The father of Madonna's newly adopted son said yesterday he didn't realize that the arrangement meant the boy would no longer be part of his family.And Madonna's people are just now realizing the meaning of the Malawian word for "orphanage." It's a give and take."If we were told that she wants to take the baby as her own we would not have consented, because I see no reason why I should give away my son," said Yohane Banda, a 32-year-old farmer from Malawi in southern Africa.
"I am just now realizing the meaning of adoption," he said.
Dad changes tune on Madonna's adopt mission [nydn via tmn]
Madonna goes to a continent that literally has millions of AIDS orphans, and she picks a kid with a living parent? I'm sure everything is 100x more complicated when you're somebody as high profile as she is, but surely her people could have seen this coming? With so many parent-less children in the world...I hope this doesn't discourage anybody from adopting internationally.
"By 2003 15 million children under 18 had been orphaned by HIV/AIDS worldwide. About 12 million of these live in sub-Saharan Africa, and it is expected that this number will have risen to more than 18 million by 2010. Most of the AIDS orphans who live outside of Africa live in Asia, where the total number of orphans - orphaned for all reasons - exceeds 87 million. There is however insufficient information in Asia to provide figures for the number of AIDS orphans in individual countries." http://www.avert.org/
God this case is distressing on so many levels.
I think the biggest question is, WHO GOT TO THE FATHER? How do you spell c-o-r-r-u-p-t-i-o-n in Malawi?
This entire situation is just really incredibly sad. And I whole heartedly agree with the above commenter... in a country filled with so many children who actually NEED to be adopted, who have no family to speak of and no one to love them as a mother or father ever will, why in the world did she choose this child?
I know it's just my opinion, but if Madonna real were as wonderful a person as she's trying to make herself out to be, then why not give the father that $19,000 that she just spent buying that child gifts so that he can afford to take care of his son... gifts aren't what he needs... he needs LOVE and he needs his family! And his father could go a very long way in raising him and raising him well in his country on $19,000 dollars.
It just seems very obvious that this wasn't a child put up for adoption by our standards and it's easy to see how someone somewhere else could get confused...
It's interesting because this was actually the meaning of orphanage in the US in the beginning of the 20th century in the US. Many children had living parents and the parents couldn't care for them. Just to give a historical perspective
A popular magazine YOU here in South Africa quote the son of the orphanage director as saying (paraphrased) My father convinced him (the child's father) that it would be in his son's best interest to be cared for by a famous singer.
I have no problem with international adoption, but I do have issues with parents having to relinquish their children because of poverty. With so many orphans why a child with living parents?