I listened for the first time in my life to a webinar. It was organized last Thursday by the people, who are pushing a bill in Congress related to international child welfare and adoption. The bill, Children in Families First or in short CHIFF, comes from the desk of Senator Landrieu of Louisiana and the Senator was therefore the main dish of the forty-five minute event. The webinar, which would teach us about the proposed legislation, was except for a well-prepared introduction by a woman I don’t know, very amateurish. The Senator spoke ad lib. In her remarks she just repeated several times in various manners of speaking that children should be raised in families and not in orphanages or on the street. And when questions came up she said in essence that children should be raised in families and not in orphanages or on the street. And CHIFF was the vehicle that could make sure that children would be raised in families and not in orphanages and on the street.
One of the problems Senator Landrieu further addressed was the mess in the child welfare infrastructure in the unidentified countries where the CHIFF bill desires to work; a mess which resulted in a situation where children are not raised in families but in orphanages and on the street. She said she was not willing to wait with the import of orphans till the mess in those countries was cleaned up. A ‘wonderful’ example of child welfare and foster care was, she said, to be found in our country. ‘Wonderful’ she repeated, suggesting that unlike those other kids our kids are happily raised in families and not in orphanages or on the street. But even with that shining American example, I don’t think that the competition between cleaning the mess and ‘quickly’ – the word stems from the proposed bill but Senator Landrieu said in a Mitt Romney moment that it was not in the bill – I repeat, that the competition between cleaning the mess and quickly importing orphans, can be won by the mess. So the orphans will find their families in our country, and thus will not have to be raised in orphanages and on the streets in their countries.
After the Senator spoke a gentleman who was like Senator Landrieu a politician, but I can’t remember his name or a word of what he said. He had the role of the sidekick. His voice was so uninviting that I wondered how he ever got elected. Maybe he has an appealing physique, but since I had only sound and no images, I can’t tell. Then came a man who is de boss of the Joint Council of International Adoption Services. That is an organization, which advocates the cause of every child’s right to a permanent family. His name is Tom DiFilipo. He started energetic about raising kids in families and not in orphanages or on the street, but got distracted and you wondered by what. He fell in the-supporting-the-Senator mode. At one point he was so far gone that even when he was asked about something else he automatically ‘supported’ the Senator and said that what she had said was ‘right on the money’ or something similar. Since Tom DiFilippo runs a club on international adoption and he advocates for children raised in families and not in orphanages and on the street, those families will presumably be found in our country.
A question and answer session followed, not with open phones, but with questions, which came from I don’t know where. They were critical, critical of the criticalness I remember from my time in my Catholic high school in Holland where the priest during religion instruction dared to formulate what he thought we thought was daring. The answers were thus so bland that even the moderator, who was I imagine part of this amateur theatre, got irritated, and almost got really critical. Almost. One of the questions was about money, about the budget. Maybe I didn’t get it, but there is no money, no budget which tells how many dollars are available and for what and where and how it will be spent. Yes, said somebody, there is money, but it has to be carved out from a larger budget. No indication where the carving begins or ends, only that is comes from money that is now spent on international child welfare. I thought that was awkward.
The session ended with a guy who – you could hear it in his voice – knows how to dress and who under no circumstance, not even in suit and tie in a Humid New York City Summer Scorcher sweats. His voice was so upbeat and he was so well articulated! He represented one of the supporters of the bill, a very Christian club with the passionate and the man fitting name Both Ends Burning. They are all about orphans and their ‘human right to grow up in a family’ and since that human right probably cannot be fulfilled, because of the child welfare mess in their countries, I imagine they have to come to our country to find their families. Both Ends Burning has designed a pretty big mission for our country of 315 million people if you think of the over 200 million orphans CHIFF estimates there are in the world. The Both Ends Burning man told the webinar participants what they could do to support the bill, like writing to their elected officials or calling them and signing all sorts of petitions. If you are in that business, or if you are not in that business like me, you know that all that foot soldier work doesn’t make any difference, when the cause you write, call or sign about is phony.
I loved my first webinar, but I wished I could have written about it in a serious manner. But CHIFF and its creators and supporters, didn’t let me do it. The webinar was, like the proposed legislation, a shadow of what a real webinar and a real international child welfare bill can and must be.