Pound Pup Legacy

It seems more and more people have become curious about Bridget's Bangladesh orphanage.  Below is a piece written for the UK's Telegraph.

Bridget McCain stood out among the seven children of John McCain who took to the podium amid the razzmatazz of the Republican convention in Minnesota.

By Angus McDowall and Abdullah Al Muyid in Dhaka
Last Updated: 12:28PM BST 06 Sep 2008

 

The adopted daughter of the party's presidential nominee, had been plucked from a Dhaka orphanage as a desperately ill baby girl after a cyclone struck Bangladesh in 1991.

 

Shyly waving from the podium, the epitome of the bashful schoolgirl, Bridget charmed the hall full of Republican activists gathered last week to acclaim their party's choice for president.

It was a world away from her roots in the backstreet orphanage in Dhaka, capital of one of the world's poorest countries, which The Sunday Telegraph traced last week.

Around the Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa Children's Home, the streets are so full and chaotic that it is easier to go on foot than ride a rickshaw or moped through the bustling crowds.

But Sister Olivet, the senior nun, was not surprised when she learned that a former charge had risen to such elevated circles.

"When she arrived here she became the child of God," she said. "So this must be what God wanted her to be. It just happened for this lucky child."

The orphanage, its walls adorned with fading pictures of babies, photographs of Mother Teresa and images of Christ and Mary, rings to the cries and gurgling laughter of nearly 30 babies and toddlers.

Neat blue baskets, quilted with bright blankets, lie in rows for the smallest babies, while the older ones - up to two years of age - bounce up and down in metal-sided cots.

In another ward, about 15 mentally handicapped children play with the few local women who come to help the nuns.

"Some of the children here come straight from the hospital," said Sister Juanne an Indian nun, who moved to Bangladesh after joining the Catholic order founded by Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta. "Sometimes the mother runs away right after delivering the baby. Sometimes the police bring in children who are abandoned in a street side or even in the dustbin."

Behind her was a painted screen depicting an angel shepherding small children to heaven.

In a small concrete yard outside, the broad leaves of a banana tree gave shelter to a small boy gazing mournfully at a rusty blue slide and set of swings. A shrine, decked with flowers and bearing the image of Mother Teresa at prayer, was set into the wall nearby.

The nuns at the orphanage, who gave up their family names long ago and are now simply known as sister, work for two or three years at a time in different homes run by the charity around south Asia.

"Most of the mothers are unmarried and that is a big scandal in our society," said Sister Olivet, wearing the order's distinctive white sari with blue trimming. "And because of poverty they cannot afford to take care of the child."

If the babies are not adopted before they reach the age of four, they are given up to other orphanages.

"We send the babies who are not adopted to a proper orphanage for older children," said Sister Olivet. "After a certain age they receive education and training. They get in to the normal stream of life after their time in the orphanage, in the case of boys they go for jobs and for girls they get married. But we keep a kind of connection with them and they also keep it alive."

Mr McCain's wife, Cindy, brought Bridget and another little girl, Nikki, back to the US after seeing them in the orphanage.

Nikki was later adopted by one of Mr McCain's aides, Wes Gullett.

Both girls needed urgent treatment for life-threatening conditions and their chances had looked bleak if they remained in Bangladesh, where more than half the population lives on less than 50p a day.

"When I visited an orphanage begun by Mother Teresa, two very sick little girls captured my heart," Mrs McCain told the convention with Bridget at her side. "There was something I could do. I could take them home. And so I did."

Her shy moment in the limelight was an astonishing turn around for the young woman, whose very existence eight years earlier was made the target of an unsavoury whispering campaign in the South Carolina primary, when it was hinted that she was Mr McCain's biological child born out of wedlock.

 

Now preparing for her final year at high school Bridget has everything a young woman could hope for: a loving family, a good education and all the opportunities afforded by a prosperous, democratic country.

Despite the worldly success enjoyed by Bridget McCain and Nikki Gullett, however, the Bangladeshi government has moved to prevent more young children being given up to adoption by foreign parents.

Now only foreigners married to a Bangladeshi citizen are eligible to adopt in the country.

"I was born in Bangladesh, a malnourished, abandoned girl child," Nikki Gullett once wrote in a prize-winning school essay. "But I was a lucky one, adopted by parents in America and naturalised as a US citizen. I am so glad I am an American girl."

I find it very curious that Americans believe adoption is going to decrease the "orphan problem".  I see two problems resulting from this "save the orphan" mentality.  We have one group of PAP's wanting to provide medical care to those who cannot afford it.  [The take-home thank-you gift, of course, is the new and improved grateful child.]  We have another more vain group wanting a cute baby/child to complete their growing family.  [Making child trafficking a very lucrative business for those orphanages that can supply both medically concerning cases, as well as "picture perfect babies left among the ruins".] 

What if, <gasp as I dare to make a very ludicrous suggestion...>, the money made through previous adoptions/contributions goes towards medical centers that can care for/provide the services these children need?  [Please read: "Mother Teresa - Where are her millions?" to learn how some orphanages service their local communities. http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/.  I believe this article gives new meaning to a person's sense of "religious vow of poverty"]

 Why should a child have to lose their parents, extended family and mother-land because wealth buys health-care?  Because adoption is America's favorite option, and it's acts are solving world problems?