January 9, 2012: Our court date in Latvia

We have reached another milestone in our process to adopt Sintija into our family. The court hearing for the Latvian adoption will be held January 9, 2012, in Valka, which is a city on the Estonian border. (Yes, we expect that the Latvian winter, especially in a city above the latitude of Moscow, Russia, will be pretty harsh at that time of year. Kind of like Garrett County.)

If the court approves our adoption, then we will return to the USA with Sintija (who is with us now here in the USA), and then we wait until being notified to return to Latvia in order for Sintija to receive a permanent resident visa from the U.S. Embassy in Riga. After that, we can have the USA re-adoption, and then she legally will be part of our family.

Obviously, Sintija already is part of our family and, more important, part of our hearts.

Johanna will accompany Sintija on both trips to Latvia, and I will remain in the USA to be with our other children.

More Ilgi from Latvia

In celebration of Sintija's 13th birthday this past week, I am posting more songs from my favorite Latvian group, Ilgi. Sintija is doing very well, and all I can say is there are absolutely no doubts.

The first is "Labvakar, Rudzu Lauks" (Good Evening, Rye Field). There is a beautiful interlude with the Latvian instrument called the kokle at about 2:21.


The second is "Nesmejieti Jūs Ļautiņi," and I could not get a good translation from the Latvian, except that Jūs Ļautiņi means "You Folks."

Some music from Ilgi

While in Latvia, I thoroughly enjoyed the music scene and there was no group I enjoyed more than Ilgi, which played three times at Egle's, which was right below our apartment window. I am including a couple of songs they did that I really like. (The words are in Latvian; don't even try to repeat them unless you understand the language, believe me.) The first is "acis veras, aizveras" ("Eye opening, closing").

The photos in "Aiz upītes meitas dzied" ("Behind the river, daughters sing") bring back many, many memories!

Preparing to go to Riga, Latvia

While we have not yet received our official referral from the Latvia government that we are assigned to Sintija, nonetheless we have been told to fly to Riga this coming Sunday, August 14. We will be flying with the children (lots of children) when they leave JFK International Airport after the five-week hosting program here.

Right now, we are scheduled to come back to the USA on September 8. If all goes well in Riga, the Orphan Court there will grant us custody of Sintija, who then also would fly back with us to JFK. If we get that far, then there are two more trips to Riga to finalize the Latvian side of the adoption, and then to get the permanent visa from the U.S. Embassy there.

Thanks to all of you for your prayers and support. I will keep you posted as things develop.

Update on our adoption of Sintija

This past weekend, we drove to New York City to get Sintija, who is staying with us for five weeks this summer. This is part of a hosting program that is separate from the adoption process, but plays a part in the process, no less.

Our hope is that there will be a good relationship established (and we already are off to a good start, even if she speaks no English) this summer so when (Lord willing) we are assigned to her and travel to Latvia in the fall, that things will go well. This process with Latvia is long and costly and requires three trips to the country, but so far we have managed to get to this point.

After arriving home last night, Sintija slept until about 10 this morning and was greeted by our two dogs, Teddy (the one in the picture) and Spanky. We are happy to report that this first meeting was successful!

Again, this is a long process, but I can tell readers already that we really like Sintija. She is tall for her age (12, turning 13 in October) and is a prettier girl than what we had seen in the original picture. She seems to have a wonderful, mischievous personality, shy, but at the same time ready to be part of our family. She does not yet know we are trying to adopt her, and may not know until the fall.

So, pray for us that this will turn out to be a wonderful time. Thanks to all of you who have supported us.

Update on our Lavian adoption

Sintija (who is age 12) is coming for five weeks this summer, and will arrive July 10. We are still in the adoption process. We have raised about $10,000.00. We are currently awaiting approval from US Immigration to bring Sintija into the country on a permanent basis.

We have most of our paperwork completed. We would like to be able to go to Latvia and bring her home to stay this fall, but we still need to raise money. Our most pressing need is for $5,100.00 to pay for the document translation and the Latvian attorney. After that, all of the subsequent expenses will be for travel.

America's False Accusation Industry

During Stalin's infamous Terror of the 1930s and 40s, if one wished to be rid of a troublesome neighbor or family member, all he had to do was to "denounce" that person to the authorities as "an enemy of the state." Soon afterward, a "Black Maria" truck would pull up to the apartment, the denounced person led away, and he or she then would disappear into the system until they were dead, either executed or thrown into one of Stalin's gulags.

Americans like to think that we are above all that, but this country has created its own version of The Terror: false accusations of child molestation and rape. Talk to the families of Duke University's lacrosse team who endured the false accusations of 2006-07. Talk to Tonya Craft or James Combs or Michael Rasmussen or any of thousands of others who have gone through this ordeal or who are going through it now.

We are long past the era in which the authorities -- those who are entrusted with finding the truth -- care whether or not the charges they are pursuing even are true (or logical, for that matter). For example, one of the charges against Tonya was based on a claim that she molested a child in her Catoosa County house -- before she even lived there!

(When that fact was pointed out to "judge" brian outhouse, he ignored the Laws of Time and Space and claimed that the prosecution had all-but-proven the charge, an action that could not have happened at either the time or the place that Chris "Facebook-Cruisemaster" Arnt and Len "The Man-Racist" Gregor claimed. Ironically, at the point when outhouse was claiming the truth of the prosecution's case, the jurors already had decided that the prosecutors were wrong.)

When judges and prosecutors use their powers and authority to bring and maintain false charges, then all is lost in this country. When "protecting the system" becomes more important than protecting the truth, then there no longer is a justice system. Instead, we have a system in which people with bad motives are able to exercise raw power at the expense of the innocent. Like it or not -- and I, for one, don't like it -- that is the system we now have, and it clearly is attracting people like Arnt and Gregor who are fundamentally dishonest people and who use their authority to see how many felonies they can commit without being punished. (And the authorities never really punish their own.)

Last night, I found a wonderful website, The National Center for Reason and Justice. This site highlights a number of cases of false accusation and conviction in which falsely accused people have gone to prison based on spurious testimony with the authorities deliberately hiding exculpatory evidence and outright lying in court. I would urge readers to visit this site if for nothing else to see a small slice of the Hell that "American Justice" has created.

In my opening paragraph, I noted that one could be taken away in Stalin's Russia on the whim of someone else. Things are no different in this country today; only the circumstances have changed.

Sandra Lamb and the Wilsons wanted to extract "payback" on Tonya Craft, so they accused her of child molestation. Joal and Sarah "Clean-Shaven" Henke wanted Tonya out of the picture so that they could gain permanent custody of Tonya's children. Given that Arnt, Gregor, outhouse, and Tim "Dirty" Deal know the drill and were anxious to go along with the scam, along with people like Holly Kittle and Suzi "I Just Remembered" Thorne, it was not hard to put the whole thing into motion.

When one couples that situation with the policy of the Georgia State Bar not to discipline prosecutors no matter how egregious their actions, one can see that as long as people were willing to lie under oath (protected by the authorities), there was and is no limit to the dishonesty that people employed by the "justice" system will perform.

This evil is not limited to the LMJC; the United States is a country now that rewards false accusations. Parents involved in custody battles can make false accusations, knowing that people in authority will go along with the lies. People looking for financial payouts, like Crystal Mangum in the Duke case, will feel free to lie because they know there will be a gaggle of dishonest prosecutors, cops, and "intellectuals" (i.e., most of the Duke faculty) to stand behind them, no matter how fantastic the lies might be.

I appreciate the fact that there are people who DO care about justice and about right and wrong and speak out. That is why I appreciate the people who read this blog and who make comments and who refuse to follow the herd. It still is possible to make a difference.

My thanks to those of you who either have contributed or who have given personal support to our recent campaign on The Point. We have raised the original $5,000, which means that we can move more quickly to the next step. Thanks to all of you who care.

Our "Point" Fundraising Efforts

At the top of this blog, you see the icon for The Point, which is an effort on our part to raise $5,000 by Monday, January 31, in pursuit of our adoption of a girl from Latvia. If we don't reach our goal, then we receive none of what has been pledged.

This is not part of an on-going campaign. We intend to finance most of the $30,000 needed ourselves, mostly by cutting way back on spending and by my picking up extra work on the side. Nonetheless, we are about $2,400 from our goal and hope that anyone who wishes to pledge will do so.

Thanks.

Our family's pursuit of another adoption

In my brief bio sketch on this blog, I note that three of my children are adopted from overseas. My two sons are Ethiopians (now age 15) and my 11-year-old daughter is from Guatemala. I also have an adult daughter who is married and has two young children.

For several years, my wife and I have wanted to adopt another girl who is Sasha's age, but our earlier efforts to adopt through the U.S. foster care system were unsuccessful. (I could say a lot about our experience with that system, but let me just say that it gave us an education in the U.S. childcare bureaucracy, and it both was eye-opening and very unpleasant.)

Last year, we concluded that perhaps God wanted our family to remain as it was, but neither my wife nor I had lost the desire to add one more child. We recently met an 11-year-old orphan from Latvia, Dace (pronounced "Dot-say") who is up for adoption, and after much prayer and deliberation, we have decided to pursue her adoption.

Neither of us have come to this decision lightly, and we have done so only after a lot of prayer and deliberation. This adoption will require that we raise a lot of money, and that we really cut back on discretionary spending. I'll have to work harder than ever, but I believe with all my heart that it is the right thing to do.

You will see that I have placed the link to our website on this blog and in this post. If you feel led to visit our adoption blog, please do. As you can see, we also have a place for people to donate to this project, should they feel led to do so.

I will post updates from time to time. In the meantime, I ask that you pray for our efforts, as this is something we never can accomplish on our own. Thank you.

The Adoption that Did Not Happen: How the CAC and Prosecutors Make Adoptions Extremely Hazardous

[Update: Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 3:25 PM]: Just a reminder for all the readers to vote for Leah and Russell! (Yes, it is called "stuffing the ballot box," but since everyone else is stuffing the box, we might as well do it better!) [End Update]

As I note on my website, I have four children, three of them adopted from overseas. One is a girl from Guatemala, now age 11, and two boys from Ethiopia, now 14 and 15. The process of adoption was expensive and time-consuming, and the process of integrating three very different children into our household understandably has been difficult and always is a work in progress.

In fact, I know that two of my children were sexually abused in their home country before coming here, and we have had to deal with the consequences of what other people did to these youngsters. Thus, when someone tells me that I don't know anything about sexual abuse, or that my standing up for Tonya Craft was a slap in the face of abused children, I have to tell them that they don't know of what they speak.

For the past two years, we have looked to adopt again, this time a girl anywhere from ages 9-13, and from the USA, and the process has been extremely difficult, and generally has involved pushing a rock to the top of a hill, only to see it roll to the bottom time after time. More than once, we have given up altogether, but still continue to pursue what might be an opportunity.

Last week, an organization contacted us to see if we were interested in adopting a 13-year-old girl who grew up in Russia, but was adopted here at age 9. The child has severe attachment problems, and huge amounts of anger directed at her adoptive mother due to things that happened to her in Russia.

First, she was sexually abused by her father from ages 3-6, and then, second, her mother committed suicide. The family here hoped that they could make a difference, but try as they might, the efforts to achieve meaningful bonding failed, and now she is in a group home, which financially is draining her family.

Obviously, we knew that this would be problematic, but we pursued things on a preliminary basis, including contacting a very highly-regarded attachment and bonding clinic (which we have used for our other children) to get a sense of what the therapists there had to say. We then had the parents get in touch with us.

Unfortunately, the child is interested in all things sexual, and here is where the modern child molestation witch hunt policies kicked in. First, this girl would be in close proximity to the bedrooms of both of our boys, and it does not take much imagination to understand the things that could happen, all of them destructive.

Second, and more important, this young girl would be a potential fountain of false accusations of sexual abuse against the boys and against me. Let me explain.

We limit the access our children have to television (we don't have cable or satellite, nor local reception, just videos), the children do not have cellphones, and we limit their computer access. That is not the case in most households, and from what I understand, this child almost is addicted to these things.

Thus, if I were to say "no" to her regarding these things, there is no telling how she would retaliate, and one of the things that young girls are taught to do is to make accusations of sexual abuse. As my wife and I see it, bringing her into our house, given her situation and given how the law encourages false accusations, would be like bringing a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse into our family.

Thanks to federal laws, which mandate that states have specific guilt-assuming procedures when accusations are made, I would be arrested, have my mug shot in the paper (as a child molester, no doubt), be subject to abuse myself as prisoners love to go after "child molesters," and then have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have a fighting chance to stay out of prison for the rest of my life.

I'm not being paranoid. Right now, false accusations of the sort we saw with Tonya Craft are epidemic in this country, and even though the majority of these "reports" are deemed false, each one must be investigated as though it were true. Furthermore, when there are Children's Advocacy Centers like the Greenhouse and in Fort Oglethorpe, and prosecutors like Chris Arnt and Len Gregor, and judges like "judge" Brian Outhouse all over the country, then one can see the danger.

If it were not for current law and the ease at which false accusations destroy lives, I believe my wife and I would have taken a chance with this young lady, or at least seriously looked into it. We know how to deal with bonding issues, but there is nothing, NOTHING one can do to avoid false accusations of sexual abuse, especially when the system is tilted toward them.

When Buzz Franklin claimed that the acquittal of Tonya Craft would keep others from reporting real instances of abuse, he was not telling the truth. Because the law does not permit punishment of people who make false accusations of child abuse and molestation, there is no downside to an estranged ex-spouse trying to gain custody of children (as in the case of Joal Henke) by telling lies.

Furthermore, not only is there no punishment for children who make false accusations, but the law and current government policies actually encourage false abuse claims. Don't kid yourselves. Arnt and Gregor LOVED the challenge of trying to get a conviction on Tonya Craft, even if they themselves never believed the charges. (As Kerwyn and I note in the article we sent to Reason Magazine, had prosecutors actually believed Tonya was guilty, they would not have tried to add what clearly was perjured "evidence," and their strategy would have been different that what it actually was: pure character assassination.)

So, this young lady will remain in a group home, and her family will continue to be bankrupted. Here is one child who might have had a chance, but given the Mondale Act and the outright lies that come from prosecutors and CAC "interviewers," there is no way that my family and I can take even a chance in adopting this child.

The consequences of false accusations are horrendous, but don't tell that to Arnt, Gregor, and Outhouse, not to mention Holly Kittle, Ione Sells, Suzi Thorne, Tim Deal, and Sharon Anderson. They are having too much fun trying to put innocent people into prison to pay any attention to the wreckage they are leaving behind. As the woman at the Georgia State Bar told me, "They are just doing their jobs," and their "jobs" today involve the destruction of innocent life.

Ethiopia Adoption Video

This post is a bit different, although I will return to my usual battling self soon enough. As many of you know, my two sons are from Ethiopia, and Ethiopian adoptions resonate deeply within me, as do the Ethiopian people themselves. Here is a moving video from the Forrest family as they celebrate a year of having brought home two young children from that proud and beautiful country.

(Be careful. It is a 100-meg download and I would not try this on a system that cannot handle it. I'm using my computer at my office.)

The first 3-1/2 minutes are accompanied by a most moving song by Andrew Peterson, "Canaan Bound." Here are the lyrics, which speak of faith, the love of God, and following God's leading even when you don't know what will be the end of the journey, or the heartache and triumph you will experience on the way. It is like our own adoptions, and like our own journeys into the Kingdom of God. Experience and enjoy.

Sarah, take me by my arm
Tomorrow we are Canaan bound
Where westward sails the golden sun
And Hebron's hills are amber crowned

So bid your troubled heart be still
The grass, they say, is soft and green
The trees are tall and honey-filled
So, Sarah, come and walk with me

Like the stars across the heavens flung
Like water in the desert sprung
Like the grains of sand, our many sons
Oh, Sarah, fair and barren one
Come to Canaan, come

I trembled at the voice of God
A voice of love and thunder deep
With love He means to save us all
And Love has chosen you and me

Long after we are dead and gone
A thousand years our tale be sung
How faith compelled and bore us on
How barren Sarah bore a son
So come to Canaan, come

Where westward sails the golden sun
And Hebron's hills are amber crowned
Oh, Sarah, take me by my arm
Tomorrow we are Canaan Bound