At Semillas de Amor, we didn’t expect that when the Guatemalan government closed adoptions, but promised to finish all adoptions in process that they would lie. Not only lie, but subject children’s homes, adoptive families and their children to a nightmare emotionally and financially. There are over 800 children “stuck” in the adoption mess in Guatemala and it appears that nobody in the Guatemalan nor US governments could care less. Children are not numbers and that is how they have been treated. These children are precious, they have dreams of having a family but that has not happened. At Semillas de Amor we have 22 children in the adoption process and 15 children that do not have families.

When most of the children came to live with us they were infants and some toddlers and a few older children. We expected that the infants and toddler age children would be young when they went home with their adoptive families. But that has not happened. In the past, when we were financially able to take new children into our home, we knew that older kids would always take lots of work to really prepare them to be adopted. Every day the kids get older which means they need to learn a whole new set of social or educational skills. To ignore this reality is to make the transition from our children’s home to their families a difficult one.

As an example, we have been working on table manners. In a family this is done with one child at a time and the kids learn from each other. However, in an institutional setting there is no mom or dad, and the other “siblings” in the home have similar manners so there is no one to learn from. In the last month we have been working very hard at teaching table manners to 37 kids. The kids come in to eat in groups so we don’t have all 37 at once but even in groups of 10 it has taken 4-6 adults to supervise. Kids need structure that makes sense to them and that is happening, it also transfers to other areas of their lives. Teaching children to respect each other, their home and their family is an on-going process within a family. Our kids’ family consists of 37 children, nannies, nurses, teachers, Luvia, Gerson, Gaby, Daisy, me, and of course, the dogs. As normal as we try to make our children’s home it is not a family. But we work at it. We work on manners, responsibility, compassion and respect. This is not good enough. It is not what parents want for their children so why should we want anything different for children being subjected to institutionalized lives. I wonder what happens to those children, in the few children’s homes and institutions left in Guatemala. Overcrowded, understaffed, underfunded, not enough love or attention, food, protection from predators, the list can go on and on. So as we struggle on a day to day basis making sure that our 37 children’s needs are addressed my heart breaks for those children we have had to turn away, stuck in a cruel system managed by people who are suppose to advocate and care for the kids and don’t.

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