Hair New Era

I love Athens. I full heartedly love this place. It's amazing. Today while walking in the open air market (greek version of a farmer's market+ flea market) with Sakina, I stopped, looked around and realized I am in love with this place. The sounds, sights and even the smells-including the garbage. The mounds of garbage are daily reminders that the people of Greece are standing up to their government in order to have better lives. If this means garbage collectors on strike as well, so be it. I know at first the smells of the trash annoyed me, but being here and talking to the people in Greece, I have a better understanding and appreciate for the strikes. Speaking of which, there has been a 48 hour strike of all transportation in Athens. Pretty intense and weird to see the streets full of cars but nothing else: buses, trams, and taxis. I have enormous respect for the people of Greece. Do your thing :D

On a different note, I had a wonderful evening today with Rahmat from volleyball and his Greek friend Areti. She's a lawyer who met Rahmat when they were working with minorities in Greece to get them better treatment. He translated for her. I absolutely loved chatting with her. We discussed the lack of appreciation for work with less fortunate and how if we had it our way, volunteering would be our careers. We all know we can live off volunteering, so it becomes a difficult path when there doesn't seem to be jobs in this field. Talk about my entire emotional roller coaster during the summer in India. It's so amazing to share views on these kinds of things with people in different parts of the world. We also had an enormous chat on the increase in immigrants to Greece from the Middle East. Because Greece is the eastern border to Europe, it gets so many people coming in from abroad looking for work and a better life. Sound familiar? I'm in a European version of America. So.many.similarities! It was intense, but also refreshing to be able to honestly talk on the subject. She touched on the fact that Greece, right now economically, can not, as she said, absorb the large amounts of immigrants. I've craved this kind of conversation and boy was I pleased after it all. She is extremely intelligent and I can't wait to spend more time with her. When I asked her what she thought I was ethnically, she said I could pass as Greek- as long as I just don't speak. Ha, I was happy for the compliment and encouraged to work on my Greek. She said that my round eyes, golden skin and wonderful hair make me appear like a natural Greek. Aw yeah! #winning.

The dinner was so delicious. After weeks of having to cook for myself, having a homemade meal was so  wonderful! What made it even better was that Rahmat opened his home to share with me a little of his Afghani culture and ways of cooking. We had incredible chicken with rice and then a chicken based soup that packed a punch. I MISS SPICY FOOD! India totally spoiled me in that realm, but here in Greece, I don't think they believe in spicy foods at all. I haven't had one spicy Greek dish. Maybe I just haven't found any? Anyways, I was in heaven. It was the funniest moment though when Rahmat brought our a Greek salad! Here we were having a Middle Eastern meal and then BOOM! Just goes to show the ways in which living in a different culture for a while begins to have its influence. Overall, the meal was ever so yummy.

After dinner, the 3 of us bonded over music- each showing one another which songs we liked. I totally passed on showing American music and opted for my new love of Bollywood music. It brought back a flood of memories from India and prompted me to share stories from the summer. Areti thought I was well spoken and versed for being so young. She's 26 and said when she was 20, she had no idea about stuff going on in the world. Shout out to my liberal arts educations and the opportunities it has granted me to travel! I felt proud to be able to hold my own with this well-educated woman who has done so much for the people around her.

Rahmat also had things to share with us other than his amazing cooking skills- pictures of his family back in Afghanistan! He has 6 siblings- 2 older sister, an older brother, 2 younger brothers and a baby sister. They're all 3 years apart. INSANE! I told him his mom is my hero. Haha. It was so nice to hear him tell us all about them and shows us his parents/siblings/nieces/nephews and people from where he grew up. I thought, "Wow, here are 2 genuine people sharing pieces of their lives with me". I don't think it could have been a better night. We continued to chat, drink coffee and listen to music. Soon Hussein (another guy we play volleyball with) came over for a bit. He's one of my favorites from the group, so I was happy to see him and hang out. It was getting late so Hussein offered me a ride back to my house. His English isn't as great as Rahmat, so we struggle communicating with one another, BUT he did know enough to say, "Now, we are friends". Gah, these wonderful human beings. I wanted to melt.

I'm really proud of myself for taking that first step to play volleyball with them. From taking that step, I have been blessed to meet some amazing people. They are kind, funny and easy going. It's a true blessing to meet people that honestly change your life. And I can whole heartedly say that they are changing mine. How beautiful, don't you think?

Strangely, although I've mentioned the Jordan Miles case several times on the blog, I haven't dedicated an entire post to the trajectory of the case. Here goes.

Jordan Miles is the Pittsburgh kid who was so brutally beaten by 3 White officers that his face looked like this:

(For example, Dorothy Roberts, in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, writes about how social service agencies and government policy tend to tear apart low-income minority families by removing children at an alarming rate and putting them in foster care, instead of focusing on reunification. Which is just backward. Adoption should not effectively cause a bio family breakdown, it should be the last resort.)

And, furthermore, it's intrusive to have the government own information about you that you can't access as an adoptee--namely, your birth certificate and information on biological family, health, etc.

So I was excited to see an article about adoption, "The Welfare State Kills Children," on The Freeman site, expecting a well-articulated libertarian rant about faulty government intervention in adoption. Which it was, to an extent, but it left much to be desired. Writer James Payne focuses on the government's negligence in allowing Renee Bowman, who severely neglected and abused her 3 adopted daughters, to adopt, but then decries the impediments to adoption many good potential adoptive families face. True, there's tons of policy and red tape. (My parents waited a whopping seven years to adopt me!) Adoptive parents are highly screened, as they should be. And yes, the government failed big time with Renee Bowman.

But in advocating better/faster adoption processes and privatization, Payne ignores the possibility that the reason the kids are in foster care in the first place might be the real issue of concern. That putting a kid in the foster care system costs tax payers ten to eleven times more than putting money toward helping the biological family if poverty is the issue, which it often is. (Now of course for some kids adoption is the best option.) As happens with most mainstream media, the issue is seen from an adoptive-parent perspective. Reporters don't always know to look behind the issue.

Payne suggests adoptions be handled by private agencies. Sure, this can often be a better process, and Payne believes that bad practices would be naturally eliminated because adoptive families would not patronize those bad agencies. (This is what I love about libertarians--they're so hopeful!) But private adoption still doesn't quite leave the government out of the transaction--in most states still, the government owns the sealed records and the child's birth certificate. When we turn it all over to a business model, the power would lie with adoptive parents, as they're the paying customers. But yet with a "largely unregulated" system that he suggests there's the risk of child trafficking, which happens all over the world and even in our US of A. There are many risks of any option. Which ones are we willing to take? 

We need to educate the public about ALL the issues of adoption so we can join forces with libertarians like James Payne, who I suspect would fight with us for unsealed birth certificates.

It's mainly fear that keeps this atmosphere of secrecy going. Let's wake up to the 21st century.

As the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute reiterates in one study, "for many adopted persons, the desire to obtain their records is entirely separate from any desire to search for their birth mothers or other relatives; they simply believe--as a human and civil right--that they are entitled to the same basic information about themselves that people raised in birth families receive as a matter of course."

The SD bill could pass in the House and get kicked back to the Senate again, so if you support it, click here and write to the state representatives and let them know.

Any little thing you do your entire life leading up to top politics will be placed under a microscope. When I run for mayor of something someday, I hope the fact that I cheated on a test in third grade and in 2008 gave $20 to MoveOn.org won't mar my record.