone else had died.

"Clara broke down and said, 'I really want my own family,' and I said, 'I can't give you your family,' because we were under the impression all her siblings had passed on," said Carol Rollins, a state service coordinator who's overseen Clara's care for nearly 16 years. "It ached in her heart to have her family."

Little did she know a long-lost niece was nearby.

Only a few months before, Lisa Gallagher, 40, started working at the center's Milford office. Gallagher works in the program that places mentally disabled adults in private homes.

Gallagher often heard her co-worker Julie White, Clara's social worker at the center, talk after that January meeting about Clara's living situation.

The last name Brothers, the same as her paternal grandmother's, struck Gallagher. She suggested to her supervisor, Sandy Karlson, that maybe she and Clara were related.

"I don't know if I was half-joking because I don't know anyone from my father's side, but Sandy said, 'Why don't you look at the file?"' Gallagher said, recalling a conversation over lunch.

Later that afternoon, Gallagher did.

It turned out one of Clara's brothers, Theodore, had the same name and birthdate as Gallagher's father. Gallagher quickly deduced she is Clara's niece. After 70 years separated from her family, Clara was found by a relative working in the same office that was helping care for her.

"There was more information on those couple of pages than I'd known about my father's family," Gallagher said, adding about her father: "He really wasn't open about what happened as a child."

She said she took the following weekend to digest the revelation. She talked to her sister and decided to introduce Clara to the rest of the family.

On March 21, at the Mandarin restaurant in Milford, everyone met. Gallagher had a collage of family photos in tow. As Clara entered the room, Karlson said, "she had her hands already out to take everyone in."

"I was happy to hug you," Clara told her niece last week, recalling the reunion at the Kennedy-Donovan Center's Milford office.

"One of the things I remember her saying was, 'Where's my people?' We got a kick out of that," Gallagher said. "She was instantly smiling."

"We were all in tears, it was heart-wrenching," Karlson said.

But it was also a trying reunion. Clara, naturally, wanted to know about her brother, Theodore, with whom she was raised in Worcester. He had died, and it was Gallagher's job to break the news.

"She said, 'Where's Teddy?' and I said, 'Teddy has passed on,"' Gallagher recounted. "She rubbed his picture and said, 'I thought about you all the time, Teddy, and prayed for you.' It was heartbreaking and, as nice as it was to meet, it was hard."

Heightening the mystery, it turned out Lisa Gallagher grew up in Wrentham, about a mile away from what is now known as the Wrentham Developmental Center, a state facility for the disabled, where her aunt had lived for many years. No one in Gallagher's family ever realized.

"If my father had known she was there, she never would've been there," Gallagher said of Clara.

With a new family, Clara started doing the things families do, going to birthday parties and other get-togethers. The search for Clara's new home continued.

Gallagher said she was scouting one option when, one weekend, her aunt visited her house in Plainville, saw a vacant bedroom and suggested she move in. Clara started living with her family again Aug. 8.

Clara said she loves living with her niece and gets along very well with Gallagher's two sons, who call her "Auntie Clara," a nickname she hasn't heard before. Gallagher said her sister takes their aunt shopping and to yard sales - a favorite activity.

"She's all over the place," Gallagher said.

Clara's case managers say the unexpected, almost unfathomable, fortuitous reunion has boosted the spirits of a woman who they already described as sweet, witty and gregarious. And it all happened around Clara's 80th birthday.

"She's opened up so much and talks so much more," said Rollins, the state service coordinator. "It's wonderful. She's so obviously happy."

And for Rollins and White, the case manager at the Kennedy-Donovan Center, Clara's reunion has been a joy so rare, they become emotional when talking about it.

"I can't be any more excited than I am about this," White said. "To have somebody who has not seen her family for so many years - it's been years and years and years to think you don't have a family - and at 80 years old, you have a family. It brings tears to my eyes."

Aaron Wasserman may be reached at 508-634-7546 or awasserm@cnc.com.

"Love Our Way"



A mother's heart-felt journey
Gretel Hunnerup

October 2, 2008

IMAGINE you received news that two of your children, adopted and lovingly-raised for eight years, had not been willingly relinquished by their birth mother but stolen from her while she slept.

This shocking, true discovery was made by Canberra mother of eight, Julia Rollings.

She could have swept it under the carpet; after all, Akil and Sabila had no clear memories of the event and were now happily enmeshed in their Australian family, with strong community ties.

Love our way by Julia Rollings, Harper Collins, rrp $32.99

Instead, she embarked on a courageous mission to reunite her son and daughter with their lost mother, Sunama.

In Love Our Way, Rollings recounts the journey she made with Akil and Sabila to Sunama's home in impoverished Chennai, and the incredibly poignant experiences that followed.

This is a story of honesty, family and the capacity of love, but Rollings also tells it in the hope that it may highlight the human toll of child trafficking.

All In The Family


Breaking bread and barriers

by: BILL SHERMAN World Religion Writer
10/18/2008

Local Christians, Jews and Muslims gather to dine.

What do a Jewish couple, a Christian couple and a Muslim couple — all strangers — talk about when they meet for dinner in a private home?

Anything and everything, it turns out.

Common Tables is a program developed last spring to foster understanding, friendship and communication between people of the three Abrahamic faiths.
Fourteen groups, or "tables," have been meeting in Tulsa since June. Most of them consist of three couples, each of a different faith. One group is four women. Another includes a gay Jewish couple.
Vicky Langston, a member of Boston Avenue United Methodist Church, where the program was born, said its purpose is to give people of different faiths an opportunity to talk together about their faiths.
Sharing meals in the hospitality of homes allows people to "see each other not just as symbols of a religion but as real people who are neighbors and fellow citizens of the world," she said.
Not all the talk is about religion.
"We don't tell them what to talk about," Langston said. "We just want them to get together. But questions about their faith naturally come up, especially during Ramadan, or the High Holy Days.
"Just to be in someone else's home, of another faith and another culture, allows you to connect with people on a different level," she said.
"It's been wonderful, I get wonderful feedback."
Allison Moore, who with her husband, Sean, hosted an Open Table on Saturday night, said the conversation was lively, ranging from business, world politics and the financial bailout to matters of faith.
"We're in discovery mode," Moore said. "We came in curious, and we're able to ask questions. It's been very enlightening."
Also in that group were Bob and Lynn Russell, who are involved in a Christian prison ministry and hosted the group in August.
"It was wonderful, just like being at one of your best friend's homes," Lynn Russell said. "We're all very different, but we're all very similar.
"What I'd like everyone to realize is that we're all the same people. Sometimes we let our religion put barriers between us. How we believe should not be a barrier between us.
"This has been one of the most incredible and the most rewarding experiences I've had in a long time."
Bob Russell said he was getting a better understanding of Muslims.
"When you to sit down and break bread, you learn a lot," said Bob Russell. "They're concerned about the same things we are, getting the kids raised, how things are going in this country."
Itai Lavi, Tulsa's Israeli emissary, took advantage of the dinner at his house to serve food that is part of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year celebration, and to explain some of the New Year blessings.
"We assume we know a lot about other people's religion and culture, but we don't," Lavi said.
"It's a great experience to see the daily culture and life of others."
Other benefits of the program, Lavi said, were to experience "warm and open hearts, and to learn how close we really are, and how similar to each other we really are."
Omer Akdeniz, a Muslim from Turkey, and his wife, Sharon Adkeniz, served their guests an eggplant dish common in Turkey, tabouli and Turkish tea.
"It was a very lovely experience," Akdeniz said. "Everybody was comfortable and relaxed."
The program originated with the Interfaith Concerns Work Area at Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. The Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice signed on as sponsor.
The 72 participants in Open Tables met in June at the Al-Salam Mosque in Tulsa, where they were divided into groups of six. Most of them did not know the members of their group.
They agreed to meet for meals three times during the next six months in each of their homes, to respect the dietary requirements of their guests and to avoid proselytizing.
Another round of meetings will begin in January. There is a waiting list for participation.
Langston said participants are required to sign up through their own faith community, and not as individuals.
After the Tulsa program was launched, Langston said, she learned of a similar program in Denver called Common Tables.
A dinner program created at Rice University in Houston two years ago is expecting to draw thousands of people in a directed discussion about the role of faith in their lives.
The Amazing Faiths Dinner Dialogues will be held Nov. 13 in 10 cities, including Oklahoma City.
The Abrahamic religions
Jews, Christians and Muslims all take their inspiration from Abraham, a Semitic nomad who, according to the biblical narrative, lived several thousand years ago in the Middle East.
Abraham was born in Ur, then a major city in southern Iraq, and migrated toward Palestine at God’s direction.
The Israelite King David and Jesus of Nazareth are his direct descendants.
He is revered as a man of faith who gained righteousness by believing in God.
The name Abraham means “father of many.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*This story really caught my eye ~ amazing irony and significance on so many levels when you think about our human-relatedness!
Little did I know that I actually hailed from a "birth" family filled with just such diversity. I don't have to sit down at a table with strangers to experience such a unique and wonderful warmth ~ I am blessed to sit down with my own flesh & blood!
My maternal heritage is mostly English & Scottish, but for almost 20 yrs now I have been blessed to spend many special days with my nMom's sister and her family. She has two kids who I adore ~ I watched them grow up before my eyes, and I am so thankful for those years of laughter and fun we all had when they were children. They are both out of high-school now and finding their way in life. Both of my young cousins are of middle-eastern decent. My aunt is married to a wonderful man who came to America from Iraq as a young man to finish his education ~ long before most of us had even heard of such a country or the drama which now dominates our world. I've cherished many years of Christmas get-togethers when my uncle would share the simple little games he enjoyed growing up in Iraq, intertwined with our more "American" games of "Uno" and "charades".
Not only do I have this family-connection, but also my wonderful paternal heritage of being Jewish. My nGrandfather's family were Jewish immigrants to America, and even though he married my "Gentile" Grandmother (as she called herself lol), she used to tell me how warm and accepting they were to her as part of their family. I will always cherish those hours I shared sitting at their kitchen table, hearing these family stories. If I hadn't searched and found them when I was young, I would have missed out on this important part of my very history. I may have never known. Never known that I drove on the same city streets as my entire natural family growing up. That I shopped at the same stores and attended the same schools. It is sometimes mind-blowing to think about.

Thank you, God, for bringing us back together.

Thank you for revealing such a beautiful heritage, both naturally and spiritually.

October 16, 2008

A Shout-Out



(Here's a "shout-out" to the myriads of "Deer Burfmudder" letters waiting out there...just a little something you might wanna consider)

Fake babies ease women's anxiety, sadness
Dr. Gail Saltz looks at the psychology of adults who "play" with reborn dolls

Can an inanimate doll — one so realistic as to look alive — really replace a baby? In many ways, such a notion feels like a page from the Stepford Wives or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s a disturbing thought to have something un-real take the place of a real human — which is why such a concept is often the basis for fantasy or horror tales.
The reality, however, is that people often face sorrowful issues in their lives. In many cases, they use denial to cope with the loss and the resulting anxiety.
For those who don’t want to have a commitment, {or who can't have a "real" baby}, a doll baby is “better”. A doll baby comes with zero responsibility. It is an interesting transitional object — similar to the blankie a child drags around, or the stuffed animal she keeps in her backpack. It signifies a connectedness to home and to mother. In this case, the transition is between the real or imagined child they lost and the fact that life no longer contains that baby for them. For some women, such a transitional object eases them into ways of finding more external methods of dealing with their needs of caretaking and loving a being who loves them back. It is the concretized fantasy of getting unconditional love.
Unlike with a real baby, a lifelike doll comes with no real-world mess — no diapers, no smells, no feeding, no crying. These babies, unlike real ones, do not grow up into toddlers. And as soon as the toddler toddles away, there’s a whole different psychic dynamic. You now have a creature growing, changing, moving toward independence. It will, clearly, need you less and less. Entwined with a doll baby is the knowledge it will never grow up, never leave you, never disappoint you, never say ‘I hate you!” It will never be a complex being unto itself. In that way, you, the "mother," will never experience loss.
There’s something else about babies. For many women, whether or not they want children, a baby personifies their genital prowess. It symbolizes their femininity and female power.
If you walk around with a baby — or a doll that looks like a baby — everyone stops to admire it. The word “cute” was made for babies! So having one produces positive attention, which is often enjoyable, like when you are dressed up and people admire you. Exhibition is a part of all of us, so it is natural to want attention. For a woman who is struggling to feel good about herself, the baby can provide reassurances in the form of others admiring your “progeny.”
This kind of lifelike doll is not for everyone, of course. But, if someone feels bereft, it could be another tool that is oddly helpful. There are many ways a person may find to cope with loss, sadness and anxiety, and these reborn dolls offer one solution.


NEW YORK - Forgive Kerry and Desmond Lyons if they sometimes mix up their sons' names. After all, they're brand new and look alike.

The rare set of identical triplets conceived without fertility treatments left a Manhattan hospital Tuesday for their suburban home.

Tiny newborns Kevin, Declan and Cormac Lyons rolled out of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in style, wearing matching blue hats, asleep in a stroller that looked something like a stretch limo.

"We never thought we'd be leaving with three healthy, beautiful, amazing baby boys," Kerry Lyons said as she beamed and wiped away a tear. "We are just so, so grateful, and so moved and so happy."

Twins, triplets and quadruplets have become much more common over the past few decades because of fertility treatments, but identical triplets are still rare. Some scientists estimate they occur in as few as 1 in 100 million births. Others peg the number higher, at 1 in 500,000 or even 1 in 64,000.

On nearby Long Island, another set of identical triplet boys was born in February at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset; their parents used in vitro fertilization.

Whatever the odds, Lyons and her husband, Desmond, said they were thrilled with the outcome, even if they can't tell the boys apart yet.

"My suggestion was to put tattoos on them," joked their father. For now, they'll wear ID bracelets.

The triplets were born Friday by Caesarean section. Their father is a lawyer. Their mother works for an Internet advertising firm. The couple already has two children, ages 2 and 4.

Kerry Lyons said she gained 50 pounds during her 36-week pregnancy. A lot of that was baby; combined, the youngsters weighed a little more than 16 1/2 pounds at birth.

At home in Irvington, N.Y., the babies will share a crib for the time being, to keep them cozy.

As for the prospect of managing five children during an economic downturn, their mother said she isn't worried.

"I think this is God's way of turning me into an easygoing type," she said.

The most famous case of identical multiple births was that of the Dionne quintuplets, born in 1934 to in the small Canadian town of Callander, Ontario. At the time, they were the only known quintuplets to survive more than a few days, and the infants created a worldwide sensation.

The provincial government separated them from their impoverished parents and put in a specially built hospital — called Quintland — where over the years millions of tourists viewed them through one-way glass.

One sister, Emilie, died in 1954; another, Marie, died in 1970. The three other sisters eventually sued over the way they had been treated as children and received a $2.8 million settlement. Yvonne died in 2001, leaving just Annette and Cecile.

October 14, 2008

"I'd Given Up Hope..."


George Hall, reunited with his family aged 90. Photograph: Henry Browne

'I'd given up hope of finding my mother'
George Hall was adopted in 1922, aged four. He had always hoped to
track down his biological family, but at 90 was living alone with no
relatives left. Then a letter arrived ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/13/family-healthandwellbeing

The Guardian,
Monday October 13 2008

I was put up for adoption in 1922 at the age of four, before official
adoption records began. My mother, Margaret Allen, had been 19 when
she'd had me, outside of marriage, and she was forced to give me up
when she met and married a first world war veteran. All I ever knew
about my father was that he and my mother met and courted during the
war. I always assumed that he returned to the front and got killed but
whether that's true or not I will never know.

My adoptive parents were strict, but they looked after me well and
treated me as their own. They sent me to a Catholic school in
Stratford, east London, fed me, clothed me and gave me toys.
Eventually, I found out that they'd had their own son. He had been
sent out to get a bottle of lemonade and was run over and killed by a
horse and cart. In some ways I think I was a replacement for him.

As much as my adoptive parents wanted me to love them, I knew they
were not my real mother and father, and I resented them for it.
Occasionally, one of them would ask me to sit on their lap and read a
comic but I would want to run a mile. When I was 13, I rummaged
through my adoptive father's papers and found my adoption certificate,
which only made me feel more unwanted.

My adoptive parents seemed to have few friends, but this was partly
due to the number of times we moved house around east London. I later
found out that this was to stop my mother from finding me when her
husband died in 1928 of his old war wounds.

After I left school at 14, I went through a series of jobs before
joining up as a Royal Marine in 1940 to fight in the second world war,
the same year that I met my wife Joan. I was one of the lucky ones - I
came back from the war, and when I was demobbed in 1944, Joan and I
went to live in Rainham, east London. I went back to my job as a
machinist at a paper company, and in 1945 we had our first and only
child, Barbara. It was an emotional moment for me when she was born,
and around that time I started thinking about trying to trace my own
mother. I'd always spoken to my wife about it, but in those days it
was not advisable to go around talking to people about illegitimate
children - it was the sort of thing that could easily have broken up
marriages. To have had a child out of wedlock was a sin and a
disgrace.

The problem was that I had very little to go on. All I had was a
lasting memory of going to a wedding as a young boy in Limehouse,
where my mother had lived. For some reason I had it set in my mind
that the person who got married that day was my mother. So I went up
to Limehouse and tracked down the house where the wedding had been
held.

By an extraordinary stroke of luck the woman who answered the door
remembered the wedding. She said the person who got married had been a
twin and a teacher, but she had no idea where she now lived. I went to
the local newsagent and asked if there was anyone by the name of Snell
(my mother's married name) living nearby. And indeed, after knocking
on a couple of doors, I was eventually directed down the road to some
prefabs.

By the time I arrived to find a woman putting washing out on a line, I
had pretty much convinced myself that I was going to find my mother.
But when I explained who I was looking for she said, "Oh, no, that's
not me. I have had no children like that." I even asked her if she was
certain, I was that disappointed. I had no one to turn to and, as far
as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I gave up hope of finding
my mother, but the desire to find out about her has remained with me
for the rest of my life.

Years later, in 1992, my wife contracted cancer. She was a fighter and
I am proud to say that I looked after her until her last day in 1994.
She had always said she wanted to live until she was 70 - or three
score years and ten as she said - and she got her wish. My life became
very difficult for a period, but eventually I made an effort to get
out of the house, and that was when I met Rita. Although you never
stop grieving for someone, you have to move on. Rita helped me to do
that and we enjoyed a lot of good times together. But casting a shadow
over those years was the fact that only two years after my wife's
death, my daughter Barbara was also diagnosed with cancer. In a cruel
twist of fate Rita was also diagnosed with the disease and died in
October 2004. After battling for 10 years, Barbara passed away in
January the following year.

We all think our children should survive us, and all I could think was
that I was the one who should have died. I suffered from panic attacks
and used to kick up such a stink that the neighbours would have to
call the doctor round to give me tablets to quieten me down.

Soon after, what my doctor had thought was arthritis turned out to be
a burst appendix. At the age of 87, it was more than I could take. I
wanted to die and - in my more delirious moments - I said exactly
that. Without some friends who helped me through that period, I am
sure I would not be here today.

Then, out of the blue in early 2006, I received a letter. It was from
a cousin called Rodney on my adoptive parents' side who was
researching his family tree and wanted to meet me. We ended up
becoming good friends and Rodney agreed to help me try to trace my
mother using my adoption certificate. He'd had so many difficulties
tracing his own family, though, that I did not get my hopes up.

One day, only a couple of months ago now, Rodney phoned me sounding
excited and said he had good news. He had discovered that my mother,
Margaret, had married again in 1935 and what's more, she'd had three
children.

I was flabbergasted to think there was someone out there who was a
living connection to my mother.

A couple of days later, Rodney phoned again. He said, "Guess what
George, I've been talking to your nephew, Timothy." I nearly fell out
of my chair. "He was a bit aghast when he heard that he had an uncle,
but he has agreed to talk to his father," Rodney continued. "His name
is David and he lives in Rutland." Obviously finding out that your
mother had an illegitimate child when she was a teenager can come as a
bit of a surprise, so when Timothy told David about me he was a little
sceptical at first. But he rang round his relatives and an aunt
admitted to him that Margaret had revealed the existence of her long-
lost son before she died.

David agreed he would come down from Rutland the following weekend and
before I knew it, my long lost half-brother was standing at my door.
We both have a bit of our mother's Greek looks about us so it was
obvious we were related. He dived in and clasped me and we both got
emotional.

We shared our histories and David told me a great deal about what sort
of person my mother was. She was apparently very caring. After her
second marriage in 1935 she had retrained as a psychiatric nurse. All
the time we were talking, sitting side by side, he would not let go of
my hand.

We also discovered that we had the same sense of humour, and before
the day was out he not only gave me a photo of my mother but a lock of
her hair too. To never know what your mother looks like and then, at
the age of 90, to be given a photo of her is a feeling I cannot put
into words. Before he left I asked him, "David, this is not just going
to be a one-off is it?" To my relief he assured me it wasn't.

Finding my family has lifted me up. When you live in a small
retirement flat on your own it makes all the difference in the world
to know you have family outside the four walls around you. I have
something to think about and plans to make. If I want to talk to
someone, I can phone them. I've got a laptop now and have learned to
email, which is useful because I have relations all over the place to
catch up with, including another half-brother in Australia called
Peter. His son has just had a boy so there's another family member to
think of.

Some people say it's a shame we were not reunited all those years ago,
that it's such a waste. I say better late than never.