Kidnapping for Profit: The Ugly Side of International Adoptions

The only memento that Salia has of his daughter Zabeen is a small photocopy of her face.

For the last week I've been working on a story about kidnapped children who have ended up being sent abroad by international adoption agencies. This story came out in this week's edition of The Sydney Morning Herald and Asian Age. This is only the beginning of my research into this issue, there is a lot more to come.

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'Maybe now, we will get justice'

NOVEMBER 11, 1998, was like any other day in Chennai: hot and humid. Fatima, a young housewife with three children left her house for a grocery run across the street while two of her children, Zabeen, 2, and Sadaam Hussein, 4, played in an alley.

A three-wheeled auto rickshaw pulled up at the alley entrance and the children peeped inside. A woman reached down and grabbed Zabeen and Sadaam and dragged them into the rickshaw. The driver, a man, sped away but Sadaam managed to break free. He ran home to an empty house and cowered under a small wooden bed.

"I can still remember their faces," says Sadaam, now 15.

While his parents searched the neighborhood, the kidnappers were meeting with the owners of Malaysian Social Services.

Police records indicate the MSS orphanage admitted Zabeen under the name Suji and claimed that her mother had abandoned her and another child.

"The documents were obviously forged," says D. Geetha, a human rights lawyer who is representing Zabeen's family. "The woman who signed it wasn't a relative, it was her kidnapper."

According to court documents the kidnappers sold children to MSS for 10,000 rupees ($280) each. Since 1991, MSS has sent almost 300 children to Australia, the Netherlands and the United States.

The orphanage demanded large donations to manage the international adoptions and collected almost $250,000. Zabeen was sent to Queensland under her new name.

"They took my child because she was beautiful," Fatima says.

Indian orphanages are often overcrowded, but many of those children may not be as attractive to foreigners as healthy children raised by their parents.

The next five years were the stuff of nightmares. Fatima and her husband, Salia, immediately filed a report with the local police, but were not encouraged by their response.

"They barely looked at the report, it wasn't a priority for them. There were no detectives, nothing," Salia says.

Instead, Salia and Fatima stopped working and spent their days scouring the city for news of their daughter.

"We had to sell the jewels from my dowry and most of our property just to keep going," Fatima says.

Then, in 2005, as news reports of adoption scandals rolled across India, a police officer asked Salia to pick out Zabeen from some photos. He identified her immediately.

The police officer told him that his daughter was safe in Australia, but that it would be difficult to bring her back. The news gave Fatima some relief.

"Every day I searched the streets for some sign of her. I had gone mad. But once the police told me that she was OK, I began to feel better. I could sleep again," she says.

Now after almost 10 years, what they want most is news of their child. "If I could only see her and know that she is in a good place, getting a good education that is enough for me. She can stay in Australia, but we should still give her a choice to come back to her family," Fatima says.

Until then, all they have of Zabeen is a small, photocopied picture of her aged two.

"Maybe now that the world is watching, we will get justice," Salia says.

[Link to article in the Sydney Morning Herald]

[More photos of Zabeen's family here]

The Key to Productivity for Internet Addicts

I have no willpower when it comes to the Internet. I can't tell you how many days I have spent surfing my favorite websites, updating my status on Facebook and pretending to research new articles by trolling the back alleys of social-networking websites. Out of a typical week, I'd say that I waste at least three days not doing the work that I'm supposed to, instead I spend most of my time checking e-mail and generally wasting time. In the few hours a day when I'm able to focus I can get a lot done, but at heart, I'm an Internet addict. Often, when I know that I have to get work done, I leave my house and set up shop at cafes in the city that don't have WIFI so I'm not endlessly wasting my time.

But there's hope for people like me.

I found a program that will give me control over my own addiction by cutting it off at the source. Freedom, a new shareware program for Mac users lets you schedule strategic internet outages so that you can focus on the important things. It cuts off all access to the internet through Ethernet and WIFI ports for a set number of minutes (up to six hours) and the only way to quit the program before then is to restart the computer. Without internet access I won't have any excuse but to be productive. I'm might actually be able to write this book I've been thinking about.

Goodbye idle browsing. Hello productivity.

Sadly, freedom is only available for OSX, windows users will have find some other way to grow their backbones and hunker down to work.

[link to the program]

Want a Job in Journlaism? Try India

Today Salon is running an article contrasting the shriveling opportunities for journalists in the United States and the booming media market in India. Arun Venugopal writes, "2,400 journalists left newspaper newsrooms last year, either through layoffs or buyouts, leaving the industry with its smallest workforce since 1984." However, the market in India offers salaries as high as $180,000 and now a few American journalists are making the jump to India.

Arun contacted me early last week to get my opinion on the market for foreign journalists in India. Here's the section where I come up.

"I have met foreigners working at the Hindu, Mint, GQ, the Hindustan Times and Times of India," wrote Scott Carney, a Chennai-based journalist who freelances for NPR, Wired and National Geographic TV. "They all work on Indian salaries, don't speak the language, and all seem to be having a ball. Since there are so many new publications opening up in India, there is a lot of demand for native English speakers and people who can bring higher reporting standards to local papers."

Carney says he turns down two or three assignments a month.

"I pretty much stick only to big investigative stories on subjects that I choose, and leave the daily reporting and feature pieces to other journalists. I have noticed that some American media houses are pulling back their freelance budgets (just try getting an assignment past the foreign desk at NPR these days!). But I bet that freelancers in America are feeling the pinch much more than I am while living on the rupee."

"If anything," he wrote in his e-mail, "I'd like to see more freelancers move to India. There are too many stories to cover and just not enough time to get to them all."

Check out the rest of the story here.

What Happened to My Girlfriend? And Other Key Sex Questions

For the last couple months The New Indian Express has been publishing a column called "(Queer)ies: Your Personal Sex Advice Kiosk" in the Saturday supplement Zeitgeist. It's India's first serious sex advice column (that I'm aware of, anyway) and adds a few raised eyebrows to the national discourse on intercourse. The column in the paper is edited down for content, but the archive online is raw, uncut and uncensored. Which is to say, much more fun to read.

And who is behind this, you ask? Why none other than my fabulous roommate Padma, founder of the Shakti Center and all around marauding killer bee in high lace-up boots. A couple weeks ago, a question she answered about women masturbating drew the ire of readers from across South India. Funnily enough, the same question about men masturbating went unchallenged. Coincidence, or conspiracy? You decide.

I am a 19-year-old girl. Madam, I am addicted to masturbation twice in a week. I don’t know whether is it good or not, but it is uncontrollable. Will this affect my health?
–Is This Weird?

Twice a week?! Frankly, I don’t think you’re masturbating enough. Masturbation is a very empowering sexual act: it can help you become better attuned to your body, your desires, and your fantasies, and all in a safe and non-threatening way. Get in there, get busy, and stop worrying about it. And no, masturbation will not affect your health. [link]

The response to this by a "doctor", is simply smashing. Check it out.