I agree, it is MUCH easier to just move on. But it is important that we don’t - for our children’s sake.

You finally travel to pick up your child, who is living in terrible conditions. The people seem nice enough but the poverty is so great you can see a lot of the children are not going to make it. You see other people’s referrals. You know these people by now. Their children are also living in terrible conditions. Those people have not traveled yet.

You may have a lot of questions about transparency but at the moment you have a half starved sick baby and you need pass the embassy interview to get the child home. How ever this child has ended up where they are right now, the child needs you and no one else seems terribly interested in their welfare but you.

Then you get home and start questioning, and you get frantic calls and notes from all those waiting parents you have come to know and love; please please don’t say anything until I get my child home. You saw my child, you know what this means to both of us.

The foreign country looks like corruption has been a normal way of life for centuries. You wonder if this insistence on transparency, law, and fairness is yet another value you are forcing on another country that may not be interested in working that way. I can see where people say at that point “not my child”. At this point you have been jerked around by so many people, and governments, agencies, facilitators, bleed dry for every penny any one can get out of you and nothing is going to the children. I think you tend to feel there is a lot more going on here then appears, you can’t get a handle on things, and there is no black and white anymore. You don’t want to get sued, you wonder if the rather scary embassy can continue to cause you problems over any irregularity. I can see where it is much easier to just move on.