I love you.....Baby

 Looking for inspiration (as you do on a Sunday night) I turned on the TV and found myself moved deeply by a story on adoption.

As I watched Sunday Night on Channel 7 a story of an American couple who adopted 9 children after already having a few of their own, I could see the love that poured out of this couple to whom adoption was just a normal thing to do.  Most people would never consider adoption let alone another nine children from many different countries including Romania but this amazing couple brought into their life, their home and their hearts a baby who was abandoned at birth, born with no limbs and was close to dying.  They have given this baby who is now a young man a life full of so many blessings and opportunities including being reunited with the parents in Romania (read the full story here).  I never truly understood the need that some may have to adopt but after watching this amazing story I really got it for the first time, that the love we have is limitless, well for the evolved ones that is and when we open our hearts amazing things can happen to us and those around us.

 

 

Love (true unconditional love that is) has no boundaries and no limits and I have certainly experienced that over the past few years with people who have been sent by God as my earth angels and what a blessing it is that such love exists and that we can give that to eachother and for some like Debra Lee and Angelina this love extends far beyond what most of us would be comfortable with.

 

We often watch in awe as Angelina Jolie continues to add to her family, adopting more and more children and loving them just the same.  Unfortunately in Australia, unlike in America it is often a long process, sometimes up to 7 years to adopt a child and one woman who is rallying to change the laws and make it easier for Australians is Deborra-Lee Furness, the wife of film star Hugh Jackman who is also appealing for more Australians to adopt orphans.

 

 

Advocate and mother of two adopted children, Furness yesterday launched National Adoption Awareness Week, calling for all Australians to do more for the world's estimated 143 million orphans.

 

Furness was close to tears as she implored Australian politicians and the broader community to help orphans either by supporting birth families so they can keep their children or by adopting children who cannot stay with their birth parents."We have an ethical, moral obligation," Furness said.

"We are one of the most developed countries in the world and yet we have the one of the world's lowest inter-country adoption rates."

 

Inter-country adoptions currently account for 61 per cent of all adoptions in Australia. Furness wants the Australian Government to do more to both encourage adoption and to support parents of adopted children, especially children born overseas. Furness said that does not advocate any specific policy but believes that changes in public opinion will prompt law makers to develop more compassionate adoption policy.

 

ANGELINA Jolie's pediatrician Dr Aronson has slammed Australia's adoption laws, branding them ``uncooperative'' and calling for urgent change. New York-based Dr Jane Aronson, who founded the Worldwide Orphans Foundation, has been closely following the adoption campaign, spearheaded by actress Deborra-lee Furness.

 

 

Dr Aronson said she was shocked at the obstacles that Furness and Jackman encountered when they tried to adopt in Australia. "It's shameful and it's wrong that they couldn't adopt in their own country,'' she said. But Dr Aronson, who works tirelessly to tackle the challenge posed by the health care of orphans around the world, said the US system was far from perfect.

"Why adopting never works out well ... is because there is no single body that's set up in the government and committed to just adoption,'' she said. "You have to create a whole different structure. None of us can turn around to our country and say we have a great system. We don't.

"Australia, like most countries, has an anti-adoption attitude.

``Meanwhile, you have tens of thousands of individuals who would like to create a family through adoption.''

 

It is a sad reality and it is inspiring to see that there are women like Debra Lee who are changing the way the world works so that it does work for everyone.  I have often questioned the many laws that exist and why when there are people who can change them to make the world a better place and help people create a family through adoption that they make it so difficult.

I certainly remember what goes back four years now, where I volunteered at an orphanage in Venezuela.  One of the most dangerous cities in the world, known for it's poverty and the crime that goes with it where people are being killed for sunglasses or a mobile phone.

 

(me at Hogar Bambi with one of my babies)

 The experience abroad is one that changed me and only now 4 years later I realise just how much.  The memories and the love that I felt towards the children I looked after, the babies who's nappies I had changed, the bottoms I'd wiped and who's tears I had wiped away, this will stay with me forever. I admit, I did want to take them home and I and they did cry when it was time for me to leave.

 

As we often hear, everything that happens to us does so for a reason and that time at Hogar Bambi Orphanage was no exception, perhaps that was a defining moment in my life that I had forgotten until I turned on the TV whilst sitting on my comfy couch, in my comfy life. Nothing happens by chance and God speaks to us in many ways, sometimes it's as easy as turning on the G Channel on 7.