Please watch this compelling video about Kyrgyzstan ... it really demonstrates the problems today in international adoption. 65 matched children are still waiting to join their forever families.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzvPHLiujc

| Subscribe to this feed | Link to this post

After some weather and airplane mechanical delays, Craig and the film crew arrived last night in Guatemala City and are ready to begin filming. Stay tuned here for updates.

| Subscribe to this feed | Link to this post

Filming of the documentary Wrongfully Detained will start this week in Guatemala, the Both Ends Burning Campaign announced Aug. 16. The movie, scheduled for release in summer 2011, will serve as a catalyst in educating the public about the international adoption crisis.

The film will feature dozens of child development experts, adoptive families, prospective adoptive parents, and children from around the globe. Interviews and portrayals of the players in this broken system will artfully provide insight, depth and color into the problems strangling international adoption, while the sights and sounds of children in desperate circumstances will substantiate the term, "wrongfully detained."

Between now and the end of the year, the film's crew will travel to five countries to capture comprehensive evidence of the crisis. International adoptions have fallen by more than 50 percent in the last six years. This is the first of many major projects planned by the Both Ends Burning Campaign to reverse that trend, advocate on behalf of the world's parentless children, and create a concrete and lasting solution for international adoption.

"The stories of neglected children and discouraged families in this obstacle course of a system are so common they could almost qualify as an epidemic," said Craig Juntunen, founder of the Both Ends Burning Campaign and executive producer and writer of Wrongfully Detained. "Kids need families and families want to adopt them, but, increasingly, we can't make this happen. This is a tragedy affecting millions of children, and we are going to show the world about it."

The director of Wrongfully Detained is Thaddaeus Scheel, in association with Globox Media Group. The Both Ends Burning foundation will hold the rights to the film, and the campaign will receive all film proceeds. Updates on filming will be available on the Both Ends Burning web site (http://www.bothendsburning.org), Facebook and Twitter. 

"Too many kids are wrongfully detained in living conditions that are deplorable," Juntunen said. "With this film, we will change that."

| Subscribe to this feed | Link to this post

Here is a discussion post written by our executive director, Tripp Baltz, to a respondent who called international adoption a "last-ditch" effort for orphans. The Both Ends Burning Campaign is going to continue to confront people who devalue adoption as an option for orphaned children. 

I must strenuously object to your characterization of international adoption as a “last-ditch” resort. The last resorts are homelessness, child slavery, and being locked away in substandard institutions, a fate facing too many of the world’s orphaned children. Five decades of social science have established that when children grow up in orphanages they face higher risks of death, disease, malnutrition, and psychological and developmental damage. There is no greater basic human right than a child’s right to grow up in a family. While every effort must be made to reunite children with birth and extended families, many institutionalized children are already confirmed double orphans in need of families yesterday. And while it would be great if they could be adopted in their nation or origin, unrealistic hoping and waiting for that to happen — especially in countries that have no system for domestic adoption or where conditions of poverty, famine, disease and war are so great they do not present a favorable environment for children — condemns more and more children to life without a family. Although adoption is not the solution for all orphans, for many of the world’s parent-less children, it is the only shot they will have at growing up in a loving family — even UNICEF acknowledges that. Shutting down countries to adoption means many more millions of children will waste away their childhood in prison-like facilities, or, worse, on the street, and is akin to shutting down a country’s roads because one driver ran a red light. Confront abuse and corruption head-on, don’t make the children suffer for it. It’s not their fault. Surely we adults can design a system that gets children into loving families ASAP — if not their blood family, a loving adoptive family. You insult tens of thousands of loving families around the world when you refer to them as a “last-ditch resort.” Want proof? Ask an adoptee if they are happy (the tiny number of exceptions aside), then go live for 24 hours in an orphanage in Haiti.

| Subscribe to this feed | Link to this post

Here is a terrific video of a recent appearance by Craig and Quinn on WNBC in New York:

http://76.12.213.3/videos/news/haiti-adoption-story.html

| Subscribe to this feed | Link to this post

The Both Ends Burning Campaign supports the efforts of Guatemala 900, an effort to bring home hundreds of waiting children who are in limbo because adoption law changed in Guatemala on Jan. 1, 2008. These children have been adopted by American families but cannot come home because of the change in the law. Most of who are living in institutions. Numerous studies have displayed the negative impact of continued institutionalization on children’s development. To learn more, go to http://guatemala900.org/wp/?page_id=70 and call for "Due Process Now" for these waiting children.

| Subscribe to this feed | Link to this post

Page 1 of 3 pages  1 2 3 >