November is National Adoption Month. Adoption Today magazine featured Ambassador author Melanie Zeeb Wright and her book Beauty From Ashes: An Eyewitness Account of Haiti’s Tragic Earthquake in their special adoption month issue.
In her piece Orphans Caught in the Disaster Zone, Zeeb recounts her experience of working in an orphanage when the 2010 earthquake devastated the country. “One of the most unexpected events following the earthquake was the evacuation of the majority of the orphanage’s children. In a process that seemed interminably slow at the time but was in reality quite fast, the Haitian government and the governments of several other nations allowed children already in the process of adoption to immediately join their adoptive families,” writes Zeeb. “Through a series of six evacuations, ranging from individual children sent on government-run evacuations to dozens of children traveling on a chartered plane with orphanage staff and everything in between, ninety percent of our children had left Haiti by the end of January.”
The number of children around the world in need of loving families is astounding. According to the Congressional Coalition of Adoption Institute:
- In the U.S. 397,122 children are living without permanent families in the foster care system.
- 101,666 of these children are eligible for adoption, but nearly 32% of these children will wait over three years in foster care before being adopted.
- According to the U.S. State Department, U.S. families adopted more than 7,000 children in 2012.
- Last year, Americans adopted the highest number of children from China followed by Ethiopia, Ukraine, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Read Melanie’s entire article by visiting AdoptionToday.com.