Monthly Archives: May 2007

 
News

The culture of being

200705_adopt2.jpgTransnational adoptees come of age and search for home.


Jennifer Cerami garnered a flirty smile from the guard at the Colombian consulate in midtown Manhattan. She was 27, with dark eyes and curtain of long hair. Around her in the waiting room sat a scattering of Colombians with official business back home. It was her first visit, in August of 2005, and Cerami looked uncertain, but not out of place. She cradled a stack of old papers and photographs.

When her number was called, Cerami leaned in to the window, whispering.

“I was adopted in Colombia.”

“Don’t worry,” the consular officer told her, leaning in from the other side. “We all have secrets.”

Like many adoptees, Cerami’s story has several beginnings. One of these is with Linda and Michael Cerami, a young couple from Lindenhurst, Long Island, a blue-collar community of single-family homes and above-ground pools. A high fever had damaged Linda’s fallopian tubes. Michael had lupus, which made domestic adoption difficult. So Linda began to look for a newborn overseas.

Since then, every April, on Jennifer’s birthday, Linda told her daughter this story.

“We wanted a baby very badly,” Linda would say. “And we had to go very far to find you, all the way to a country in South America. I put in the papers, and nine months later, the call came telling us that a beautiful baby girl was waiting for us in Bogotá. You had been left on the doorsteps of the orphanage. Your father and I flew down. No, we never met your mother. But we met the woman who took you in. She led us in to a room with rows and rows of bassinets, and said, ‘Guess who your daughter is?’ Well I walked down the row right past you. But your father stopped there in front of your crib and started crying. And that’s how we were blessed with a wonderful daughter, who is you.”

Jennifer’s adoption was a big event in the closely-knit neighborhood. The Heinzes and the Duffys brought their children to the Cerami front yard for the baby’s arrival, and their daughters — Teresa, Sabrina and Rebekah — became Jennifer’s life-long friends. Summers were games of hide-and-seek and Red Rover, lemonade stands, collecting fireflies. “You wouldn’t have found anything Colombian in our house,” Cerami says. “Nothing.”

Cerami thought of herself as white but there were things every now and then that didn’t jibe. When in second grade other children wrote “basketball” and “butterfly” for words that begin with B, she chose “Bogotá.” While they burnt to red in the sun, Cerami merely darkened. By the time she was ready for prom, Cerami could see the irony of choosing Rodrigo, the only other Latino she knew, for a date.

At Boston College things began to get perplexing for Cerami. She was recruited to the Latino student union, OLAA, though she spoke no Spanish. At a meeting of AHANA, a campus minority group for Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans and African Americans, the leader played “I Believe I Can Fly,” then gave a speech Cerami calls “don’t let the white man bring me down.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Cerami says about storming out of the meeting. “The white man raised me.”

During her second year she moved into the romance language dorm on campus, and studied some Spanish. For a school publication, she wrote an article called “What kind of Latina am I?” “I love my mother dearly,” it reads, “but she raised me as she was raised — Italian.”

Taking the country out of the children

Last year, the U.S. State Department issued immigrant visas to over 20,000 foreign-born orphans, up from roughly 2,000 in 1969. Nearly 200,000 of the 1.6 million adopted minors living in the U.S. are foreign born. Today, exchanging children is a $1.4 billion industry, with travel and adoption agencies, visa wallahs and psychologists to fill every available economic niche.

Inter-country adoption flows in the wake of foreign war and poverty. Developed nations sheltered Koreans after the Korean war. Romanians and Russians followed the fall of Ceausescu and Communism in the early nineties. China’s one-child policy bolstered its top ranking among donor countries in the last decade. But as China’s supply levels off, Ethiopia, Liberia and other African nations are now opening up. In Latin America, and Colombia in particular, the orphan boom came in the wake of civil conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s, which means the largest group of Latino adoptees like Cerami is currently coming of age.

Still, modern international adoption has only been going on for 50 years. It remains an unfinished social experiment, bred from compassion, infertility and post-war economic divides. The legality, propriety and ethics of transnational adoption — its effect on parents, children and societies — is still hotly contested. What began as an idea about “saving kids” has turned into an acute expression of a global society. New laws, such as the Hague Adoption Convention, designed to protect children from trafficking, are allowing transnational adoptees greater access to their pasts. Both cosmopolitan and provincial, adoptees magnify the broader changes in the way we answer the basic question of where we come from.

The biggest development in the history of transnational adoption, though, is the death of the myth of a “clean break” from biological and cultural roots. Today, agencies encourage adoptive parents to foster multiple identities, through organized “culture camps” or sponsored trips home. “Cultural citizenship” spurs South American-themed wallpaper, dress-up clothes, and peculiar show-and-tell moments. As cultural anthropologist Toby Alice Volkman describes in the academic journal Social Text, transnational adoption “forges new, even fluid, kinds of kinship and affiliation on a global stage.” In other words, transnational adoptees, with their socially-constructed identities, are the avant-garde of the present global age.

Jerri Wegner, who has three adopted Colombians of her own, helps educate new families on managing their children’s identity. “I tell parents,” she says, “that we have to take our children out of Colombia in order to bring them home, but we never have to take Colombia out of our children.” Her agency, Friends of FANA, organizes Spanish-language camps in Colombia, and country-themed gatherings in upstate New York, where kids are fed Colombian food and encouraged to play soccer wearing Colombia’s yellow national team jersey.

Hollee McGinnis, a sociologist at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute who studies identity in adoptees, wonders whether this is the best approach. She argues that “culture camp” may unnecessarily complicate the development of a healthy identity. Her research describes two layers of culture that every adoptee has. The first is an “external” layer of food, attire, language and history — things anyone with a little curiosity can pick up. But the second layer of culture is more elusive: “the culture of being,” which can only be acquired by living it. “It’s how you walk, interpret the world, your internal values,” McGinnis says. “Most adoptees lose that.”

A shifting sense of home

The Colombian in Cerami’s face is visible, but she moves like a girl from Long Island, with a wide, forward-pressing gait. These days, Cerami works as an analyst at Ann Taylor’s online marketing division, in Midtown. Before that, she did a stint on the floor for Sephora. She squeezes appointments in before racing off to the New York Sports Club, then heads home to a Lower East Side one-bedroom where her open laptop chirps with instant messages. She talks to her mother every day. “I had fights with my mother just like any teenager,” she says, “but now she’s my best friend.” And still, Cerami holds on to a desire “to be from some place.”

Like for many adoptees, Cerami’s search began with documents. Her first came in a DHL envelope, just a week after her visit to the consulate: a birth certificate. “Not a mystery solved,” she says, “but more like answers to questions I didn’t realize I had.” Her own name is Constanza Cruz. She had not been left on a doorstep.

That winter, Cerami got in touch with her orphanage in Colombia. A friend’s wedding in South America had given her an excuse to stop off in Bogotá, the first time any Cerami had returned to Colombia since Jennifer was three months old. Through a contact at the consulate, Cerami sent out an announcement on Colombian radio asking Constanza Cruz’s mother to call, but nobody responded. Colleagues at Cerami’s office, who had been following her revelations, offered donations for the orphanage, which Cerami planned to visit. Come Christmas, Linda drove her adopted daughter to the airport.

“I’m afraid I’m not going to feel,” Cerami told her mother in the car. “I’m afraid I’m going to go down to this country and be completely not affected by what I see. My life is not going to change. This isn’t going to have a connection with me, and what does that mean then?”

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A man brings a spare bike home from the repair shop in Candelaria, a town on the road from San Diego de los Baños. October 1999. (Alastair Smith)
San Diego de los Baños
Commentary

Alone in the Forest

Discovering the kindness of strangers in Cuba.

By Lita Wong
A man brings a spare bike home from the repair shop in Candelaria, a town on the road to San Diego de los Baños. October 1999. Alastair Smith

First in a two-part series. Click here for the second part.

A truck had dropped me off at a crossroads. But instead of driving away, the well-meaning driver was still trying to tell me something. Probably, “No cars are coming. You’re in the middle of nowhere. Are you crazy? What are you doing, little lady?”

I got the gist, even though I didn’t speak Spanish. I started walking, and as the distance between us grew, I could hear him yelling that maybe this was a bad idea, and he motioned for me to get back into the truck. He honked again.

But I kept on walking. No time for debate.

I passed a man wearing a suit and a felt hat, who was also headed for San Diego de los Baños, a town known for its thermal baths. He was just standing there, waiting in the middle of nowhere, as if it were a bus stop. But there was no bus stop. No car or another person in sight.

Perhaps he is still waiting there.

The man said that San Diego de los Baños was a long way off — fifteen kilometers at least. But rather than join him, standing in the countryside, with the chance that a car may never show up, I decided that if I walked fast enough, perhaps I could still reach the town by nightfall.

It was now 3:30 p.m. The sky was overcast. About three more hours of sunlight left. Remembering the distance of bygone high school cross-country races, I calculated that 3.1 miles equaled five kilometers. If I can walk three miles per hour, surely I can reach town by dark, I thought. It is doable.

So I began walking. And I walked and walked.

And not a single car came by.

The road through the countryside rose and fell, and soon, the flatness of the land gave way to a forest of pines and cedars. Not far from here, Che Guevara had moved his headquarters into a cave during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was just me and this forest, and if I shouted, I’d spook myself.

Suddenly, two men emerged from nowhere, walking next to their bikes. Perhaps there was a house tucked away in the forest that I couldn’t see. I began to walk a little faster, but the two men were gaining on me.

Why are they walking next to their bikes? I asked myself.

My duffel was heavy, and I tried to pick up the pace, but they were getting closer.

I could totally be raped and robbed right now, I thought, clenching my teeth.

I stopped and let them overtake me. A teenager with his father on a bicycle ride, it appeared. They happened to be walking next to their bikes because the hill was on an incline.

“Hola,” they said, after I gamely raised my hand and said, “Hi.” I knew I was safe after I asked them how far San Diego de los Baños was, and the man replied with a wave of his hand into the distance, “Twelve kilometers. It’s far away.” I reassured him that I was hoping to flag a car that came this way. He nodded, and they soon passed me.

I walked a few more kilometers when I saw two other men approaching from behind — again walking with their bikes.

There is nobody around, so I am really at their mercy here, I began to think. Suppose I get killed in this forest. The Cuban police might take a week to identify my rotting body from my passport photo. My imagination was getting the better of me again; I began to wonder how much media coverage the story would get at home.

And then, the men were next to me. One of them offered to put my bag on his bike. I said no, that I can carry it myself. Now there is a ploy, I thought. Put the tourist’s bag on the bike and ride off.

It was not until the younger of the two men smiled sympathetically and said something about confianza that I softened. I said “Sí,” and put my duffel on his bike. I recognized the word from the French confiance, which means “trust.”

And so began our twelve-kilometer ride to San Diego de los Baños, where the two men lived. The sun emerged, and the skies then revealed the depth of their blue heights, with wispy clouds soaring high above. When we would reach the summit of a hill, I would sit atop the horizontal bar of the bike, “sidesaddle,” in front of the younger man, and hold onto the inner handle bar while he, wearing my backpack, would steer us both downhill, with the older man following close behind.

We’d breeze past palm trees and lush vegetation, the young man applying the brakes generously and carefully avoiding the road’s potholes, until the hill petered out. Then the three of us would hop off the bikes and walk them up to the next summit, get back on, and ride downhill again.

A strange grunting noise seemed to follow us each time we stopped. And then came a long squeal.

Poking out of the slits of two sacks tied onto each bike were two snouts, each sniffing the air as if to figure out what was going on. We were biking with a couple of hogs.

“Música,” joked the younger man as we navigated down yet another hill.

As we approached town, we passed people who looked up and stared. Sometimes, I heard laughs and “Chiiiiina.”

I am American, but I let people think I was from China during this trip to see Cuba on my own. “Chairman Mao!” some would offer generously in a eureka moment of finding common ground. “Lejos,” or “far,” people would say, in remarking how long my plane trip must have been from Asia.

I often got those comments while walking — or waiting for transport.

This is a country where you often have to stick your thumb out to get somewhere, especially when off the beaten track, because of a shortage of buses. No hitch aboard a tractor, truck, or even motorcycle sidecar prepared me, however, for the possibility of catching a ride aboard somebody’s bicycle.

When the younger man had first motioned for me to jump on his bike, I balked. How did he want me to sit, I wondered. Did he want me to straddle it?

“You’re from China,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how?” He then stuck out his butt to demonstrate that the best way was to sit sideways.

I do know this. I would probably still be walking in the dark in that uninhabited forest, were it not for those two men. Not once did a car pass along the road that entire time.

We made it to town just before nightfall.

November 2, 1999

First in a two-part series. Click here for the second part.

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Blog

Petitions


It's time for you, the little guy, to take a minute to try to make the world a better place. Then tell two friends. And have them tell two…

First, on June 26, the ACLU hopes to deliver a 10,000-signature petition to Congress urging them to:

1. Restore habeas corpus and due process.
2. Pass the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.
3. End the torture and abuse in secret prisons.
4. Stop extraordinary rendition: secretly kidnapping people and sending them to countries that torture.
5. Close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and give those held there access to justice.
6. Investigate wrongdoing and ensure those who broke the law are held accountable.
7. Restore American values and the rule of law.

I know it's a tall order, but a girl can dream. So please, go sign it (via Boing Boing, of course).

After you do that, take another minute to help out the fellow little guys. From the Free Press website: "Postal regulators have accepted a proposal from media giant Time Warner that would stifle small and independent publishers in America. The plan unfairly burdens smaller publishers with higher postage rates while locking in special privileges for bigger media companies." Now, is that fair? Don't we just hate that? Then go sign it.

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Blog

It’s not you, it’s them


There should be a rule on how grandiose a self-gratifying claim can be. For example, last week Bill O’Reilly used his Web and newspaper column to glad-hand himself for “knowing” that Rosie O’Donnell would leave “The View.”

Reading it, you would have thought Mr. O. was pulling strings behind the scenes as some well-respected newsman, instead of just being a steamy pile of upper-class, Bush-voting crap.

But that’s Bill: he makes outlandish claims because he thinks he’s bigger than Guy Fawkes Day. This week, however, Bill has gone too far.

People who watch his drivel on TV will be familiar with his recent inspired ranting against Virginia Beach Chief of Police Jake Jacocks, who did not call Homeland Security over Alfredo Ramos, an illegal immigrant, who had had four run-ins with the law. This has Bill miffed — and maybe rightly so — because on March 30 Ramos killed 17-year-old Alison Kunhardt and 16-year-old Tessa Tranchant when he drunkenly hit their car. Of course Bill felt Ramos should have been sent back to Mexico already, before this tragedy occurred.

Virginia Beach’s Jacocks didn’t share this idea because Ramos had not been a violent offender. More pragmatically Jacocks said he didn’t want to get federal authorities involved, possibly because Feds don’t play well with the locals; Feds like to have a lot of power and that’s something of an issue with people who like freedom. This fact has got Bill, who apparently thinks the Feds should have a camera in every home and a tracker on every computer, angrier than a pit bull in a room full of cats.

Under duress with the bad press he was getting all around, Jacocks changed the policies of his department.

What does Bill say?

“After my reporting battered the government of Virginia Beach, it has changed its dangerous and irresponsible policy. But Jacocks got in a last shot calling me, your humble correspondent, ‘pathetic.’”

Did you read that? He claims it was his reporting that changed things and then has the audacity to call himself humble. I’d call that an oxymoron if that were not two syllables more than what O’Reilly is.

The fact is that Bill wasn’t the only person “reporting” on the Ramos case. It got a lot of attention in the press (I’m betting he got it from the AP) and the public was angered. O’Reilly didn’t do anything, the people did. But The Culture Warrior is not above hyperbole.

My whole point is that people responding to the policies of their government make changes — not middle-aged white men pontificating from inside of a box. Anyone who thinks they do may require therapy.

However, maybe Bill is on to something. Maybe everyone with a forum for opinion should use that to make claims that they are the ones that make the differences.

All right, here is mine: I’m the reason Lindsey Lohan is doing so well with rehab. You see, I’ve publicly stated that she is a “hotty” several times but that I don’t like “drunks.” Hearing this Lindsey must have chosen to turn her life around.

Now I’m off to cause a thunderstorm in Wyoming and end the LAPD’s violent ways. Thank god I have this forum, or nothing would ever change. Aren’t I swell? I did a great job.

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Blog

Embrace the pale!


May is Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention Month. That means my anti-sun habits are not just acceptable this month but trendy, too. 

I could make many excuses for how pale I am. I'm a bookworm — all those hours indoors reading. I'm part Irish — we're not a sun-friendly people. My skin doesn't tan, it blisters — well, that's not an excuse, just a painful truth. Besides all that, tans just don't do it for me. On myself or anyone else. I understand the image — J. Lo, Paris, jet-setters in general with exotic tans and a big purse that costs enough to feed a small nation. I also understand the economics behind the advertising — so much profit to be made off the bronzing powders, sprays, lotions, and tanning business, trying to look like an heiress. Intellectually, I get it (if you don't, read the NY Times article spelling it out for you). Personally, I don't like it. I have better things to do with my time than damage my skin. And if I were forced to be on the towel next to you, you'd get an earful from me.

To begin with, it's your health, stupid. A tan is skin damage. Even if the possibility of skin cancer (higher than ever before) means nothing to you, I'll appeal to your vanity. You may like to carry around Gucci bags, but do you want to look like one? Are you going for a crocodile look or something?

Now, this rich-girl image. A century ago the heiress look — only the poor worked outside and tanned — was pale. So pale in fact that they used arsonic-based cream to whiten their skin, which would naturally kill some of them or at least make them extremely ill. Do you think skin cancer from sun damage is any different?

Behind the image: last I heard Paris Hilton had been sentenced to 45 days in prison. Wow — that's hot. Like, burning skin hot. I'm sure some time in "the yard" will allow her to keep her coloring.

I also understand that not all young women out there know how to be their own person. They need an icon from a magazine cover to aesthetically mimic. I can provide some pale versions, some anti-crocodiles. First, Nicole Kidman. Come on — what's not to like? Oscar winner, the richest of all rich girls, and a UNIFEM Goodwill Ambassador. Next, a French version: Julie Delpy. Is anything more chic than a French woman? Last (but not least, I just can't think of more pale actresses at the moment), a youngin', Michelle Trachtenberg. From the NYT article: "In the May issue of Allure magazine, [she] said the pressure to bronze is her pet peeve with beauty advisors at makeup counters. 'They're like, 'Maybe you'd like to warm up your skin tone'…And I'm like, 'No, I'm going to embrace the pale.'" 

That's right, people — embrace the pale!

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The case of Abdel-Monem Mahmoud


The case of Abdel-Monem Mahmoud, a blogger and member of the Muslim Brotherhood is the second of its kind in Egypt, a country where press freedom has greatly deteriorated in the past few years, according to a report released by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) on May 3, International Press Freedom Day.  The report, entitled “Backsliders,” listed Egypt in seventh place, after Ethiopia, Gambia, Russia, DRC, Cuba, and Pakistan.  Following Egypt were Azerbaijan, Morocco, and Thailand.

Abdel Kareem Soliman was the first blogger to be arrested in Egypt.  He was sentenced in November 2006 to four years in prison for insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak.  His trial lasted five minutes.

Monem is quite a different personality from Soliman; a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was previously arrested for “belonging to an illegal organization” when he met with Brotherhood members to organize an anti-war rally.  Monem is a devoted human-rights activist, and was among the first to go to Darfur to speak with high-ranking officials there.

He also spoke out about the arrest of fellow Egyptian blogger Soliman, despite his personal disagreement with Soliman's statements against Islam.  In a post written on March 7, 2007 (originally in Arabic) in Monem's own blog, Ana Ikhwan (“I am a brother”), Monem defended Soliman, saying:

To begin with, I disagree with the opinions of Abdel Kareem, but I believe that it’s unfair for the security forces to treat him this way, punish him for his personal opinions, and sentence him for his so-called “contempt for the president.” I believe that this behavior is unfair to a young man who, along with his friends, will not change his ideas simply because he fears punishment at the hands of the security forces.

The post, translated to English by Fatima Azzahra El Azzouzi, is here.

More coverage on the case of Abdel-Monem Mahmoud can be found at the Free Monem site as well as at Global Voices Online.

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Commentary

Finding solace in cyberspace

savage.jpg

Stricken with the loneliest of illnesses, people with rare forms of cancer have built their own online communities.


Savage, a Boston Globe correspondent and ITF contributor, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. This story was originally published June 4, 2001.

 

“No man is an island,” the poet John Donne assures us. But on October 5, 1998, I had a hard time sharing his optimism. That was the day I found out I had LMS — leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer of soft muscle tissue that strikes fewer than four people out of a million.

But despite those numbers, I never really felt alone. Today, people with extremely rare medical conditions around the world are banding together via email groups. It is, in every sense, a revolution in terms of patient empowerment, one that has quickly spread in the past couple of years.

Cancers like LMS are among the loneliest of illnesses. While those with more common cancers can usually find a network of others in the same city who have the same condition and who are going through the same thing, my chances of ever meeting another LMS patient seemed slim.

Only a few years ago, that isolation would have been my new reality. It certainly was for Orland Hetherington, a native of Ontario, Canada, who had LMS diagnosed in 1994. “I spent two years trying desperately to find another living soul with LMS,” Hetherington said. “I was alone with this and scared. I became somewhat obsessed with finding someone else on the planet with LMS and searching harder for more and more information.”

In March 1997, LaDonna Backmeyer, an LMS patient in Rock Island, Illinois, found Hetherington on a cancer online support list. She asked him to help her start an online discussion group specifically for LMS patients and their families and friends. From just four members then, that email group has grown to more than 560 subscribers.

For a while, I was one of them. The group instantly welcomed me to its ranks with both personal notes of understanding and a barrage of advice on treatment options and research information that helped me know more about what lay ahead during my recovery.

The group “has given information to several hundred patients since its founding,” Backmeyer said. “Some of the patients check in for a small amount of time in order to get the information they need; others find a group of welcoming friends, and they stay.”

All this from a machine

In my case, the group helped me learn about a then-experimental surgical technique developed by Dr. Steven Curley at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I flew to Houston and underwent Curley's surgery, which removed all traces of tumor from my liver in December 1998. As of my last trimonthly check up, I remain cancer-free without having had to undergo chemotherapy.

In October 2000, Curley was quoted in a U.S. News & World Report article about a successful new generation of cancer-fighting techniques; because of the help of the LMS group, I found him two years before the general public learned of his existence.

There are similar email lists for about sixty other cancers. All are the offspring of a single group list started three years ago by the not-for-profit Association of Cancer Online Resources, founded by Gilles Frydman, a New York City computer entrepreneur. Frydman's wife was stricken with breast cancer and found information through an email list that helped her avoid a mastectomy.

"I started to look at how cancer patients use the Internet," Frydman said. He found that people with a variety of cancers all seemed to end up on a single, general-cancer email list. "I thought it was outrageous that only people suffering from very common forms, like breast and prostate cancer, got their own specific mailing list. So it seemed to me that what we should do was create a mailing list for every known type of cancer." Today, there are more than 125 email groups, with a total enrollment in the tens of thousands.

"Everyone comes to this support group with no idea of the vast information that is going to be shared with them," said one LMS group member, Cynthia Whitson of LaGrange, Georgia. "We all just come to selfishly help ourselves find the way through the maze of doctors, facilities, treatments, and side effects. We find that we become a part of an emotional movement to collectively find the answer to each one's question."

For many, helping others on the list find answers becomes a way to cope themselves. "I had every intention of getting off the group during this three-month break between treatments while I waited for the next scan date," Whitson said. "But you can't leave it. It becomes a part of your life, just as cancer will forever be a part of your everyday life."

Many members of these rare-cancer communities attest to this sense of involvement–becoming, in the words of Donne’s poem, not an island but a “part of the main … involved in Mankind.”

“The list, for me, has meant longer time here on Earth and incredible satisfaction in trying to help others with LMS,”

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