Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Adoption Conference / NAC update

Get yourself a cup of coffee and sit down to read the presentations that were given at last week's East Africa Adoption Conference.

To quickly summarize what I took out of my reading last night is they are trying to modify the adoption program to assist with the adoption of more boys. Girls are preferred in domestic adoption in Kenya (due to inheritance/cultural reasons), and currently girls are only permitted to be adopted by single females. (Although, we have seen medical exceptions.) It looks like they may be changing the ruling on the single female adoptions to allow the adoption of boys as well. Good news!

Another subject I was happy to see was the presentation given about attachment. As adopting parents in the Western World, we read and read and take classes on this. However, this is a fairly new concept in Africa, and I don't mean 'attachment' in itself is new - I mean education and attachment therapy. One example would be their preference for the child to have their own bed, and how we as parents feel like we have to 'skirt' around this issue, because we 'co-sleep' with our children to build attachment.

In other good news, I have to make an Edit to my last post. I gave the wrong link for the Gazette. The issues are posted to the web frequently. The link for the updated issues are here. I cannot currently get this link to work, but I do know it was working before, so I believe they may be doing maintenance on the page.

Nothing has been published about the NAC yet, but we are told to watch for the November 29th issue, this Friday.

Hopefully, this is week will mark the end of this delay, and you all can get back to actively 'waiting'. Adoption does have a way of fine tuning ones patience. I don't know about you, but 2012 was the year I discovered my first grey hair. It's fitting I suppose.

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