Comments on: More Questions Than Answers

By: Webmaster

Webmaster — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:02:20 +0000

Hi Deborah and thanks for your feedback. I just want to clarify that we are bloggers. We are not journalists and we do not pretend to be journalist. Regardless, editorializing and “news analysis” is an accepted form of journalism. I’d challenge you to find a newspaper or news show in this country that doesn’t offer both editorializing and news analysis as a basis for some (and sometimes most) of its coverage. But since we are not journalists, we don’t make apologies for sharing our experienced and hard-earned opinions. You are free to draw differing conclusions and share them here or start your own blog.

By: Deborah

Deborah — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:36:15 +0000

I appreciate the information you have presented and recognize its importance to the adoption community at large, but I find your own conclusions misleading and assumptive rather than being based on fact. Presenting information is one thing, but adding your own interpretations is troublesome and should be avoided for the sake of journalistic integrity.

By: Christina

Christina — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:15:56 +0000

I also want to say that I did not write this article with only Americans in mind – I think the adoption community has to encompass ALL families who adopted from Vietnam – and that Americans, Irish, Italians, French, Australians… etc… ALL need to speak out and do what we can to bring this serious issue into the light.

By: Christina

Christina — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:13:22 +0000

Thank you for sharing this with us. Based on your information it sounds like the Ruc children did not go to the US, and therefore must have been adopted to Italy.
It also sounds like the US embassy has been much more involved and aware than any of the articles implied. I am glad to hear that.

However, it also sounds, from the articles, that there is a possibility that the Ruc children (and/or children from other minority areas) may have been sent to orphanages in other cities and their backgrounds obscured such that it may be impossible to know what countries/agencies they were adopted through. That was one of my bigger concerns … that these children may have been “laundered” so much that their parents will never be able to track them down.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:53:56 +0000

“Although the United States has expressed serious concerns about inter-country adoptions in Vietnam, during these reviews, we have not identified problems specifically related to adoptions of children from the Ruc community.”

The US embassy responded thusly because the one child adopted to the US that Miss Ha and others spoke of was not, in fact, from the Ruc tribe. Believe me, the US embassy is fully aware of the situation with the children from the Ruc community (or was before a staffing change or two), but they also are more aware of the circumstances of that one US case than is Peter Bille Larsen or the authors of any of those articles.

While I have no huge love for the US government, I do respect their involvement in our adoption case. However, I have no respect for anthropologists who lump one case in with some other cases just to drag the US into a particular fray. It makes me feel like my child is being used.

Please Forgive the Anonymity,
The One Child’s Adoptive Mom

By: Nicole

Nicole — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:31:37 +0000

Thank you for posting this. You are asking the right questions on here and I hate to, yet again, see a story like this pushed aside.