Tuesday, June 17, 2008
One Family - unsolicited DVD review
We watched the DVD, One Family, this past weekend. It is really well done. It is just 35 minutes, and shows a family preparing for their trip to Ethiopia, and going to pick up their 10-yr-old daughter at Layla House. It includes some interview time with mom, dad and brother, and some scenes where the adoptive parents meet their daughter's Ethiopian family members. It also shows some of the beauty of Ethiopia and its people. We are going to use this DVD to help our extended family and friends get a feel for what we are doing and to help start more conversations on adoption. We enjoyed seeing how well cared for and loved the kids are at Layla House. We are especially eager to show it to our kids so they can see how much Ethiopian kids are like them.... because I think they, like most Americans, have a picture in their heads of sad, starving children. There is lots of love and laughter in this short film, and it is SO worth the price of admission. There are tears, too, because life involves tears. The producers of this film really caught the essence of what's important in life.
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4 comments:
Did you happen to see the documentary about the little Ethiopian girl who was adopted by a family in Vermont? I had the same questions after seeing that video that you appear to be having: Is this one family, in particular, actually unable to feed and care for this child??? The documentary family didn't appear -- to my unstrained and ignorant eyes -- to be actually very impoverished. They had lots of clothes and nice house and served tons of food at a goodbye party.... It must be so confusing for you! A very complex and difficult situation, I'm sure!!
Thank you, Bess, for sharing what you saw with such emotion. I wish I had been able to travel more and understand more immediately what you saw and experienced.
And I felt the same about the Vermont video--it sent me and SO into a moral/ethical tizzy... I cried through most of the movie, and then some. but it must not tell the whole story... perhaps the giving up of children is evidence enough? now that I have my son with me, I have to think that no one relinquishes a child but for a very good reason...
Bess, I thought your post was really touching and true in many many ways. I have never seen such poverty as I saw in Ethiopia.....
But I think it is important to remember when considering reasons for relinquishment that there is never a simple easy answer. Poverty may be a huge part of the reason for many, many families. But there typically are other factors acting on people's decision-making as well. After all, there are many, many destitute families in Ethiopia and the majority of those families do NOT relinquish their children.
Unfortunately, I think that it is very easy for us as Americans to look at poverty and see it as the answer to an unanswerable question. As in poverty = cause and relinquishment = effect. I'm not saying poverty is not one of many reasons for relinquishment, or even an overwhelming reason or the main reason in many cases. But I think it's rarely that simple. Because otherwise you would have an entire country relinquishing their children. There could be social factors at play that families may not want to explain, or that are painful to delve into.
there are so many reasons that children are relinquished. this girl had no parents....everything else is secondary.
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