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This article was written by Laura Bauer of the Kansas City Star. The original article can be read here.
In a small community in southwest Missouri, one little boy is torn between two families, two worlds.
He even has two identities.
His Guatemalan birth mother named him Carlos. To his adoptive parents, the couple he calls mommy and daddy, he’s Jamison.
And today his future is more uncertain than ever.
Will the 4-year-old boy remain Jamison and stay in Carthage with Melinda and Seth Moser, who adopted him more than two years ago and cared for him a year before that?
Or will he go back to his birth mother, Encarnacion Bail Romero, an illegal immigrant who last held him on May 22, 2007, the day she was picked up in an immigration raid at a Barry County poultry plant. He was just 7 months old.
It’s an emotional case that wedges the boy, who likes to play ball and watch Nickelodeon, between federal immigration laws and state adoption laws. Where what’s legal may clash with what some people view as what’s right. It’s also a case bringing nationwide attention to the plight of children who get tangled in the system when moms or dads are detained or deported.
Read more: Children of illegal immigrants caught in middle of adoption fights
Dale Buscher, director of protection, talks with BBC World News about conditions for children living in refugee camps.
A letter from executive director, Sarah Costa, on clean-burning cook stoves is in today's online edition of the New York Times. Read the letter below.
To the Editor:
Re “Developing Nations to Get Clean-Burning Cookstoves” (news article, Sept. 21):
It is great news that the United States will provide $50 million to help provide clean-burning cookstoves for villages in Asia, Africa and South America. In addition to the appalling health risks (1.9 million deaths a year due to inhaling smoke from open fires) and the environmental devastation caused by cutting down trees for fuel, women and girls risk rape and sexual violence when they gather wood to cook or sell.
This is particularly true in refugee camps and other displaced settings, where fuel is typically not provided to cook the food that displaced people receive.
In addition, girls may miss out on education opportunities as they spend hours each day foraging for cooking fuel or stay at home to watch younger siblings as their mothers collect firewood.
It is essential that the clean-burning stove initiative — both the provision of stoves and the development of local stove-making businesses — reaches humanitarian settings, as it will enhance the protection of refugee women and girls immeasurably.
Sarah Costa
New York, Sept. 21, 2010
Find the full article, posted on the online edition of the New York Times here.
Food is scarce in Ethiopia, where most of the population lives in rural, drought-prone areas in a state of chronic poverty. In 2010, the Government of Ethiopia identified 5.2 million people in need of emergency food aid. Not surprisingly, this hunger crisis also impacts the thousands of refugees living just within Ethiopia's borders.
Read more: Struggling to Make a Living in Ethiopia: Surviving in the Informal Economy
The names in this post have been changed to protect their privacy.
The morning I met Nadine in her new "home" in a former park in the middle of the Peacutetionville neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, it had been raining -- the first rain since the earthquake. The ground was muddy and slick, and her shelter did not have a floor. She and her family slept on cardboard boxes on the dirt. The shelter did, however, have walls and a roof of bed sheets and some plastic sheeting. A rudimentary charcoal stove was set up just outside, where a small pot of rice was cooking for the day's meal for her family of five.
Read more: Building Back a Better Haiti: The Need for Cooking Fuel
Refugee women with disabilities- at higher risk of GBV. @DIsabilityNW @Disabilitygov @DisabilityNow @disabilityscoop http://t.co/v2fAjrMELE
May 22, 2013 at 4:03 pm UTC Retweet this
8,000 followers! Thank you for helping us improve the lives and protect the rights of women and girls displaced by conflict and crisis!
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