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Their Stories

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My oldest sister is in college, just a few short courses from degree. She's been there awhile and I've watched - or listened long distance on the phone, rather - through the years as she's learned things that have swayed her softly in new directions. A light turns on and grows brilliant and illuminates yet more of the path she reaches to follow.

And now she's doing a research paper. Not just any paper, but one about something that I know something about. It's a paper on international adoption, and on the rights of children. It's a research paper that will tell the world in a way my adopted daughter's story and of the stories of thousands upon thousands of little children. How they came to this country as so many other immigrants did. With little more than the shirts on their backs and a dream of something too wonderful to describe.

And it will tell the story of an even greater number of little children who have not yet crossed that ocean.

Today, there will be a newborn baby abandoned at a hospital because his mother is not married. A brother and sister will go to an orphanage because their father can not find a job. A Chinese infant will be left in a train station simply because she is a girl in a country where families can only have one child and where boys bring more honor to the family. A six-year-old boy will try to speak through a crudely repaired cleft lip. A baby will lie on her back in a crib with her head flattened from many days of lying there just like this, staring out of a far-away window and developing rickets because there is no sunshine. An African child will lose a limb in a battle against druglords that will also take his parents.

Today, an orphanage worker in Ukraine will hand wash a load of disposable diapers so that they can be used again, tied to a baby with twine now that the tape is long gone. A developmentally delayed four year old in Russia will be given a diagnosis that sends her to an institution for the mentally retarded, to live out the rest of her short life. A Haitian woman will be told that there's not enough room in the orphanage for her starving son. She will be told that she can bring him back when a family is found. If he lives that long.