Natural disasters and the US/Canada?
After Hurricane Katrina, I don’t remember vultures circling for children to adopt, as they are now for kids in Haiti.
If there was an earthquake in California that was just as destructive as the one in Haiti, would people be as eager to adopt?
Or is it that people intuitively know that poor nation is easier to exploit and take advantage of?
I personally think that the lack of a viable social safety net in these countries gives PAPs the illusion that they are saving the world by adopting from these countries. There are also major cultural differences, some of which can be perceived as a result of poverty by more affluent nations, thus giving the impression that these people are just BEGGING for our help, when they are likely not begging for us to take their children.
After Katrina, I think that North America was outraged, as a populace, by how it was handled (ie; the FEMA fiasco…), because there was an expectation that the safety net was supposed to kick in at that time, and that it didn’t happen fast enough. With countries like Haiti, which have no discernable safety net resembling anything that we are accustomed to, it gives us a bit of a superiority complex…no safety net that any other country would implement would be enough for us. We, as a culture, are so arrogant that we believe that the lifestyle we have to offer is the only one that a person should want. So, what is the point of supporting the whole country, right? We can just take a few kids out of it and show them how to REALLY live.
Complete with pools and ponies.
So, no. An earthquake in Cali would just give way to months of media coverage of the “unbreakable American spirit”. The kids (particularly in foster care) in California still technically have access to “the American Dream” as one answerer so nauseatingly put it yesterday, so it is assumed that they don’t need to be shown the “right” way. They can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. So, we leave them in care with no support, and a much more complicated culture to navigate, completely alone.
It’s all ethnocentrism.
Haitian Adoption: An American Family