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.