This post is dedicated to Jean McCracken, who unknowingly opened our worlds, thoughts, and hearts to orphans across the ocean blue...
What, you might be wondering, does "Round Up" refer to? I'll not mince words: We are rounding up to ten kids -- a nice, tidy, perfect number, even if it's still one short of fielding a soccer team. And we couldn't be more happy. It is a verb because we are choosing to round up ... with Down Syndrome.
In August of this year, a little miracle happened: We managed to pull off our dream wedding. It was't the wedding itself that was necessarily the dream; rather, it was that we were surrounded by everyone that we'd dreamed of: our sets of parents, our many, many siblings and families, my grandmother, our coworkers and our closest friends. With family straddling the great divide -- mine Northwesteners and his primarily Pennsylvanians -- and friends littered all between, it was hard to create a vision for our long-awaiting celebration .... here? there? somewhere in between? big and boisterous? small and intimate? The miracle was, they all came: young and old, near and far, family and friends. And what a celebration it was!
What does this have to do with Down Syndrome...? Okay, I'm getting there!
The week leading up to, during, and after our long-awaited (ahem, 15 years) day was spent in the luxury of family who'd flown in and were camped out around town in various bed and breakfasts and nearby rentals -- including, but not limited to, Peter's parents Charlie and Jean, his step-dad Wally and lovely wife Guilia, and Peter's many brothers and sisters and kids. As Peter's family floated in and around throughout those days, our lively bunch of five young-uns provided no shortage of hoopla. Jean would occasionally exclaim, "Oh, I know this family! They remind me of you! They adopted a little girl with Down Syndrome from an orphanage. They have hearts like you!" She'd share a detail or two ... then a couple days later she'd mention this family again, with whom she was acquainted.
After we'd said our teary good-byes and bid everyone safe flights and drives back home, we returned to our reality which is, in a nutshell, one busy family -- running shoes and sense of humor required!
Less than one week later, sometime during the second week of August, a little card arrived with a folded up newspaper clipping entitled, "Daunting problems, undaunted parents." Staring out was a photo of a little girl, whose sad but peaceful gaze caught my breath: It was Katie, the little girl that Jean had been telling me of. The newspaper article detailed her adoptive family's tedious journey to rescue her from an orphanage in Bulgaria, where she was discovered weighing less than 11 pounds at 9 years of age.
Shocked, I got online and started researching ... and researching ... and the more I discovered, the more I felt a "stirring" build up inside. What I found was one horrific article after another about children with Down Syndrome living lives of exile in orphanages and mental instiutions in Eastern Europe, in societies ashamed by their presence. I discoverd other families with similar rescue stories ... children unable to walk, talk, eat; an 11-year-old wearing size newborn clothing; the heart-wrenching stories of those who weren't rescued soon enough. I felt I was suffocating in my knowledge. It wasn't long before I stumbled across Reece's Rainbow, an advocacy group for the international adoption of children with Down Syndrome. No longer were the stories just black-and-white text: the stories became faces, hundreds and hundreds of them staring out at me with doleful expressions and one common denominator: an anomale of their 21st chromosome.
I welcome you to take your own journey along part of the path that I traveled: to understand the "why," you need to know the "because"...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26332429 - a 3-segment Dateline video. NBC's Ann Curry visits Serbia's mental institutions and learns how a society's most helpless people are shunned and warehoused. (Click on one video to start .. the other two will follow)
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/utah-family-saves-ukraine-girl-15236476 A family from Utah saves one little girl from a life of institution
http://reecesrainbow.org/ The faces of the children, the reality, and the people who advocate for change.
The sad truth. In Eastern Europe and Russia, where prenatal care and genetic screening is scarce, babies with Down Syndrome are born... and born. These countries are ashamed of Down Syndrome. Parents abandon their "disabled" children or are persuaded to give them up to orphanages as infants. At the age of four to five, they are transferred to o mental institutions. 95 percent of them will die within the next year, suffering from neglect, malnourishment, and lack of stimulation. Those who survive will live a life without family, confined to a crib, and will ultimately die alone.
The up-side ... (coming soon!)
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