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By Eric F. Mallonga
(Closing remarks at the 9th Global Consultation on Child Welfare
Services, Taal Vista Lodge, Tagaytay City)
I read this moving book entitled Lest Innocent
Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie. It is about French Protestant Pastor
Andre Trocme and his village Les Chambon in Southern France. Trocme
offered his Protestant village as a place of refuge for Jews during
the Holocaust. It cost the lives of many Chambonnais, who were among
millions executed in Hitler’s concentration camps. But it was
precisely that kind of human sacrifice that touches us all and the
basic decency of the people who made that sacrifice.
I have felt that basic sense of decency here.
A decency that when female infanticide in China
became a matter of serious international concern, most of you
gathered here today readily took upon the burden of providing those
condemned infants with permanent, loving homes;
A decency that when female genital mutilation
started spreading as an ethnic rite of passage in some African
tribal villages, the people of Canada immediately presented their
nation as a place of refuge with permanent homes for the young child
victims;
A decency that when Adoptions Centrum and Holt
International discovered the growing number of Filipino children
being born without families in the Middle East where adultery is
punished with death by stoning, Sweden and Oregon offered to
immediately find suitable permanent families without any need for
those unregistered, abandoned and stateless children to travel back
to the Philippines.
My fascinating journey with the Intercountry
Adoption Board (ICAB) has been shared, shaped and reinvented by
incumbent ICAB members, who had the temerity to believe, against all
odds, we could streamline a tedious adoption process. With DSWD
Undersecretary Luwalhati Pablo’s encouraging support, we have gone
on with this audacity to search for systemic faults and tackle these
concerns through executive policy and legislative action, working
even beyond the mandate of our agency because we know, in our
hearts, that the child is paramount. We pushed for the declaration
of abandonment as an administrative process three years ago in a
previous Philippine Congress. Once again, that bill has been
re-filed. We cannot guarantee whether it shall be passed soon. There
are no guarantees to success. But the test of this journey is not
success or perfection. The true test is that we have been able to
recognize the failings of the past and together, with you, we can
rise in unison to meet the challenges of these trying times.
Together, we made this solemn affirmation—a
collective covenant declaring that every abandoned child, every
neglected child, every abused child, every orphaned child deserves a
permanent and loving family that will nurture him or her, and
provide the indispensable care, affection, and love because the
world can be extremely lonely, miserable, and even cruel.
We visited Philippine prisons recently. We
witnessed the inhumanity of children in prisons. Instead of doing
nothing for those miserable children behind bars, we have taken that
misery to conscientize ourselves, imagining together what we can do
for these miserable children, and to provide for every child in
those prisons a fighting chance in this millennium. It will
certainly not be easy to leave here today and not give another
thought to the orphanages, shantytowns, hazardous streets, garbage
mountain villages, prisons, and hovels in which many Filipino
children live.
We know these challenges can be hurdled.
Already, the Americans have proposed to set up a system of
cooperation for immediate placements of Special Needs
Children—those with Downs Syndrome, HIV/AIDS, cerebral palsy, even
spina bifida. Australia and New Zealand made similar commitments.
Before, we never thought adoptions of Special Needs Children were
even possible. Michigan’s Lutheran Services and Wereldkinderen
have committed to support halfway homes for children from prisons
while Andorra and Barcelona have agreed to establish programs for
runaway girls from domestic sexual and physical abuse. We cherish
the hope, however faint, that these children shall also be adopted
by nurturing parents in permanent homes.
Uplifting as it is to see such a responsive
audience from all over the world, I know you did not come here just
for this Global Consultation although these conferences are
necessary feedback mechanisms for our future goals. Nor are you here
just to meet ICAB members albeit it is necessary to encourage more
congenial discussions amongst ourselves. Nor have you come to merely
follow up on status of applications for prospective adoptive
parents. You came here because you believe in what we all dream for
the world’s children.
When I became an ICAB member, I was motivated by
a single, simple, powerful idea—that I might play a small part in
the nurturance of impoverished orphan children. For the past six
years of my term, we toiled together, even quarreled together. But
our singular devotion to children endured. We transcended our
differences because all of us desired to place those suffering
children in the best permanent homes possible.
This is the reason that this Global Consultation
is all about the children—it must be about what we can do together
for all children. Further, I agree with the proposition that voices
of adoptees should be heard at these Global Conferences. It is adoptees
who experience inner turmoil and genealogical bewilderment in their
lives. The voices of birth mothers should also be heard because the
lonely decision that is forced upon them by uncontrollable
circumstances in relinquishing their birth children is certainly
agonizing. In addition, voices of adoptive parents, who have to deal
with familial turbulence in the child’s transition from infancy to
childhood to adolescence, must also be heard.
In ending, in some African tribal communities,
the children do not call any single person as father or mother. They
call all adults as father or mother. And to these fathers and
mothers, there is not one child that they call their child because
every child in the village is their child. I believe this is what
must be stressed. These children—they are not just my children. Or
your children. They are our children. Because all of the adults in
this world community must be nurturers of all the world’s
children. All of us must be fathers and mothers to these children.
Because these children are all our children!
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