The Taraz Ten
Yes, I am back. Contain your excitement, please. I was away on a super secret mission to ensure that Christine O’Donnell wins the Republican primary for Senator. Needless to say, the mission was a success, and when Christine wins in little over a month, you will all thank me.
I will be delving back into our local politics shortly. But first, I wanted to pass along and highlight a horrible story concerning a friend of mine that was featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday. Jeremy Meyer and his wife Becky Compton are one of eight families who have spent the better part of the last year held hostage in Taraz, Kazakhstan while waiting to adopt their children. Indeed, Becky is still there.
But what has happened so far to Becky Compton, Jeremy Meyer, and the 16-month-old they call Noah Aldanysh Compton-Meyer in the mountain-ringed city of Taraz has been anything but routine.
It is there, about 6,350 miles from home, that Meyer, 40, and Compton, 39, have spent most of the last 7 1/2 months as Noah learned to walk, ate his first banana – and became a pawn in a battle with Kazakh officials who have blocked what the couple expected to be a routine adoption.
Compton, a psychology professor at Haverford College, remains in Taraz, spending three hours a day with Noah at an orphanage while fighting the Kazakhstan bureaucracy. Her husband, a labor lawyer with a Center City firm, returned four weeks ago to an empty house on Haverford’s campus and the possibility that Noah might never arrive at the freshly painted, toy-filled room that has been waiting for him for nearly a year. […]
Since January, government officials in the region have abruptly rejected adoptions by seven foreign families – another is pending – leaving in limbo the families and the 10 orphans they seek to adopt. The families call them the “Taraz Ten.”
Besides the growing resistance of many countries to giving up their children to foreign adoptions, the much-publicized death in January of tabloid celebrity Casey Johnson may have played a role, adoption advocates speculate. The fast-living heiress had adopted a daughter from the Taraz orphanage where Noah lives.
“Attitudes toward international adoptions are changing, absolutely,” said Leonette Boiarski of the Pearl S. Buck Welcome House, the Perkasie adoption agency that arranged the boy’s adoption. “Countries want to be able to take care of their children.”
And separating a toddler from two people who already love him and will care for him and raise him throughout his life is supposedly the Kazakh method of “taking care of their children.” No, it is punishing the child (who will be forced to live in the orphanage for the rest of his childhood) and the parents (Jeremy and Becky and the nine other parents involved) for something they didn’t do.
I encourage you to read the full article. It is heartbreaking. And it is also heartbreaking that there is not much we can do as bystanders in this story but spread the word. Join the cause. Maybe the Kazakhs can be embarassed into doing the right thing if enough people know about this.
sad
Being adopted myself I can understand Jeremy’s & Becky’s need but Noah has it all over my sorrows. As much as I am disinclined to acknowledge organized religion, I’ll take this to the church on Sunday maybe get the holy rollers to do some good for a change. We are talking about a life after all.
(And yes, I will use the church anyway I see fit or the state for that matter.You should see what I can do with Sudafed)
Throughout this ordeal, I am sure they have turned to God or whatever higher power they believe in. But this is one of those situations that make you think that either there is no God or he is one stupid violent evil asshole.
A very, very sad situation. But just one correction – they haven’t been “held hostage” by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyone considering international adoption needs to get a cold-shower reality check before heading overseas. A lot of the adoption agencies here in the U.S. paint a happy-happy-joy-joy picture, and prospective parents don’t realize that they’re going to have to navigate a ton of cultural, legal, religious and linguistic barriers. Adoption is never simple, in any form.
I beg to differ. From what Jeremy has told me, the courts delayed and delayed their decision from January of this year until about June, when they put the adoption on an indefinite hold with no legitimate reason. The investigation into their fitness as parents was already complete, and thus there was no reason for the delay. I call that holding them hostage.
And you’d be right. Except for the fact that you’re wrong.
Hotage:
– a person held by one party in a conflict as a pledge pending the fulfillment of an agreement
– a person taken by force to secure the taker’s demands
There are no hostages here.
Know what anon–this is an extremely emotional issue. Not a time to go get all semantical on DelDem. So quit diverting from the real struggle of getting this adoption finalized and offer either support, direction or some answers.
I don’t know DelDem–I remember a while back when people could have cared less about Darfur–all of a sudden SAVE DARFUR t-shirts started showing up, and next thing you know people started looking up Darfur to see where the heck it even is–and then all of a sudden America cared. No doubt, if there is adoption involved, we Americans might get moving faster…..I’m really sorry…and so late to the info.. That darn liberal media.
I kind of thought the same as anon. Good thing I read the whole article. Considering that part of the world (Kazakhstan), I don’t think anon’s snippy remark was totally out of line. Until I read the article, and got a few grafs down, I still though they were being held hostage.
That being said, Welcome back, DelDem. You been hanging with the Lady O’Donnell, too?
Off topic comments will be deleted as spam.
Does this mean I’m being held hostage by the State of Delaware when I have to wait five hours in the DMV?
I’m not equating the horrible times that this couple has gone through with getting a license renewed, of course. Just demonstrating that one person’s emotional semantics are another person’s hard facts, and that we need to be careful in what we say.
All adoption is fraught, and international adoption even more so. I’m sorry for all concerned.
It’s not a hostage situation though. Calling it that trivializes real hostage taking, and over-simplifies the balance we have yet to find between meeting the needs of children everywhere and making them into commodities.
You can love someone without getting title. Ask any teacher or foster parent.